Walking on Water

Walking on Water – January 26, 2025

Matthew 14: 22-33

Anita Fast

            One of my favourite books as a child was made up of layers upon layers of transparencies. Maybe you remember those books – 1970’s technology.  As you turned each page, the base scene layered with new images, deepening, clarifying,  sometimes nearly completing changing what you saw in the original picture. 

            Reading the Bible is sort of like that.  Questions we ask, traditions we are part of, cultures that shape us layer on insights and new ways to view the biblical stories.

            We can, in fact we should, try on new lenses with very familiar stories so they can speak to us anew.  Trying on a new transparency, I have decided to approach the story of Jesus walking on water from a perspective I'd never considered - the perspective of the water!  

            This seemed like a fascinating angle to take –  and I started asking myself, what might I learn about water from this story?  A question which soon became - what might I learn FROM water in this story?

            I’ve been spending a lot of time learning from Indigenous friends and writers about what it might mean to be Christian in this land, learning from their wisdom ways of knowing. 

            Accompanying me as I reflected on this story of Jesus and Peter walking on water has been the book 'One Native Life', a memoir of Richard Wagamese, Canadian Ojibway writer and journalist.  Wagamese speaks this way of the Lake where he lived in Northern BC:

“The lake...has tempers and moods.... it's a shapeshifter.... like all living beings it breathes and moves and changes. “

             Indigenous peoples often view water as a living entity or a relative, to which they have a sacred responsibility.  To speak of the lakes and rivers and oceans in this way is foreign to most of our ears.  If we talk about a lake's 'tempers and moods' we are likely speaking in metaphor.  But for the Ojibway, and other Indigenous nations, these moods are not metaphor, no different from us saying that we feel angry, or excited, or joyful.  The water is alive in and of itself.  It has spirit.  Agency.

            And so when I imagine the Sea of Galilee where the disciples struggled against the wind and the waves, where Jesus strode across their bulging heaves, where Peter stepped out into the storm from the comparative safety of his boat, I've been trying to imagine a living relative – dynamic, engaging, perhaps a bit mischievous. 

            Of course, the wind is also a major actor here.  Was it a welcome friend on the lake ready to play, or an annoying visitor for a sleepy sea?  Or perhaps the wind and see both saw an opportunity to teach the disciples a lesson when their boat sailed out onto the sea's watery depths.  I bet the lapping reach of the shoreline had allowed the waters to witness the miracle of the loaves and fishes which just occurred.   Perhaps this turbulence was a show of exasperation and frustration at how long it was taking for the disciples to clue into what was happening around them.  Maybe Jesus noticed what his watery and windy companions were plotting, and decided to join the fun!

            It's hard for me to shake the picturesque image so often rendered of this story: the stately Christ with peaceful gait, robes flowing – barely a hair out of place.  But if the winds were as strong as the text suggests, that could hardly have been what the disciples saw.  No wonder they were afraid – some shadowy moon-lit silhouette, waving his arms frantically trying to keep balance while rising and falling on the stomach-churning roller-coaster of 6-foot swells. 

            This past spring I spent 3 weeks in Greece, and while there I was reminded of the deeply ancient, awe-inspiring ever-presence of the Greek Gods and Goddesses of the Greco-Roman Empire.   As such, it might have been tempting for Jesus to have borrowed from the popular culture of the day and run full speed over the waters like the stories circulating about Heracles, Poseidon, and Hera – bare feet just skimming the top of each crest as he flew.   Then his disciples might have known he was God not a ghost.  But Jesus' power wasn't like that – it came, he came, unexpected as usual.

            Like God's, Jesus' power was not a power of domination, of control.  Like the power of joy when a lost coin is found; the power of ‘yes' when an invitation is extended and accepted; the power of love when fear is palpable – such is divine power.  Such is, too, the power of water .... a strength that, although furious at times, ultimately resides in its fluid, flexible persistence – which comes to shape and define even the hardest rock.

            On the rugged shorelines of the Greek Island of Paros, its beaches are covered in millennia-old stones worn down into smooth, almost soft, pebbles.  As the timeless waves rolled the chattering pebbles, it struck me again just how powerful water is.  A power patient and unrelenting, to be sure. 

            The water demonstrates, reflects and teaches us about Divine power.  Could it be that when Jesus walked on water, he was able to do so because of a oneness with the sea – a collaboration rather than a domination?  That perhaps this ability reflected Jesus' intimate kinship with the water?

            After all, the close relationship between God and the waters goes waaaaaay back.  In our creation narrative in Genesis, water is there from the beginning, with God's spirit hovering over the face of the deep.  Some theologians suggest that the story assumes water is co-eternal with God and that it wasn't until Aristotle that the notion of creation out of nothing got a foothold.

            We haven't be taught to think about God as collaborative,  I know, at least not with anything as base as the elements.  We have read descriptions of God's power vis-a-vis the winds and the waters as power-over the elements – power to control and manipulate what they do.   We read of God commanding the sea to rise, and then later making the storm be still.  Yet if our starting assumption is that water is a living relative, would we hear scripture any differently?

            I suspect we might.   Notice that when Scripture speaks of God as 'commanding' the waters, and the seas ‘obeying’, this is no different from how God speaks to, and what God expects from, humankind as well.  Commandments and obedience to the divine word is not only the prerogative of humanity.  Indeed even to suggest obedience is to attribute agency.  Creator invites everything into discipleship.  

            Throughout scripture the closeness of the animals and elements to God is noted.  Psalm 19 sings of how the skies continuously praise God and reveal knowledge of the divine to the ends of the earth.   In Jonah, God commanded the fish and it belched Jonah out on the shore.  In 1 Kings, God instructed the ravens to feed Elijah, and they brought him bread and meat, night and day.  On another stormy night, Jesus spoke to the seas and calmed the storm, leaving the disciples saying to each other “who is this man, that even the winds and seas obey him”.           

            The call to obedience assumes a relationship.  When Jesus speaks to the seas, he must have known something was listening.  That the animals and elements are so often found to obey should hardly disparage them!   As Wagamese says of his Ojibway teachings – the Creator made humankind and then, realizing how vulnerable we were, sent the animals to be our teachers forever.  The animals, trees, earth and seas are obedient to God's voice because they know that working with, instead of against the divine will is to make things well again – the stuff salvation is made of.  If only we were quicker to learn!

            But let’s get back to the story – we've learned something about the divine relationship with the water, but what about Peter?  What might we say about Peter's attempt to join Jesus on the high seas? 

             “Bid me come to you on the water” Peter asks of Jesus.  Jesus bids, Peter walks.  Then he takes full stock of the strong wind, and his bold courage dissipates into panicked fear.   Peter begins to sink.  In his desperation, he calls out to Jesus who reaches out a hand, catches him, and then reprimands - “O man of little faith, why did you doubt”?

            Yet who or what is it that Peter doubted? If you're like me you've been taught that Jesus is talking about himself.  Peter didn't trust in Jesus and therefore he began to sink.

            As important as trusting in Jesus may be, the text doesn't actually say this.  Layer on a different transparency and imagine that perhaps the issue is that Peter failed to trust the water.  Peter doubted that it would hold him like it was holding Jesus.  Could we hear in this story an invitation to trust, to have faith, in our relative the sea?

            We are, after all, largely made up of water.  We are, after all, dependent on water as the life-blood of the earth.   First Nations wisdom teaches that water is the most life sustaining gift and is the interconnection among all living beings.  When we don't acknowledge and respect this, believe in and trust that interconnection, we sink.  Isn’t this precisely what is happening as our climate warms and droughts plague the earth we have desecrated?  In line with Indigenous teachings, this story also teaches that when we do honour and trust our interconnection with all of creation, living deeply into that web of relations, we can weather any storm. 

            As Wagamese reflected after a walk with his uncle on their traditional land - “we are all related.  That's what my people understood from the earliest times.  At the core of each of us is the creative energy of the universe.  Every being and every form shares that kinetic, world-building energy.  It makes us brothers, sisters, kin, family.... Walking with my uncle that winter day, I came to the beginning of understanding that”.

 Walking in a new way with Jesus and Peter on the water, I am beginning to understand that too.