Walking on the Waves

The crowd in Capernaum had asked Jesus, "When did you get here?" and he never told them. His friends knew, because they had been out on the lake that night. It had started on the evening of the hillside supper, while twelve baskets of leftover bread still sat on the grass, and the crowd was full and happy and in no hurry to go home.

Jesus was. "Get in the boat," he told his friends, "and go across ahead of me." Then he sent the people away, climbed a mountain by himself, and prayed there until long after dark.

Out on the lake, the wind turned against the boat. The disciples pulled at the oars, and the waves shoved them back, and the boat creaked and groaned and hardly moved. People in those days split the night into four watches, like turns for a guard. The fourth watch was the last one, between three o'clock and sunrise, when everyone's arms ached the most. That was when somebody looked up from his oar and froze.

A man was walking toward them across the water.

"It's a ghost!" they screamed. Even the fishermen among them, who had spent their whole lives on this lake, shrieked and grabbed one another.

Then the shape spoke. "Take heart. It is I. Don't be afraid."

Long ago the book of Job had said that God alone stretches out the sky and walks on the waves of the sea. Nobody in that boat was thinking about Job just then.

Peter cupped his hands and shouted into the wind, "Lord, if it's you, tell me to come to you on the water!"

(The other eleven did not ask for anything. They held on to the boat.)

"Come," said Jesus.

Peter swung one leg over the side, then the other, and let go. The water that had been trying to sink their boat all night held him up like a floor. One step. Two. Peter was walking on the sea!

Then a gust slapped spray in his face. He looked at the waves instead of at Jesus, and he was terrified, and his feet began to go under, then his knees.

"Lord, save me!"

At once Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, holding on to him. "Why did you doubt?"

They climbed into the boat together, dripping, and the wind stopped. The men bowed down in the puddles at Jesus' feet. "Truly," they said, "you are the Son of God."

Peter's walk had lasted a few steps, and his courage would sink again. On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter warmed his hands at a fire and said three times, "I don't know the man!"

But his friends had seen what the old book said only God could do. And in the language Matthew wrote in, "It is I" is simply "I am," the name God gave himself when he spoke to Moses from a burning bush.

The one who walked on the sea kept walking, all the way to a cross, where he died. On the third day he walked out of the grave alive. Early one morning beside this same lake, he cooked breakfast over a fire for Peter and his friends, and then he asked Peter three times, "Do you love me?"

The hand that caught Peter on the waves had reached for him again, and it was still holding on.