Walking on Water
The story of Peter’s attempt to defy gravity is told in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 14. Jesus had just finished feeding five thousand people with loaves and fishes. He wanted some time by himself. So he sent the disciples ahead of him in a boat, and he spent the night praying.
For the disciples, it was a long night. By evening, waves were battering the boat. The wind buffeted the craft, keeping the men from reaching shore. When morning dawned, they were worn out from rowing and shaken by the turbulence of the sea.
In that vulnerable state, with the sky still gray, and the water choppy, they noticed a shadowy figure emerge from the mist and glide toward them. Alarmed, they shouted, “’It is a ghost!’ But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid’” (Matthew 14:26-27). [1]
That was well and good, and the disciples probably felt a better hearing his voice, but couldn’t a ghost pretend to be Jesus? Peter wanted proof.
“Lord,” he said, “if it is you, command me to come to you on the water” (Matthew 14:28). And Jesus commanded him.
So Peter climbed out of the boat and stood on the sea, and he began to walk toward Jesus. He might have made it, too, had not a wind gusted up, distracting him. Suddenly, he realized he was in a precarious position, and he became afraid. In his fear, he began to sink.
Proof of Divinity
“’Lord, save me!’” Peter cried out. “Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’” (Matthew 14:30-31). And Jesus led him to the boat, and they stepped in, and the wind died down, and all was well.
For the gospel writer, this proved Jesus’s was divine. “Truly you are the Son of God,” the disciples told him (Matthew 14:33). At last, they knew who he was.
Over the centuries, believers have used this story to confirm their faith in their miraculous man-god. They treat the tale as a factual accounting of events. We know that memory is malleable and that eyewitness accounts are regrettably unreliable. Though we find a similar story of Jesus walking on water in the Gospel of Mark, which was written around 60 CE, this version that includes Peter’s attempt was probably not written until some twenty years later. Since Jesus died around 33 CE, the story had about thirty, then fifty, years to grow. [2]
Of course, if you assume that God guided or dictated everything the evangelist wrote, the years between the event and the telling of it matter little. The rest of us know that stories grow in the telling, and a skillful author can manipulate his tale to make his point. For Matthew, that point was that Jesus was the Messiah, and surely the ability to walk on water, and then to give his disciple the power to do so, as well, is proof of his godliness.
We Can Do Anything
It is also, for some people, proof that, if we keeps our eyes on Christ, we can do anything. As Matthew’s gospel tells us elsewhere, faith can move mountains. Even a “faith the size of a mustard seed” can give us the power to do the impossible (Matthew 17:20).
It’s encouraging. If we can walk on water and move mountains, surely we can cure cancer and expel the demons in the mind of someone who is hallucinating. If we pray for miracles in innocent faith, surely God will grant our wish.
This belief works well for people, at least for a while. The certainty that our god will do our bidding, because, after all, our holy book promises us that, bring us comfort, peace, and a sense of superiority. After all, we can learn from Peter’s mistakes and cling to our faith in the face of terrible threat and disaster. We can heed the call of Jesus and never fear the wind. We need never sink.
Of course, we all sink sometimes. There’s no hope for it. We can’t help making a misstep now and again. If nothing else, we lose focus at times. For an instant, we turn away, fret about bills, gossip about our neighbor, get caught up in an addiction, focus on the motion of our muscles instead of the feel of the breeze against our skin, and our connection to the holy wavers. We forget, and we fall. That’s what happened to Peter.
Constrained by Reality
Only when he didn’t think about what he was doing, when he concentrated on the external focus of his Lord, could he move forward. When the wind rose up, and he returned to this life of concreteness and uncertainty, he realized what he was doing and began to sink. It’s like those cartoons where Wile E Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, sailing along fine until he realizes there’s no ground beneath him. Then he plummets. It’s as if we could break all the laws of physics if our brains didn’t notice that’s what we were doing.
It’s more than that, though. The literal believer believes she is above nature’s rules entirely. She longs to control the world, channel the power of God. If she prays for a miracle until the vessels burst in her eyes, if she begs God with all her heart, maybe then life will turn out as she desires. God will prove himself. Her trust will be vindicated. She will stay afloat without a boat.
Eventually, though, reality will strike. We’ll discover God doesn’t play by the rules we’ve devised. God plays by Her own rules, and one of them is that we humans are heavier than water, so no matter what the stories say, when we step onto it, we sink.
At times of sinking, the obstinately faithful devise strategies to deny reality. This thing or that thing didn’t really happen. This same mentality allows us to believe in absurd conspiracies.
If this denial fails, we might blame ourselves. We’ll decide that, like Peter, we allowed our humanness to get in the way.
As a last resort, we’ll question our faith. When a true believer falls into doubt, he may reject God entirely. Reality can destroy everything we hold sacred.
Lost in Fear
But surely the gospel isn’t trying to make us think we, even with God’s help, can command the seas. Remember, the disciples didn’t spend the night in peaceful contemplation and prayer. They battled the elements to survive, and though they might have prayed for calm, it didn’t come.
This was not their first storm. Storms are part of life, after all, so it’s not surprising they’d experienced another. Yet that other time, a time when they feared capsizing, Jesus was with them. They took from his presence. This time, they were alone.
According to a homily by the theologian, John Chrysostom, Jesus purposefully left them in this position, even roiling the waters to makes it more frightening. He meant to teach them a few things. First, he wanted to build their endurance and resilience. Next, he hoped to open their hearts, for fear and suffering can enhance our nobility. Finally, he expected the disciples would discover that deliverance does not come from the world of nature, but from him. The idea was that by getting through one bad situation after another, they would not only gain a strength of spirit, but they would also find that, if they keep their hearts and minds trained on him, they would be at peace. [3]
Indeed, Peter fell because he got distracted from the prize, which in this case was Jesus, and lost peace.
In the gospel story, we learn that Peter’s lack of faith made him stumble. “You of little faith,” said Jesus. If only Peter hadn’t doubted, he would have made it all the way. But, according to Chrysostom, Peter’s fear was the problem, and it wasn’t even a fear of drowning, or a fear of the waves, but a fear of the wind, something that doesn’t even exist. [4]
Unseen Forces
Wind is not a thing that tosses the water and buffets a boat. Air exists, and it can move; water and boats exist, and they can be swayed by this swirling air. Essentially, then, wind is nothing but motion. Like gravity and sound, it is a force or essence recognized by its effect. This thing that is not a thing at all scared Peter and almost made him drown.
And why not? Gravity might be no more than a force exerted on matter, but we are made of matter, and this force of gravity affects us. Sound may be nothing but vibration, but the waves the vibration create affect us. So does wind, though it be nothing but movement.
Thus, it’s not so much that Peter had nothing to fear, for even something we cannot perceive can be real, as that he hadn’t learned the lesson Jesus hoped he might. He hadn’t learned that faith is more powerful than all these forces.
Faith, then, is more powerful than movement. Like the brain that gets in the way of what our bodies do best, so Peter’s thoughts got in the way of his walking feet.
Gerald N. Callahan wrote a book about a scientist’s faith. In it, he offers examples of religious faith, and also of the physicist’s faith that, in spite of the insanity of quantum reality, our universe is rational and can be understood, and of the biologist’s faith that one day we will discover the secret of our immune systems. Scientists, Callahan tells us, have a “confidence that their tinkering with the parts of something so powerful and so intricate will inevitably lead to greater benefit and understanding.” [5]
All Our Faiths
Perhaps the most incredible example of faith that Callahan describes, however, is our faith that we will live one more day; that our children and spouses and loved ones will live one more day, five more days, a decade; that viruses and bacteria won’t destroy us, even though they kill hundreds of thousands of other people; that we can climb safely to the tops of mountains; that we will die in old age. We need such faith, he notes, because otherwise we would live in constant fear. We would cease making babies, cease taking care of our families, cease caring about life at all.
So faith is more than the certainty that Jesus is with us, or that the Sufi Beloved is part of us, or that we are a wave and will return to the ocean when we die. Faith exists not only in religion. It keeps us moving forward, sustaining us so we might stay upright on the water.
Maybe, then, it doesn’t matter if we focus on Jesus so much as that we focus on something other than our thoughts, because, really, what happened was that Peter started thinking. He judged his situation—I’m doing something impossible—and he invented a story—I’m just a person, I can’t do this miraculous thing. He didn’t allow his body to do what bodies do. Instead, he stepped out of the present moment and into fear. As Jesus told him, he lacked faith.
Putting God to the Test
Yet if Peter wasn’t faithful enough, he surely was eager enough. His love for Jesus, his trust in him, made him scramble from the boat in the first place.
Except that he didn’t understand what faith was. He took it literally. Like today’s literalists, he put his god to the test. If you are who you say you are, then make me like you. Give me the power you have, to walk on water, to move mountains, to save dying children. Believers might say it is all for the glory of God, but do they not want that strength in their own hands, their faith proven to the multitudes? When God answers their prayers, they know they have the faith of a mustard seed. They are better than Peter, that most devoted, yet most foolish, of disciples.
A literalist’s faith is riddled with hubris, as tenuous as the foam on the ocean. Blow on it, and it pops. If a wind gusts up, it sinks. Over and over, God will reject their tests. What a hard life, having to rationalize one failure after another, somehow turning them into victories.
When we cannot let go of a faith that makes no sense, when we cannot accept the mystery and the metaphor, we must run from truth. We cannot allow ourselves to see what is real, to look deeply at the people in front of us. To listen, to know, to understand is beyond us. It’s as frightening as the wind. Instead of living in the moment, we live in the future, seeking always that divine promise of wealth and stability and long lives for those we care about.
Losing Focus on the Moment
That was Peter’s failing. He never understood who Jesus was. Instead of seeing that Jesus was love, and light, and truth, Peter thought he was the miracle-maker, the candy man, the enemy-destroyer.
When we get caught up in our dreams of the future, in our longing for status or wealth or peaceful seas, we lose sight of the divine. We focus not on what stands before us, here and now, but on our hopes and fears. Instead of living mindfully, we live in the turmoil of our heads. Our bodies can no longer do what bodies do, which is move through the day present to the moment, one with the forces of gravity and wind and light and love.
If Peter had been able to keep from thinking about what might go wrong, he would have made it to Jesus’ side. Ironically, however, if he’d been focused on the moment, entirely present to his experience and the life force around him, he wouldn’t have needed to walk on water in the first place. He would have realized that was just a magician’s distraction from the real thing, which is life. Instead of putting his god to the test, he would have lived in the moment. He wouldn’t have needed a faith in something in particular. All he would have needed, was a faith in breath. Just that. Breath.
Faith as the Kingdom of God
Such a faith is like the kingdom of God, that place that is no place, that way of living that is no way, yet that exists within us or not at all. The kingdom of God is found only in the present moment, in that sliver of instantaneousness that is beyond all comprehension. We cannot think ourselves there. All we can do is let our bodies do what our bodies do, and live there. To walk on water, we must be able to be in that place of silence, and grace, and mystery beyond answer, that place of timelessness and weightlessness, where everything exists and nothing exists.
For a moment, Peter was there. Then he felt the air brush against his face, and he lost touch with that timelessness. When we live in time, we feel fear, for in time, hardship and loss threaten. Faith, whether in Jesus or in science, saves us not because our deity passes some test, not because we unlock the mysteries of the universe, but because, when we are fully immersed in our faith, nothing else exists. There is no thought. There might not even be movement. All is still, and all is well. That is what Peter can teach us, though he might not know it.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- All Scripture passages are NRSV.
- See Reddish, Mitchell G., An Introduction to the Gospels, Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1997, 108.
- Barkhuizen, J. J., “John Chrysostom, ‘Homily 50’ on Matthew 14:23-36, (‘PG’ 58, 503-10). A Perspective on His Homiletic Art,” Acta Classica, 1995, Vol. 38 (1995), 43-56, 45, https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA00651141_1063, accessed December 11, 2021.
- Ibid 48.
- Callahan, Gerald N., Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion: What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception, New York: Thomas Dunne, 2002, 173-174.
Stained Glass: Jesus Walks on Water by St. Botolph
Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.