Faith and Fear: Lessons from Jesus Walking on Water

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

Could Jesus walk on water? Probably. But if that is where our fascination with this story begins and ends, we have missed the point of the narrative entirely.

The story of Jesus walking on water, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, is one of the most famous passages in the New Testament. Yet, it is also one of the most thoroughly misunderstood. For centuries, modern readers have treated this account as a display of divine gymnastics, a spectacle designed to prove that Jesus possesses supernatural powers that defy physics. 

The problem with this framing is that the language Matthew originally used loses a tremendous amount of nuance in English translation.

First, consider how the voyage begins. Matthew notes that Jesus ordered the disciples into the boat. It was not a casual suggestion or a polite request; it was an imperative command. Jesus intentionally sent His closest followers directly into the dark, toward a journey He knew would prove perilous.

Second, consider the storm itself. Most English translations say that as night fell, the disciples’ boat was “battered by the waves.” That phrasing paints a picture of bad weather. But “battered” falls far short of Matthew’s actual intent. The Greek word Matthew chooses here is basanizomenon (Bah-sah-nee-ZOM-eh-non) It is the same word used elsewhere in the Gospels to describe torment, agony, severe distress, and demonic affliction. So Matthew was not writing a weather report. He was using language that denoted a deep, spiritual, and psychological anguish. This was an internal storm, a chaos so violent and overwhelming that no human skill or rowing technique could control it.

When we read the text through this original lens, the passage transforms from a story about physical buoyancy into a commentary on the human condition and the power of God to meet us in our internal hells. The moment Jesus climbs into the boat alongside Peter, the torment ends. It is at that exact moment, not when Jesus is hovering above the water, but when He enters their shared space of terror, that the disciples declare for the very first time in Matthew’s Gospel: “Truly you are the Son of God.”

So, if this story is ultimately about the reader’s internal and spiritual life, why does Matthew bother including such dramatic elements as walking on water?

The likely answer is that Matthew knew his audience. Human beings need something tangible to grasp intangible spiritual truths. Concrete imagery gives our minds an anchor. Unfortunately, over centuries of translation and institutional repetition, we have clung tightly to the physical anchor, the water walking, while completely abandoning the profound internal reality it was meant to illustrate. We inevitably focus our attention on the wrong message.

Matthew is attempting to do something far more radical with his Gospel than merely hand us a warm, sentimental reassurance. He is showing us what happens when our fear becomes more real to us than our faith; when the internal struggle grows so deafeningly loud that we can no longer see the help standing directly in front of us.

The point is not simply that Jesus can stride across a body of water without sinking. The point is that God actively enters the storm, stretches a hand toward those who are drowning in terror, and invites them to trust that they do not have to overcome the agony alone.

Notice what happens next in Matthew’s account. Peter does not remain safely inside the wooden walls of the boat. He sees Jesus walking through the dark, and instead of staying put, he steps over the edge directly into the raging water.

Peter’s faith is far from perfect. Almost immediately, he panics, loses his focus, and begins to sink into the deep. But his failure does not render his attempt meaningless. In his panic, he reaches his hand into the dark for help, and Jesus instantly reaches back to grab him. The Gospel presents Peter as an ordinary, terrified human being who was nevertheless willing to move toward God while still afraid.

That is precisely what faith asks of us today. Faith does not demand that we sit back and wait for God to erase war, eradicate poverty, or heal every broken body. It asks that we refuse to accept these horrors as inevitable.

We may not possess the power to calm every storm on the planet, but we possess the power to decide whether we will leave our fellow human beings to face those storms alone. We can feed a person who is hungry, shield someone who is vulnerable, challenge systems that cause suffering, and extend our hands when another human being begins to sink beneath the weight of life.

Maybe God does not enter the physical world by bending natural laws from on high. Maybe God enters the world through human beings who refuse to look away from suffering. The miracle is not always that the wind stops blowing. Sometimes, the true miracle is that, in the middle of the tempest, human beings become willing to reach for one another.

This brings us back to the ultimate declaration made by the disciples: “Truly, this is the Son of God.”

They did not make this confession simply because Jesus performed a miraculous stunt on the water. They declared it after witnessing Jesus meet their absolute terror with personal compassion, climbing into their battered vessel rather than abandoning them to the deep. They recognized something far more profound than raw physical power. They recognized a God who refuses to remain distant from human suffering.

The story of the storm does not promise that every trial will disappear the moment we ask God to make it stop. Instead, it tells us that God is deeply present in the struggle, that rescue often comes in forms we never expected, and that true faith will inevitably require us to step outside the safety of our boats. When we reach toward those who are drowning and refuse to abandon one another to despair, we finally begin to understand what those weary disciples realized in the dark so long ago: Truly, God is in this place.

Embracing Differences: Lessons from the Weeds and Wheat

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

In today’s parable, the Master indicates that the weeds should be allowed to grow with the wheat because if the weeds are removed, then the wheat may be damaged. At face value, it appears that this parable is about the end times when the angels will separate the believers from the non-believers, but I caution us from jumping to that conclusion. I caution us about assuming that there is such a thing as those that are in and those that are out, and I do so because binary thinking is not only dangerous, but it is usually wrong. It is natural for us to want to have clarity, and on the surface this parable provides that: the people who follow the rules, the wheat, will enter the Kingdom and the people who don’t, the weeds, will not. The slaves, who represent us, want to hurry up and get rid of the weeds—the people that do not fit our vision of who belongs.  

The difficult truth is that we live in a world consumed by this exact kind of weeding. Our current landscape is defined by deep, exhausting partisan divisions and international standoffs. Whether it is political polarization here at home where we view the “other side” not just as neighbors with different ideas, but as enemies, or global conflicts flashing on our screens, the secular world is constantly demanding that we sort humanity into binary columns. We are told to pull up the weeds, to cancel, to exclude, and to isolate. We want the field clean, and we want it done now.

But when we do this, we miss the whole context of the world Jesus was talking to. In ancient Jewish teaching, a parable like this was called a mashal, basically an extended metaphor or story used to make a comparison. And Jesus follows it with a nimshal, which is just the explanation of the story. You see this structure all the time in rabbinic commentaries, where stories of kings planting orchards are used to show God building up or pulling up people based on whether they follow his will.

But Jesus puts a much more urgent spin on his explanation. He says that at the end of the age, the angels will collect the “evildoers” and throw them into the furnace. Now, in English, “evildoers” sounds like a word for the absolute worst villains of history. But the actual Greek phrase Matthew uses, poioūntas tēn anomīan (poy-OON-dahss teen ah-noh-mee-ahn) takes the word for the Law, the Torah, and puts a negative on the front of it. It literally means living against the Law 

And what is the Law according to Jesus? He tells us later in this same Gospel: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.

So, if you look at it that way, the weeds aren’t people who hold the wrong opinions or fail our social litmus tests. The weeds are simply those who live against the law of radical love. The wheat, the righteous, are the ones actually enacting that love.

God has been lovingly tolerating humanity far longer than we ever will and it is not our job to decide who belongs; our job is to love each other like Jesus did. The hardest part of this whole situation is that we do not naturally love each other, mostly we just tolerate each other and try our best not to exclude the people that annoy us the most. So on one hand we know it is so much easier to just do what feels right in the moment, to just take care of ourselves and the people who are closest to us; but on the other hand our entire faith tradition says that we are supposed to do the complete opposite; we are supposed to give aid and comfort to everyone, no matter what; we are supposed to include everyone, no matter what; we are supposed to love everyone, no matter what.  

Earlier I cautioned us about binary thinking because it can lead to misinterpretation and inaccurate assumptions. The reason the master, who is God, said to leave the weeds is because he knew that some of those weeds might actually turn out to be wheat. There are many plants in my garden that I mistake, every year, but I leave them because I suspect that they might be flowers and when they do flower, I am grateful that I left them. It is also worth mentioning that a weed is only a plant growing in a location you do not want it to be in. It is very possible to cultivate a weed into a beautiful thing, but it takes time and that is what God in their infinite patience knows.

The process of becoming people of love takes time, and if we kick people to the side too soon, if we write off entire groups of people because of the political signs in their yard or the country they reside in, then they will not have the chance to grow into the people God intends them to be, and if in the end they don’t “make it”, that is between God and them.

Now, focusing on doing God’s will and loving people doesn’t mean we are earning our way into heaven by our own merits. This isn’t about “works righteousness” meaning doing morally correct things. Think of it like a mechanic who fixes up a broken-down car. Once the car is fixed and saved from its old state, the owner is expected to actually start driving it to get somewhere. If you just refuse to drive it, you completely ignore and undermine all the hard work the mechanic just did. It’s the same thing here. Jesus saves us from our sins so that we are freed up to actually do good works and live out that righteousness. Refusing to love, refusing to do those good works, basically cancels out the whole purpose of what Christ did on the cross. The parable is showing us what it looks like when saved believers actually live out that righteousness.

So, the only weeding or dividing, we can, or even should do, is within ourselves. We need to look deep into our souls and weed out those traits of our character; our tribalism, our judgments, our self-righteousness, that inhibit our ability to love like God. Daniel Berrigan, who was a Jesuit priest, once said, “If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.” Let me repeat that, “If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.”  

The message of Jesus was radical. It was radical two thousand years ago and it is radical today because it is contrary to human nature and that is the point. Jesus was nailed to a piece of wood because he told people to love each other and that idea was so radical, so contrary to the way his society thought, that they killed him. You see, Jesus was killed because people thought he did not belong, they thought he was the weed. Whether we are a weed or wheat does not matter because we are all children of God and we are all loved wholly and equally, even though we are really bad at loving other people.  

Jesus was willing to die for his radical message of love; he was willing to look good on the wood, are we ready for that? Are we ready to love so deeply, across ideological and political divides, that we will face discomfort or even social “death” for that love? My guess is no, and in the end, what matters is that we try to love each other, and when we fall short, not if, but when, we work even harder to make sure that we don’t fall short again.

Abiding in God: Navigating Trauma with Faith

Published on by The Rev. Jason A BurnsLeave a comment

As with the entire lectionary, the gospel passage for today is taken out of context. One might think that it comes after the resurrection since it is the 7th Sunday after Easter, but chronologically Jesus is still seated at the table with his disciples the night before he died. He is preparing them for his departure, yet he speaks as if it has already happened. The language of this passage switches back and forth between future and past tense as if time has no meaning—and truthfully, it doesn’t. In this moment, Jesus is standing firmly in the room with them, yet talking as though he has already left the world.

The primary theme of this passage is eternal life, but we need to let go of our definition of that term. We almost always think of eternal life within the context of death and resurrection, which is linear thinking. We treat it as something we experience far in the future, stretching out after we die, like a prize we win after we cross the finish line of death. But it isn’t in the future, and it also isn’t in the past; it is always. Eternal life is not a reference to what will be, it is a reference to what is. God is eternal, creation is eternal, and we are eternal; not in the sense that our physical bodies will live forever, but that our existence is not limited or defined by the short time we exist on earth. When Jesus says, “This is eternal life: that they may know you,” he is using the present tense. It is an immediate reality, a current state of being that we are invited into right now, right in the middle of our messy lives.

Throughout the gospel of John, we hear terms like “abiding” and “dwelling.” In the original language, both of these words denote patiently waiting, living permanently within a space, and thinking about something at length rather than rushing past it. It means refusing to run away when things get uncomfortable. All of these definitions combined still do not fully capture what it means to live eternally with God, but it is as close as we can come with our limited human understanding. These terms aren’t meant to be theological puzzles; they are meant to convey a tangible sense of calm, comfort, connectedness, and most importantly, inclusion. To abide means to rest in the certainty that you belong permanently and safely in the heart of God, no matter how chaotic the external world becomes.

Yesterday, some of us attended a seminar on trauma and the church’s role in addressing it, and the concepts there fit beautifully with this idea of abiding. We learned about a concept called the “window of tolerance.” This is a psychological state of being in which we are able to experience joy, compassion, connection, and curiosity, precisely because our nervous system is not overly taxed or triggered by trauma. When we are in this window, we are mentally, emotionally, and physically present. In a very real way, being inside this window is the real-world equivalent of what John calls abiding.

This is, of course, a state that is fluid. We can very easily slip out of this window into an altered state where it becomes difficult for us to function. On one side, when we are overwhelmed, we might shoot up into the “fight or flight” response where we become overly agitated, anxious, or angry. On the other side, we might drop down into the “freeze” response where we shut down, numb out, dissociate, and feel completely exhausted or disconnected.

When the trauma and stress of the world pull us out of our window of tolerance, we lose our capacity for connection and curiosity. We can’t “abide” because our bodies are stuck in survival mode, convinced we are under attack. Jesus knew the trauma his disciples were about to endure the very next day, which is exactly why he prayed so deeply for their protection and their unity. He knew they would need each other to stay grounded.

This is where the church’s role becomes so vital, when the church stops being just a social club or a lecture hall and becomes a sanctuary for holy regulation. When Jesus invites us to abide in him, he is inviting us back into that safe, regulated space. And when the church understands trauma, we can become a community that helps widen each other’s windows of tolerance. By offering a space that mimics God’s character—one of calm, predictability, safety, and unconditional inclusion—we help soothe each other’s overtaxed nervous systems. We pull people out of the isolation of shutdown, and we calm the panic of hyper-arousal. In doing so, we create a sanctuary where people can step out of the chaos of linear time, drop their defenses, and return to the quiet, grounding truth that they are already safely held in the eternal life of God.

Long story short, our liturgy is the thing that provides the predictability. It helps us provide a sense of calm, it is in this space that we need to leg go of the things from the outside world. We need to let go of the anger, we need to let go of things like bulletins not being printed correctly. We need to let go of other people’s opinions or what we think about them. And we just need to be present for each other and abide in God’s love, which is why we are here. Amen