Read Mark 6:45-52
"They did not understand about the loaves...."
What is Luke talking about? What didn't they understand about the loaves and in what sense were their hearts hardened? Hardened against what? And why did the Lord perform precisely this miracle, that is, walking on the water, right now? I.e., after the multiplication of the loaves and fishes?
And why did the Lord give them the impression that He was walking by them, as if He wasn't even interested in their presence, until they cried out in fear?
There are many mysteries in this event, and not only the very fact that Jesus walked on the water--which is already amazing--and perhaps precisely because of this we don't pay attention to the other deep questions that this event contains.
So let's briefly meditate together over these questions.
(Read 6:45)
Do you think Jesus knew, having sent the disciples across the lake, having stayed behind to disperse the crowds, that He would do this miracle? I think so. And I think that the Lord knew the disciples had need of this stunning manifestation of the power He possessed. It must be that, for some reason, the disciples, having seen the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, remained strangely unimpressed--unimpressed by the significance of the miracle and the magnitude of what it said about the One who performed it.
So in what sense were their hearts hardened? After all, they were following Jesus, they loved Him, in some sense they believed in Him! Certainly we could call them, in comparison with everybody else, the outstanding believers in Jesus of their day. So in what sense were their hearts hardened?
I think it was in this sense: they underestimated the monumental, actually terrifying power radiating through not only every miracle but every act and word of Jesus. It's delightful, of course, when the Lord gently reaches down and raises Peter's mother-in-law back to health, or says, "Let the children come to Me." But this Lamb NEVER quits being the Lion of Judah. The glory of His tenderness lies precisely in the fact that He can dematerialize the whole universe with one word. The very fact that we never read of Jesus' chosen inner circle reduced to trembling shock when Jesus heals the sick or even raises the dead suggests the way in which their hearts were hardened. Jesus' power wasn't simply about doing what people might consider "swell stuff," making it holiday time for all. No. The warped, bent human soul that doesn't register the danger in Jesus has no hope of rescue, for if Jesus represents no danger to our worst disease, then what salvation is there?
Intrinsically linked to this is the very simple fact that the disciples urgently needed to understand that they didn't understand Jesus. In His rebuke it seems to me the Lord is saying between the lines, "Don't you understand yet that you don't understand? Where is your awe? Where is the awareness of your own poverty of soul?"
I think that this is the way the hearts of these disciples, whom Jesus loved in the perfect, passionate, self-giving love of God, were still unacceptably numb and unresponsive. They needed a lesson, to be shaken up. They needed to learn not only to rejoice but to tremble, not only to feel justified in their "choice" of Jesus (though the choice was really His), but to reach utter disillusionment toward all their previous, comfortable assumptions. They needed to know that no matter how much they grew to know Jesus, they were knowing Him Who was unfathomable, Who infinitely transcended their grasp. And they needed to know that before this Majesty, the one state the human soul is duty-bound to inhabit is...AWE.
It is what the Old Testament calls "the fear of the Lord." A mere miracle-worker might impress you, but in the presence of God you fall speechless in adoration.
And so, the Lord sent the disciples on in the boat, without accompanying them, while he went to the mountain to pray. What do you think? Did the Lord's talk with His Father in heaven, this most holy fellowship within the very being of God, touch upon the miracle Jesus was about to perform? I would guess, yes.
Why? Because it strikes me that in this act, walking on the water, we encounter SUCH a sacred disclosure by the Lord to His most intimate circle, a disclosure of His unspeakable, transcendent glory, that, yes, the Lord must have talked, prayed, communed with the Father over it, the gravity of it, the meaning of it, the sublime, divine revelation of it in the dimension of time and space.
We cannot know what words, if we may even call them words, were spoken in that prayer. But apart from words I imagine that found in that prayer were both joy and pain, holy passion surging after redemption's achievement, beginning with the redemptive work Jesus was patiently performing on those twelve unlikely disciples laboring against the wind in the boat even as Jesus prepared to step out on the water.
And there can be no error in the disciples' clear impression that Jesus was about to walk right by them, until they grabbed his attention with a certain amount of terrified shrieking. I believe that is a critical part of this lesson: "I am walking on, in the power you don't understand, and accomplishing the Father's sacred will, whether you go with me or not. You need to UNDERSTAND: the waves, the wind, the very laws of the creation itself, will not stop me. I am heading ON. I want you with Me, but you will never get there on your own strength or understanding."
But the disciples did cry out in fear, they didn't tell the "ghost" to go away, but recognized their Divine Master, and begged Him to come into the boat, to make it HIS boat. They were shaken, terrified, yet surely closer in faith and love to this incomprehensible Lord, even in their awe and fear, than they had ever yet been. For, by terrifying them, Jesus also exposed to them something of Himself He had never yet shown anyone else. That is...sacred, exquisitely sacred. At such a sacred moment you can only whisper in awe: "Who is this?"
I think we all know what it is to want something so badly it hurts. Christ so loved the disciples, as He loves you and me, that He could not possibly be satisfied at their merest reception, certainly not on their comfortable terms. Their lives could not be changed as imperative as long as they failed to grasp that, before Him, they were in the presence of the Most High, before Whom all creation bows. I believe the sufferings of Christ in this world were not only, or perhaps not even mostly, from outright rejection and hostility. I think the Lord's deepest sufferings rose up from the intenstity and passion of His love for those He came to save. I hear that pain in His words, "Do you still not understand?"
There must be untold layers of meaning in this event, including the fact that that the disciples saw Jesus "passing by" them on the water, in this stunning revelation of power and glory. It reminds me of the glimpse of glory given to Moses on the mountaintop when God "passed by" him. It is in moments like these that the glory spoken of by the apostle John must, to put it conversationally, have completely bowled the disciples over, shattering all their mental categories. "Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We SAW his glory, the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father.... No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known" (John 1: 14, 18, NET Bible).
Yes, Jesus is "walking past," unstoppable, on the way to the Cross and beyond, with or without the disciples. Yet He is "walking past" also because God must always "pass by," allowing a glimpse, that's all, of ineffable, infinite glory. Our Lord and Savior will always go past our grasp, beyond our understanding, exceeding our vision; this is His glory and our joy. Yet, when we call out, He will come and enter into the boat with us, as well, and tell the very forces of creation itself to be quiet, because Jesus is with His friends. Both are true, the "walking past" and "entering in." It ought not to surprise us that this is hard to...understand. It is perhaps the whole point: to understand that we don't understand, exult, believe, and worship.
