The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Jesus and the Storms of Mission:  Mt.8:23 – 27

^8:23 When he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. ²⁴ And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being covered with the waves; but Jesus himself was asleep. ²⁵ And they came to him and woke him, saying, ‘Save us, Lord; we are perishing!’ ²⁶ He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm. ²⁷ The men were amazed, and said, ‘What kind of a man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?’

          What are our storms?  Are they any hard life circumstance?  Although some people take this passage that way, I don’t think that’s what it means.  Let’s take a closer look.

The Sea of Galilee, on the natural level, was the source of livelihood for the fishermen Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  They were familiar with it, having sailed on this large, glittering lake since they were boys with their fathers, catching fish on moonlit nights.  So they knew it could also be a formidable opponent at times.  The lake was ringed by mountains and therefore acted as a wind tunnel.  Windstorms would suddenly descend upon the large lake, turning it into a chaotic, even life-threatening, adversary.  The Sea was more than a source of fish, however.  It defined the Jewish political and religious world in northern Israel.  The Galilee area was racially mixed.  Approximately eight hundred years prior to Jesus, the region was already called by Isaiah ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ (Isa.9:1 – 2) presumably because of the Assyrian presence.  Matthew quoted that very phrase (Mt.4:15 – 16) because the Sea’s western and northern coastline was settled mostly by Jews while the eastern and southern coasts were populated mostly by Gentiles.  They were Syrians and some Romans.  The Sea was the boundary between Jews and Gentiles.  It is a physical threshold that the Galilean Jews guarded fiercely.  The water was their physical separation from the Gentiles.  It is also a threshold that the disciples knew how to manage.  Now, by sailing to ‘the other side,’ Jesus worked from within what is familiar to the disciples to challenge their political and religious views.  He crossed the physical boundary of the water.  And thus he called his disciples to cross an internal boundary within their hearts and minds.  As readers, we must interpret Matthew 8:23 – 27 with Jesus’ mission to the whole world in mind.  The story foreshadows and is related to Jesus’ mission to the Gentiles, because on the other side of the Sea, Jesus exorcises demons from two Gentile men who, just like this storm, had become ‘so extremely violent that no one could pass by that way’ (Mt.8:28 – 34).  Is the similarity a coincidence?  Not at all.  Jesus brought these two episodes together, as we explore below. 

While the lake is smooth and calm, Jesus fell asleep.  Immediately afterwards a crisis strikes the disciples.  ‘There arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being covered with the waves; but Jesus himself was asleep’ (Mt.8:24).  In the face of such a fierce wind, the disciples would normally turn around and sail back for shore.  However, perhaps the wind came so suddenly that they had no time to turn around, and furthermore they were constrained by Jesus’ purpose to go to the other side of the lake.  Jesus thus brought them into a situation beyond their control.  They had to face the storm’s fury.

In that moment of sheer panic, the disciples must have thought about fishermen’s stories of so-and-so never coming back to shore.  They may have recalled stories from childhood warning them about the dangers of sailing on the waters.  Jews regarded the Sea of Galilee and its larger counterpart, the Mediterranean Sea, with some uneasiness.  Why?  Israel’s worldview and history viewed the seas and large, unpredictable bodies of water as the stuff of chaos and threat:  God beat back the primordial sea to bring forth the good, fertile, and stable land on which humans were meant to dwell (Gen.1:1 – 10); the sea trapped Israel against the Egyptians until God smote and divided the waters with His mighty hand (Ex.14); the sea is the home of the monsters Leviathan (Job 41) and Rahab (Ps.89:10); the sea brings such fear to sailors that, before they are dragged down to the depths, they come to their wits’ end, despair, and become like staggering drunkards (Ps.107:23 – 27).  Countless passages of Scripture inform the deep Jewish consciousness that the sea is the life-threatening force of chaos, such much so that the Book of Revelation happily says that in the new heavens and earth, ‘there is no longer any sea’ (Rev.21:1).  The disciples, while their boat is sinking, were probably thinking, ‘Why didn’t we heed the warnings of our mothers, fathers, and sacred texts?’

So what are our ‘storms’?  Figuratively, a ‘storm’ occurs when Jesus pushes us beyond boundaries that we inherit or have set up for our own self-protection and self-definition.  A ‘storm’ is not simply ‘any hard life circumstance,’ although this passage is commonly mistaken to mean just that.  The problem with that misapplication is that it removes the goal of mission.  It then turns the passage into a false promise, as if Jesus will calm ‘any hard life circumstance.’  The context of this passage must be allowed to control the interpretation of ‘the storm.’  Jesus in the last scene claimed authority higher than that of the Jewish family and Jewish father (Mt.8:18 – 22).  In effect, Jesus relativized their natural families.  But now Jesus pushes the disciples even beyond the boundaries of Israel.  He takes them to see how he will make a way through to the Gentiles. 

Jesus calls us through limited patterns of relationship by which we maintain membership in certain groups.  He calls us beyond physical boundaries set up for our own safety and well-being, beyond relational boundaries placed around certain residences and places where people form relationship, etc.  A storm, figuratively speaking, usually occurs when we let Jesus take us across this boundary.  It can be internal to us and symbolize our own resistance, or it can be external to us and symbolize resistance from other people:  our natural families, affiliation group, nation, etc.  Nevertheless, Jesus’ invitation is, ‘Let us go over to the other side’:  the other side of the proverbial train tracks, the dividing wall separating us from them, the side of town to which you never go, the house where the drug dealers live, boundaries enforced by childhood stories and adult worldviews.  These boundaries, so familiar that they exert an influence at a deep, subconscious level, must give way.  Jesus’ mission to the whole world is the underlying cause of this type of stormy crisis. 

What are your storms?  How is Jesus leading you into them for the sake of loving others?