25. Mark 6:47-56: Mark’s Signature Christology
Jesus
Walks on Water (6:47-52)
Mark ties this story with the feeding
by mentioning the disciples’ failure to “understand about the loaves” (v.52).
Likely, then, the two stories make the same point. There the point was Jesus’
royal messianic identity and authority as leader and agent of God’s New Exodus.
We must look for the meaning of this story along those lines as well.
Mark began his gospel by calling Jesus “Son
of God” (1:1). And he ends it similarly with the centurion crying, “Truly this
man was God’s Son!” (15:39). All the teachings, stories, and events in between
fill out what this term means. It is just this that is at issue in the feeding
and walking on water stories. And it is just this that Jesus’ disciples (then
and now) struggle to embrace.
Misunderstandings we have of the phrase
“Son of God” don’t help. In the Old Testament it meant the king who was to rule
the people as YHWH would (see Ps.72). For many of us today it means a divine
figure, the second person of the trinity. Mark means neither of these things.
Jesus is clearly more than a human king (though not less or other than human!).
But neither is he a divine figure in the way we think of him today. N. T.
Wright is spot on in the following statement:
We are right, then, to be astonished; but not to do what
so many in the last two hundred years have done, and elevate that
astonishment into a critical principle, ruling out from our world (and
that of Jesus) anything that breaks what we think of as laws of nature.
Nor is this a plea to allow for ‘supernature’ or ‘supernaturalism’, as
though there were simply a different force which might invade our world
from outside. Rather, we are invited to see something more mysterious by
far: a dimension of our world which is normally hidden, which had indeed died, but which
Jesus brings to new life. Mark is offering Jesus to our startled
imagination as the world’s rightful king, long exiled, now returning. He is, in
Paul’s language, the last Adam. From his time with the beasts in the
wilderness (1.13), he is now striding the garden, putting things to
rights.[1]
In other words, he is what God is a
human being. And he is a human being filled with the life of God as Adam (and
us) are meant to be. We saw this in the earlier story of a storm at sea where
Jesus calms the sea and the frightened disciples ask “What kind of man is this?”
It’s the Son of God, this Adam-like figure exercising divine-like prerogatives.
Let’s see how this plays out in this story.
The disciples set out to sail across
the sea without Jesus who remained behind. A storm blows up battering the ship
and preventing it from making any headway. Jesus sees the futility of their
struggle and walks on the water to where they are. Then the very strange
comment, “He intended to pass them by” (v.39). What’s up with that?
The answer seems to lie in the allusion
to Job 9 here. Richard Hays notes,
“In the same passage that speaks of the
Creator God walking upon the sea, Job goes on to marvel at the way in which God
eludes his own limited understanding:
“He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength —who
has resisted him, and succeeded?— he
who removes mountains, and they do not know it, when he overturns
them in his anger; who shakes the earth out of its place,
and
its pillars tremble; who
commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up
the stars; who
alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the Sea
[LXX: καὶ περιπατῶν
ὡς ἐπ’
ἐδάφους ἐπὶ
θαλάσσης
(‘and
walks upon the sea as upon dry ground’)]; who
made the Bear and Orion, the
Pleiades and the chambers of the south; who
does great things beyond understanding, and
marvelous things without number. Look, he passes by me, and
I do not see him; he
moves on [LXX: παρέλθῃ
με,
’he
passes me by’], but I do not perceive him.” (Job 9: 4-11)
“Thus, in Job 9 the image of God’s
walking on the sea is linked with a confession of God’s
mysterious transcendence of human comprehension: God’s
‘passing
by’ is a metaphor for our inability to grasp his power. This metaphor accords
deeply with Mark’s emphasis on the elusiveness of the divine presence in Jesus.
Thus, the story of Jesus’ epiphanic walking on the sea, read against the
background of Job 9, can be perceived as the signature image of Markan
Christology.”[2]
Hays further notes that the verb “pass
by” alludes to God’s “passing by Moses” in Ex.33: 17-23 and 34:6 to reveal his
glory to him. And the phrase “It is I” alludes to God’s self-revelation at the
burning bush of his name ‘I am (or “will be”) who I am (or “will be”).[3]
All this points to Mark’s meaning:
Jesus is God in human form and humanity in God’s form (or “image”). As such he
exceeds humanity’s ability to comprehend him. But not our ability to apprehend
(lay hold of, embrace) him. And that, to embrace him, is what Jesus wants of us!
The disciples did not understand this
because they have failed to understand the same truth Jesus revealed to them in
the Feeding of the 5000. They are a work in progress. As are we. May we hear
Mark’s teaching about who Jesus “Son of God” truly is with open ears and open
hearts!
[1] Wright, Mark for
Everyone, 109.
[2]
Hays, Richard B.. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold
Gospel Witness (Kindle Locations 786-803). Baylor University Press. Kindle
Edition.
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