9th Sunday of Matthew
Scripture: Matthew 14:22–34
Oops!
As many of you know, I grew up in southeast Iowa, not far from the Missouri border to the south, and not far from the Illinois border to the east. We didn’t have lakes like we have here in Minnesota, but we had rivers. Lots of them. As a kid, I used to fantasize about rafting down the Mississippi like Huck Finn. Ah, the river life.
But in ’93, we had almost constant rain from April clear through July. It produced historic flooding. I watched in horror as the “big town” next to us, Burlington, went under. This wasn’t water running down the streets; this was water climbing several feet up the sides of people’s homes and businesses. The entire downtown had to be abandoned.
I remember my parents driving my sister and me to a bluff where we could look down over the city. All we could see were rooftops. It looked like someone had picked up the whole town of Burlington and plopped it down in the middle of the Mississippi River.
That flood killed fifty people and caused just under sixteen million dollars in damage — about thirty-one million in today’s money. At the tender age of ten, I learned very quickly that water can be a dangerous thing.
Ugh!
In a church setting, when we think of water, we usually think of baptisms: water that brings us into a loving relationship with God. Or we think of Jesus, who said he was living water, and that whoever comes to him will never thirst again.
What we don’t tend to think of is chaos. Destruction. And yet within Scripture, that’s often exactly what water symbolizes.
The very second verse of Genesis tells us:
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
God, hovering over the chaos.
A few chapters later, God uses that same chaotic water to bring judgment on all of humanity — except for one man, Noah, and his family.
In the Exodus, the Angel of Death comes to strike down the firstborn of Egypt. The Hebrews are set free, but first they must pass through the waters of the Red Sea — the waters of death itself. And just as the angel struck Egypt’s firstborn, those same waters now close over Egypt’s army.
And then there’s Jonah. It’s at sea that chaos overtakes him, and he’s swallowed by a monster birthed from the deep.
In the biblical imagination, water is bound up again and again with chaos, with the powers arrayed against God. And that’s the world we walk into when we hear today’s Gospel.
When we hear about the disciples in the boat, about the sea raging and the waves battering them on every side, we’re meant to see more than a bad night on the water.
We’re meant to see humanity itself, subjected to hostile powers, enslaved to sin, death, and corruption. The disciples, at the mercy of the sea, are all of us, at the mercy of the forces arrayed against us. We are helpless before a chaos that wants to destroy us.
Aha!
But at the height of the storm, just when it seems like all is lost, a figure appears, walking on the water. The disciples think it’s a ghost. It isn’t. It’s Jesus himself, the Son of God.
As he draws near, they hear his voice: “Take heart, it is I.”
That sounds like a simple, almost throwaway line in English. It doesn’t sound that way in Greek. There, Jesus says: θαρσεῖτε, ἐγώ εἰμι.
Ἐγώ εἰμι — “I am.” That’s code for the name God gave Moses at the burning bush: the great I AM. Here comes the Creator of the universe, walking on the water he made.
And as he walks, he brings the Old Testament to life before their eyes:
“You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them” (Psalm 88/89:10).
“God alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea” (Job 9:8).
This isn’t Jesus showing off, mastering some impressive natural trick. Matthew is reaching for the language of God’s own sovereignty over the cosmic waters, and placing it, without apology, on the lips and feet of Jesus.
Whee!
The disciples heard it. When Jesus said “I am,” they heard the great I AM — because once the storm was stilled, they didn’t just say, “Well, that was impressive.” They fell down and said, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
This is not simply a nice episode in the life of Jesus and his friends. It’s not a story about Jesus being generous enough to forgive us so we can “get into heaven” someday.
This is a story about the Lord of all creation defeating the very powers that have held humanity and creation captive. It’s a preview — a foreshadowing — of how Christ will defeat the whole realm of Death through his own death, or as we sing at Pascha, how he has “trampled down Death by death.”
Yeah!
But most of us are a lot more like Peter than we’d like to admit. We see Jesus, and like Peter, we ask him to call us out to him. And then, the moment our feet hit the chaos, we’re afraid. We start to sink.
We sink in our anger. Our addictions. Our sense that we’re not enough. Our depression, our anxiety, the chaos of our jobs, our families, our ordinary days. It piles up, and the water closes over our heads, until all we can manage is one last breath and Peter’s own prayer: “Lord, save me.”
Here’s the good news: everything that terrifies us — the raging sea, the storm, the chaos, even Death itself — is already beneath the feet of Christ.
God has not abandoned us to the waters. He is reaching out, right now, to take hold of our hand and pull us up.
He’s not watching from the shore. He’s here, in the boat, in the storm, in the water reaching for us even now.
Amen.