EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
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EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
Jesus made His disciples get into the boat, and the boat went straight into a headwind. Day 1 begins the week on a dark lake, with a mountain above it and someone on the mountain who can see.
Matthew 14:22-24; Mark 6:47-48; John 6:15; Psalm 77:16-19; Ecclesiastes 8:8
Opening
Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to the other side, while He dismissed the crowds. After He had sent them away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. When evening came, He was there alone, but the boat was already far from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.
Matthew 14:22-24 (BSB)
The same evening as the feeding of the five thousand. The twelve baskets of leftover bread have just been gathered.
With the crowd fed, the day should be ending well. Then Matthew writes a sentence that is easy to read past: Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat.
Made is a strong word. In Greek it is anankazo (ἀναγκάζω), to compel, and it tells us that He insisted without telling us how. These men were sent onto the lake that night.
Then Jesus climbs a mountain alone to pray, while the boat sails into trouble. By dark it is far from land, with the wind dead against it.
Keep those two facts side by side, because we tend to pull them apart. They are where Jesus told them to be, and they are in a storm.
Many of us read hard weather as a verdict, as if a night this rough must mean we took a wrong turn. Matthew leaves no room for that reading here. The wind found twelve men on the route their Lord had chosen for them.
Mark adds one line to the scene. He could see that the disciples were straining to row.
They could not see Him, and He could see them.
One of the men at those oars is Simon Peter. Before this night is over he will be out of the boat, and the week will turn on what he is looking at. Tonight there is nothing to look at but the dark and the waves.
REFLECT
Do this today: name the hard thing you are in. If you came into it by doing what was right, tell God so in one sentence that begins, You sent me here. However it began, say Mark’s line aloud: He could see. If the hard thing is a person who is hurting you, tell someone today.
A Two-Minute Prayer
Lord Jesus, the wind is against me, and I cannot see You from here. Thank You that You can see me. Keep me rowing until You come. Amen.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the sea, and Jesus was alone on land. He could see that the disciples were straining to row, because the wind was against them.
Mark 6:47-48 (BSB)
Mark tells the same night. He adds the view from the mountain, which no other Gospel records.
In Matthew's telling the day follows hard news. John the Baptist had been killed in prison, and when Jesus heard it He withdrew by boat to a quiet place. The crowds followed Him there on foot, which turned it into a day of plenty. Five loaves and two fish fed about five thousand men, with women and children besides. The twelve carried the food out to the crowd with their own hands. Afterward they gathered twelve baskets of what was left.
Then the day ends in a hurry. Immediately, Matthew says, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat.
John's Gospel may tell us why: Jesus saw that the crowd was about to come and make Him king by force, and He withdrew. Matthew gives no reason himself. But picture what the twelve were feeling. A crowd of thousands wanted to crown their teacher. They would gladly have stayed for that.
He sends them off instead and dismisses the crowd Himself. Then He goes up the mountain to pray, and Matthew says it twice so that we do not miss it. He went up by Himself, and when evening came, He was there alone.
So the scene is set in three places. A crowd is walking home full, a man is alone on a mountain, and twelve men are in a boat, rowing away from a day they would have liked to keep, because He told them to.
Today we are in the MINISTRY of Jesus, the stretch of the story when He is showing a small group of people who He is. Tonight the lesson will be taught in the language of the EXODUS: a sea, a night watch, and a people who cannot see their God.
They were where Jesus told them to be, and they were in a storm.
Three Gospels tell this night, each with its own measurement. Matthew says the boat was far from land, Mark says it was in the middle of the sea, and John says they had rowed about three or four miles. The lake is about eight miles across at its widest, so they are out in the middle of it in the dark, with no shore close in any direction.
Matthew gives the cause in one short clause: the wind was against it. His word for against means opposite, in your face. It is a headwind, so every yard they gain has to be taken back from it. He offers no other explanation. He blames neither the men nor an evil power.
People who knew the lake would not have been surprised. It lies about seven hundred feet below sea level with hills all around, and an old Bible encyclopedia describes cool air from the uplands rushing down the gorges onto the water with great violence.
Then there is what the waves did. Our translation says the boat was buffeted, but the Greek word, basanizo (βασανίζω), is stronger than that. It has a history. It grew from basanos, the touchstone a goldsmith rubbed metal against to see whether the gold was real. From there it came to mean questioning a person under pain, and then simply torment. That last sense is Matthew's. The boat was tormented.
Mark uses the same verb for the men themselves. When he says they were straining to row, this is his word, so the boat was tormented and the rowers were too. The night was rough on them. Both writers chose a hard word to say so.
One more detail concerns time. They left in the evening. Jesus will come to them in the last watch before dawn. Matthew covers the hours between in a single verse, but the men in the boat did not get to skip them.
The waters saw You, O God; the waters saw You and swirled; even the depths were shaken. The clouds poured down water; the skies resounded with thunder; Your arrows flashed back and forth. Your thunder resounded in the whirlwind; the lightning lit up the world; the earth trembled and quaked. Your path led through the sea, Your way through the mighty waters, but Your footprints were not to be found.
Psalm 77:16-19 (BSB)
A sleepless person, asking in the dark whether God has forgotten him, makes himself remember the night Israel crossed the sea.
Psalm 77 was written for a night like this one. It begins with a person who cannot sleep, and he says so to God: You have kept my eyes from closing; I am too troubled to speak.
His Hebrew is more vivid than our English. It says, You have held the guards of my eyes. The guards of the eyes are the eyelids, and the word is shemurot (שְׁמֻרוֹת), from shamar, to keep watch. It is the root behind a watchman and behind the watches of the night. His own eyelids have been posted like sentries that are not allowed to stand down.
In the dark he asks the questions that hard nights raise. Has God forgotten to be gracious? He never gets an answer to that. What he does is make himself remember, and what he remembers is the night Israel crossed the sea.
He tells it as a storm, with the waters swirling at the sight of God, the clouds pouring down water and thunder in the whirlwind. Then comes the line that holds the psalm together: Your path led through the sea, Your way through the mighty waters, but Your footprints were not to be found.
Two more Hebrew words carry that line.
The first is derekh (דֶּרֶךְ). Our translation has path here, where the King James has way. It is the ordinary word for a road, and it comes from a verb that means to tread, so a derekh is ground that feet have gone over. The psalm says God's road ran through the middle of the sea.
The second is iqqevot (עִקְּבוֹת). It comes from the word for heel and means heel-prints, the marks a walker leaves behind him. The King James has, thy footsteps are not known.
Put the two together. God walked His people through the sea, and when it was over nobody could point to a single print. He had been there for every step, yet no one could track Him.
The psalm never tells the sleepless man that his trouble is over. It gives him a way to think in the dark: you cannot always trace where God is walking, and that has never meant He was off the road.
Now look again at the lake. Twelve men are in the middle of the water at night, with the one who sent them out of sight. Any of them, asked where Jesus was, would have pointed back toward a shore he could no longer see. They are living inside Psalm 77 and do not know it yet.
One more thread comes from that night in Exodus. While Israel was in the sea, the book says that at the morning watch the LORD looked down on the army of the Egyptians from the pillar of fire and cloud, and threw it into confusion. The rescue turned in the last hours of the night, with God looking down. Mark is about to tell us something very like it.
Stay with Mark's line for a while. He could see that the disciples were straining to row. It is night and the boat is miles out, while He is on a hillside praying, and still He could see them. Mark reports it without a word about how.
For the men at the oars, nothing about that night felt watched. They had wind and water, sore hands and a dark shore, and the most important fact about their situation was one they had no way of knowing. They were seen.
The hard part belongs here as well. Jesus sent them out onto this lake. Mark sets two things side by side: He could see them, and about the fourth watch He went out to them. How long He watched, Mark leaves unsaid. Matthew and Mark both give the gap. They left in the evening and He came in the last watch of the night, so for hours they strained and He had not yet come.
Scripture gives no reason why He sent them into a headwind, or why He waited. John Calvin wrote about the first of those questions more than four hundred and fifty years ago. He was commenting on the verse where Jesus makes them get into the boat, and before he offers any reasons of his own he says this.
"There is always the best reason, no doubt, for every thing that God does;"
That is the half we like to hear. He goes straight on to the other half.
"but he often conceals it from us for a time, in order to instruct us not to be wise in ourselves, but to depend entirely on the expression of his will."
That is Calvin's reading, and not every Christian presses it so far. Whatever the reason, the meantime was plain. The disciples had been told to cross, so they rowed.
Not every storm begins with a sending we can name. An illness comes, or a death, and some storms we sailed into ourselves. Jonah's storm came while he was running from the LORD, and yet he could say afterward, In my distress I called to the LORD, and He answered me. Mark's line does not depend on how the night began.
So whichever night is yours, this passage makes no promise that the wind will drop before morning. It gives you what was true for the twelve before anything changed: He could see them.
The Labouring Boat
Alexander Maclaren preached on this passage in a sermon he called The King’s Highway, and he would not let his hearers separate the mountain from the lake. “He is on the mountain in prayer, and He sees the labouring boat and the distressed rowers.” Maclaren puts both verbs in the present tense, because the praying and the seeing happen at once. The one on the mountain has not turned His back on the boat in order to pray. He is with His Father while His eyes are on twelve tired men.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
From his sermon The King’s Highway, on Matthew 14.
Found Seeking to Obey
Hudson Taylor was about twenty-one when he sailed for China as a missionary. His ship, the Dumfries, left Liverpool on the nineteenth of September, 1853.
A violent gale caught it almost at once. For twelve days the ship beat back and forth in the Irish Channel and could not get clear, and on Sunday night, the twenty-fifth, it was drifting into Carnarvon Bay, within a stone’s throw of the rocks.
The captain was a Christian. He told Taylor they had very little time. Then he asked him a question.
“We cannot live half an hour now: what of your call to labour for the LORD in China?”
Taylor answered that he would not wish to be anywhere else. If he died that night, he said, this is what he expected to hear.
“the Master would say it was well that I was found seeking to obey His command.”
A few minutes later the captain looked at the compass. The wind had shifted two points, which was enough for them to beat out of the bay.
Taylor tells one more thing about that night, and it is against himself. His mother had asked him to buy a swimming belt for the voyage, and in the storm he gave it away, because he thought keeping it showed weak trust. He later called that a mistake.
“The use of means ought not to lessen our faith in GOD”.
Taylor was six days out of port, on a ship he had boarded because he believed God had sent him, and the voyage nearly killed him in its first week. He did not read the gale as a sign that he had heard wrong. He also learned that trusting God does not mean throwing away the life belt.
Where This Sits in the Story
ANCIENT TRUTH
In the EXODUS, God Himself led Israel to the edge of the sea with an army behind them. That night became the story the nation never stopped telling, and Psalm 77 retells it for one person who cannot sleep.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes will walk with us all week, and he begins where the disciples began at the oars. Nobody, he says, is in charge of the wind. He says it so that we stop expecting to be.
MODERN APPLICATION
A hard season that began with a right decision is one of the most confusing places to stand. It might be a job taken in good faith, a move, a marriage or a calling, and the difficulty feels like proof of a mistake. A hard place is not the same as a harmful one, though. If someone is hurting you, staying is not the obedience this passage teaches, and getting safe is no failure of faith.
NEW TESTAMENT ECHO
Jesus had already told these men that the rain falls and the winds beat on the house built on rock as well as on the house built on sand (Matthew 7:24-27). In His teaching the storm comes to both, and what differs is what the house is standing on.
REFLECT
What do you think Jesus is doing on the mountain while you row?
A Breath Prayer for Today
Mark gives us the words. This takes two minutes, and you can do it at a desk, in a car, or in a hospital corridor.
Sit
Put both feet on the floor and let your hands rest open on your knees.
Breathe in
Slowly, through your nose. As you do, pray: I cannot see You.
Breathe out
Longer than the breath in. As you do, pray: and You can see me.
Repeat
Ten breaths. If your mind runs to the wind, bring it back with the next breath.
Stay
Sit for a moment in the quiet before you pick the oars back up.
As no man has power over the wind to contain it, so no one has authority over his day of death. As no one can be discharged in wartime, so wickedness will not release those who practice it.
Ecclesiastes 8:8 (BSB)
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes is listing what no person has power over, and the wind heads his list.
Today's verses end with nothing fixed. The wind is still against the boat and Jesus is still on the mountain, with dawn hours off.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes, whose line we have just read, would not have been surprised. He spent his book studying what people can and cannot control, with wind as his favourite example of the second kind. He offers no trick for making it stop. He sets it beside the day of our death, as the two things nobody is in charge of, and we will come back to that on the fourth day.
In place of an explanation, Matthew has told us who sent the boat out. Mark has told us who could see it.
That is enough to row on tonight. You may not be able to see Him from where you are, which was true for all twelve of them for hours. And Mark says that from the land He could see them.
Tomorrow, in the last watch of the night, He comes down.
Prayer
Father, I am in a headwind, and I have wondered whether I heard You wrong and whether You have forgotten me. Tonight I take hold of what the Gospel says. Your Son made them get in, and Your Son could see them. I do not need You to explain the wind. I ask You to keep me at the oars, to keep me from reading the storm as Your anger, and to let me know, even faintly, that I am seen. I will watch for You in the last watch of the night. In the name of Jesus, who came. Amen.
BREATH PRAYER
Inhale: I cannot see You — Exhale: and You can see me
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Today's Commitment
I will stop reading my hard season as proof that I took a wrong turn. Today I will do the next thing I was given to do, and I will say once, out loud, He can see me.
LEAVING AT THE CROSS
RECEIVING FROM THE CROSS
Check Yourself
Which Gospel says that Jesus could see the disciples straining at the oars?
The Man Who Kept the Detail
the writer of the second Gospel, in the first century
An early tradition says Mark was a companion of Peter who wrote down what Peter preached. Most scholars place his Gospel within a few years of the year 70. The book itself does not name its author.
He could see that the disciples were straining to row.
LESSON FOR US
If the old tradition is right, this detail comes from a man who was at the oars that night and only learned afterward that he had been seen.
Sources & Further Study
RELATED SCRIPTURES
Matthew 14:1-24
The death of John, the feeding, the sending and the headwind.
Mark 6:45-48
The same night, with the view from the mountain.
John 6:14-21
The crowd that wanted a king, and the dark crossing.
Psalm 77
A sleepless night, and the road through the sea.
Exodus 14:19-31
The crossing, and the morning watch.
Ecclesiastes 8:6-8
No man has power over the wind.
Jonah 1:1 to 2:10
A storm that began with running away, and a prayer that was answered.
Matthew 7:24-27
The same storm on two houses.
FOR DEEPER STUDY
Greek: Matthew 14:22 made is anankazo, Strong’s G315, to compel; Thayer notes it can mean compelling by force or by persuasion and entreaty, so the word shows that Jesus insisted and does not show how. Matthew 14:24 buffeted is basanizo, G928, used twelve times in the New Testament; Mark 6:48 uses it of the rowers. Its noun basanos, G931, is first a touchstone, then a test, then torture; Thayer glosses Matthew 14:24 as harassed, distressed. The idea that the storm was assaying the disciples like gold goes beyond the word. Against is enantios, G1727. Matthew 14:24 has a textual note: some manuscripts read far from land and others in the midst of the sea. Hebrew: Psalm 77:4 (verse 5 in the Hebrew numbering) reads achazta shemurot einai, You have held the guards of my eyes; shemurah, H8109, is the eyelid, so named, says the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon, from its guarding the eye, and it comes from shamar, H8104, to keep or watch. Psalm 77:19 (verse 20 in the Hebrew numbering) has derekh, H1870, a way or road, from darakh, to tread, and iqqevot, from aqev, H6119, heel or footprint; the Berean Standard Bible renders derekh as path and the King James as way. On John 6:15 as the reason for the hurried dismissal: this is an inference; Matthew gives no reason. The lake: about thirteen miles long and eight wide, roughly seven hundred feet below sea level. Notes on the story and the quotations. Hudson Taylor’s account comes from A Retrospect, a memoir he published about forty years after the voyage; it is his memory of the night, and no journal from the voyage has been checked. His sentence about the use of means continues in the original after the word GOD. John Calvin goes on, after the lines quoted, to suggest reasons of his own for the sending; the Latin commentary was published in 1555. Sources 1. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 2 (Latin, 1555), on Matthew 14:22. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. 2. Alexander Maclaren, “The King’s Highway,” in Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Matthew, chapters 9 to 28. Project Gutenberg #7351. Maclaren lived from 1826 to 1910. 3. J. Hudson Taylor, A Retrospect (China Inland Mission, 3rd edition; first published 1894), chapter 8, “Voyage to China.” Project Gutenberg #26744. 4. International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), “Galilee, Sea of,” on the lake’s sudden storms. Further: BibleProject, “The Disturbing But Surprising Wisdom of Ecclesiastes,” on how little of life we control.
Finished reading? Mark this day read.
BEFORE YOU GO
Anything you want to keep from today?
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