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The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as are right, that we, who cannot exist without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 14)
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The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 14:22-33
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Matthew 14:22-33
✛
Meeting on the Sea
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It’s kind of a charming image of Peter that we get in today’s Gospel reading: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Peter sees Jesus doing the impossible—walking on water, after all—and he wants to join him, like a younger brother trying to imitate his older sibling. I want to do that, too! But he wants to make sure that it’s Jesus that he sees there on the water. Jesus says, “Come.”
And off Peter goes, swinging his legs over the side of the boat and easing himself down onto the surface of the water. It works! The water holds him up. One tentative step, and then another, moving toward Jesus. But suddenly he notices, as if for the first time, the howling winds buffeting him about, and they unnerve him. His confidence only falters for a split second, but that’s just long enough for him to begin to slip down into the hectic sea.
What Peter does then is one of the great examples of Christian righteousness that we have. At that moment of abject fear, Peter prays an instinctive prayer of desperation. St. Matthew writes, “Beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’” Just that: “Lord, save me!” And immediately Jesus’ hand went out and caught him. In Peter’s time of greatest need, he reached up toward Jesus and prayed, and he was saved.
That prayer out there on the turbid waters of the sea of Galilee reveals something essential and wonderful about who Peter is. But Peter isn’t the only person who we see praying in today’s Gospel reading. He isn’t even the only person we see praying a prayer of desperation. Recall that Matthew chapter 14 begins with the death of John the Baptist in a gruesome way. It was a death that, if it wasn’t meant for Jesus, was certainly a warning shot across the bow. If Jesus had gone about his ministry to that point unencumbered, he could now be sure that he was on the watch list of the political and religious leaders. John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, had been murdered, and his body mutilated. Jesus may have seen it then: it was the image of his own end.
Jesus tried to get away from everyone after that, but they followed him; then they all got hungry, so he fed them. Finally, perhaps in exasperation, he just sent them away, even sent the disciples away, put them in a boat, and had them set sail. Then, Matthew says, Jesus went up the mountain, by himself, to pray. Jesus is the other person who we see praying today’s Gospel.
And for a long time, too. Late afternoon turned to evening while he was there, and evening into night. It was only in the fourth watch—that is, right before dawn, between three and six in the morning—that he went back down the mountain, and out onto the turbulent sea. From sundown to almost sun-up, though, he was by himself, and he was praying.
Saint Matthew only reports on Jesus praying twice in his gospel: this occasion, and then later in the garden of Gethsemane, at the very cusp of his death. In other words, the only two times that we see Jesus praying in the gospel of Matthew, he is, for all practical purposes, alone; he is anxious about what he has been called to; he is scared. There is a remarkable similarity between Peter and Jesus in these dozen short verses.
After all, Peter had been beckoned, by Jesus, out of the boat and into the Sea of Galilee. It is a frightening notion for anyone, but all the more so in the Biblical imagination. Water, in the Biblical world, was a dangerous element, representing the wild and primordial, the uncontrollable forces of the cosmos. The very act of creation in the first chapter of Genesis involved God’s separation of the waters and the act of the Passover was God parting the Red Sea; because for the Hebrews nothing else so illustrated God’s sovereignty over everything than his ability to manipulate the waters. The waters are dark; they are dangerous; they capsize ships and drown fishermen—fishermen like some of the disciples. The eternal pulsing of the tides, in and out, impervious to any human will, is like the breathing in and breathing out of some horrible monster. When Saint John the Divine, in the book of Revelation, describes what heaven is like, he says that it is a place where the sea is no more (Rev 21:1). Their notion of heaven was that it is someplace where the sea is no more.
Jesus had been called, by the Father, into the sea also, but his call was into the destructive waters of human sin. It was a call into a world in which might makes right; and innocent men are convicted and killed; and kings cut the heads off of prophets. The death of John the Baptist may have been the first time that Jesus looked at that chaos and evil straight-on, and saw its power, and the danger it posed. Noticing the strong wind of evil men, he, too, became frightened.
So when we see this long night as a single, continuous event—from the late afternoon, when the crowds depart, through the night, into the small hours right before dawn—I think we see Jesus being affirmed by Saint Matthew not only as the Son of God, as the amazed disciples exclaim at the end of the passage, but also as the Son of Man as well. Peter’s lord and God; but also Peter’s friend and brother. Both of them walked on the water; you can even imagine that, from a distance away, through the rain and in the darkness, it would have been difficult to tell who was who. Both of them feared for their safety. Both of them trembled at the thought of what was being asked of him. One is the master and one is the disciple, but both of them are human beings. On that stormy night, with the water unexpectedly solid underneath their feet, perhaps for a moment they locked eyes, and each saw his life reflected in the face of his friend.
But, if they did feel that common bond, it was fractured at the moment that Jesus reached out his hand and brought Peter out of the water. Jesus was scared; Peter was scared. Jesus prayed; Peter prayed. Jesus saved Peter—but no one saved Jesus. No one put a hand out to pull him to safety at the last minute. At that place, the lives of the two brothers diverged.
For Jesus, in the midst of his own storm, the vicious waters of human sin closed over his gasping face in a way that Peter escaped. Peter cried out, “Lord, save me.” Jesus cried out, “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” The wind blew, and the waves crashed, and Jesus’ lungs filled with water, and when his body stopped thrashing, he sank to the bottom of the ocean floor. The sea claimed its greatest victim.
Peter lived, because Jesus was the savior who was going to die. Peter would be brought to safety, because it was the savior who was going to drown instead of him, and for him. Out on the water that night, in the middle of a storm, those two brothers grasped hands. The younger brother wanted to do what the older brother was doing. But he didn’t. The younger brother wanted to go where the older brother was going. But he couldn’t. Jesus was dragged down alone. He laid there for three days in silence.
What happened next is as mysterious as it is miraculous. After three days, God the Father reached down into the inky darkness of the ocean deep and gathered the Son back to himself, breathed life into him again, and brought him into the kingdom of heaven. And as he was being raised up, breaking through the surface of the water and coming again into the light, Jesus reached out and grabbed onto the hands of his sisters and brothers—Peter and the disciples, Christians throughout the ages, enemies and friends, you and me—pulling them to safety. His hands reached out across time and space. Because Jesus was raised from his grave, we can be, too; and we can join the resurrected Christ in the kingdom of heaven, that place of perfect peace, where the sea is no more.
