Asleep in the Storm

News of the young man at Nain, who sat up at his own funeral, was still running from village to village. Crowds followed Jesus everywhere now. One day so many people packed the beach of the Sea of Galilee that Jesus climbed into a fishing boat and taught them from the water, story after story, until the sun went down.

When evening came, he said to his friends, "Let's go across to the other side."

So they left the crowd and pushed off, taking Jesus just as he was, and a few other boats came along behind. (A fishing boat in those days had oars, a sail, and no roof at all. Whatever the sky decided to do, it did to everyone on board.) Jesus went to the back, put his head on a cushion, and fell asleep.

Out in the middle of the lake, the wind came.

The Sea of Galilee sits low among steep hills, and wind can pour down them all at once, like water tipped out of a bucket. This was that kind of wind. It heaved the waves up high and dropped them into the boat. SLOSH. Then again. SLOSH. The water climbed over the men's ankles, then up to their knees.

"Bail!" somebody shouted. "Bail faster!"

Peter and Andrew, James and John knew every mood of this lake. (When fishermen get frightened of the weather, everyone else in the boat should be frightened too.) They fought the sail. They scooped with buckets and pots and bare hands. The boat filled anyway.

And in the back, on his cushion, Jesus slept.

They stumbled to him and shook him. "Teacher!" they cried. "Don't you care that we're drowning?"

Jesus woke. He stood up in the tipping boat, with the spray in his face, and he scolded the wind. Then he said to the sea, "Quiet! Be still!"

Storms usually wear themselves out over an hour or more. This one stopped between one breath and the next. The waves sank down flat, and the lake lay so still that the men could hear water dripping off the ropes.

Jesus looked at his soaking friends. "Why are you so afraid?" he asked. "Do you still have no faith?"

Nobody answered. They stood knee-deep in the water they had never finished bailing, and they were more frightened now than they had been in the storm. (Being scared of the wind is one thing. Sharing a boat with someone the wind obeys is another.)

They whispered to one another, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"

Every man in that boat had grown up singing Israel's old songs. One song told of sailors whose ship rode up to the sky and plunged down into the deep, until they cried out to the LORD, and he made the storm be still and hushed the waves. That song gave only one name for the one who does that, and it was God's.

Jonah once slept through a storm too, and the sailors got their calm sea back only by throwing him overboard. One day Jesus would go down into a darker storm on purpose, when he died on a cross to save his friends, and on the third day he would come back up.

That night, though, the one that old song was about had been asleep on a cushion in the back of their own boat, an arm's length from their buckets. And all the way to the other side, the sea lay flat as a plate under the boat that carried Jesus.