Where is your faith?

One day Jesus got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side of the lake.’ So they put out, and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A gale swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. He said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’

Luke 8:22-28 (NRSV)

Consider this story, often titled ‘Jesus calms a storm’. It is a good example of the type of miraculous story that can send us and theologians into a tizzy. As far as theologians go, there are three main approaches. First we have the literalist interpretation that says never mind if it is impossible, it is there in the Bible so you will just have to believe it is true, or else. Then along comes rational modernity and liberal perspectives that say that since we know logically that things like that don’t happen, that this must be a literary device or perhaps we can say that the storm must have calmed just as Jesus began to speak. Thirdly we get the postmodern, postliberal approach that stops looking for the ‘miraculous’ event to be fundamentally true and sees the story in terms of its function in the cultural-linguistic symbolic framework of the religious context.

All of these seem, at least for lived, practical purposes, unsatisfactory both as ways of understanding the story and for imagining it into our lives. All of these debates and interpretations focus attention on the action, on what Jesus did, on the truth or significance of that action of calming the storm. But if we step back we might wonder why we persist in trying to make sense of the story at all. I think one reason why we bother to struggle with a story like this could be because it holds some sort of power, because we very much want it to be true for our minds in the same way it resonates with some echo of truth in our hearts. We may want it to be true because despite ourselves we long for there to be inexplicable mystery and wonder in the world. We may want it to be true because we both know and feel that if this story is true it means we are safe.

The place where the point is missed with stories like this is in placing the action or event at the centre. I think that theological explanations and imagined versions of this story stumble unless we see that this is not primarily a story about what Jesus did but a story about what Jesus did. It is a story about Jesus, a story about God.

So, then, what if we read and imagine the story that way? Instead of focusing on what Jesus did, or on the storm, what if we focused on Jesus? As Jesus asks, ‘Where is your faith?’ What if we imagine the scene in our minds, the stormy waves, the boat, the disciples in the boat, Jesus, then pause there, stop there, even before he calms the storm. What if we pause and turn our eyes upon Jesus, placing him at the centre of our imagined version of the scene. Since, unlike the disciples, we know how the story ends, what if we then use the benefit of hindsight, resting assured in that moment, with that focus, that he will calm the storm, both then and now. What comes next? It's wondrously unpredictable and perhaps it is different for each of us and on each imagining. But in pausing there for a while all the rest may, in any case, grow strangely dim.