Readings:
Sermon:
In our gospel reading for today we read of the disciples in a boat caught up in a storm and being understandably frightened. Jesus sleeps through the whole thing and when he is woken he remonstrates with the disciples “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Gaslighting is a nasty psychological device whereby someone makes out that when something horrible happens to someone else it was in fact the fault of the injured party themselves in the first place - they brought it upon themselves. Gaslighting has is mild forms and its very serious form but is always a form of psychological manipulation.
Today’s Gospel reading reads like a mild form of gaslighting of the disciples by Jesus. They are caught in a storm, they are scared, and Jesus seems to imply that it is their own fault because they lack faith.
What are we to make of this text then, if we are to believe that Jesus is not a psychological manipulator, seeking to demean his disciples?
Let’s deal with the miracle of Jesus stilling the storm first. One of the major problems with the way we read biblical miracles in our scientific age is that the first question we ask is ‘how did he do that?’, as if it was some sort of magic trick. The reality is that the gospel writers who recorded these stories did so not because they were magical or supernatural, but because they wanted to make the point about who Jesus was. The point about the miracle stories in the New Testament is not about what happened, but rather who made it happen. These stories are all about emphasising the uniqueness of Jesus and his claim to be the Son of God.
So if this story is less about what happened and more about who made it happen, then we get a a little more flexibility around understanding what was going on. While I don’t doubt that there may well have been a meteorological storm going on, I wonder if there wasn’t another storm going on internally both individually and collectively amongst the disciples. This might have been an emotional or even an existential storm for the disciples. The passage we heard today comes after a long section of teaching by Jesus in which he tells a number of parables including the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Mustard Seed. It seems unlikely that when Jesus has finished his teaching and they all got into a boat to cross the lake, that this disciples didn’t fall into conversation as to what is was all about, what was this new and radical teaching that Jesus was espousing? And it would seem unlikely that that conversation didn’t get a bit heated at times, so the storm may well have been both inside the boat as well as outside it. The disciples may well have felt that they didn’t understand that they didn’t get it, that they were perishing. Jesus, who was asleep, exhausted after a long period of teaching is woken, and he calms the storm, perhaps internally as well as externally, and he says “What’s wrong with you lot? Don’t you get it?” What’s interesting about this is the disciples’ reaction. They didn’t feel demeaned or told off (which is the clear evidence that Jesus wasn’t gaslighting them) , but rather we are told ‘….they were filled with great awe and said to one another “who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”’
The disciples had a significant experience of their anxieties, internal and external, being contained, being relieved of their power to destroy and disrupt.
And this is the great gift of faith. It doesn’t guarantee that we are not caught up in storms, be they internal or external, but it does offer a means of containing the destructive power of those storms. The narrative of faith tells us that life is stronger than death, that the good stuff is stronger than the bad stuff, and this provides a container in which all our fears and anxieties can be held and contained and in which their power to render us helpless and unable to act is taken from them.
So far from demeaning his disciples, in this event Jesus offers them a means of containing their fears and their anxieties. It is this ability to neutralise that which is potentially so destructive that encourages the gospel writers to assert that Jesus is who he says he is, the Son of God.
Questions:
- What are your fears and anxieties?
- Where could you go in the Chrisitan story to find a place where they can be contained and robbed of their destructive power?