Mark 4:35-41
Asleep on a Cushion in the Storm
35When that evening came, He said to His disciples, “Let us cross to the other side.”
36After they had dismissed the crowd, they took Jesus with them, since He was already in the boat. And there were other boats with Him.
37Soon a violent windstorm came up, and the waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was being swamped.
38But Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on the cushion. So they woke Him and said, “Teacher, don’t You care that we are perishing?”
39Then Jesus got up and rebuked the wind and the sea. “Silence!” He commanded. “Be still!” And the wind died down, and it was perfectly calm.
40“Why are you so afraid?” He asked. “Do you still have no faith?”
41Overwhelmed with fear, they asked one another, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?”
Berean Standard Bible
He had spent the whole day teaching from a boat, pushed out from the shore because the crowd was too big to stand in front of. By evening he was still in it, and he told the disciples where they were going next.
“Let us cross to the other side.”
Mark adds that other boats went along with them, and then does nothing with the detail at all.
The lake sits low in a basin ringed by hills, and wind comes down off them without much warning. Mark says the waves were breaking over the boat and it was filling with water. Several of the men aboard had fished that lake for a living, so they knew the difference between a rough crossing and a night that drowns people, and this was the second kind.
Jesus was asleep in the stern. Not on a cushion, on the cushion, which is how the definite article, for a fixture the account treats as known.
So they woke Him and said, “Teacher, don’t You care that we are perishing?”
It is a complaint rather than a prayer, and people do make it. Mark could have tidied it on the way to writing it down, and did not.
He got up and spoke to the weather the way he had spoken to the unclean spirit in the synagogue, and the wind dropped, and the water went flat.
An old song stands behind that. There is a psalm about sailors caught in a storm the LORD himself raised, lifted to the sky and dropped again until their courage melted and their skill was no use to them. They cried out. He calmed the storm to a whisper, the waves of the sea were hushed, and he brought them to the harbor they had been trying to reach. Men who fished that lake grew up on those words, and they say stilling storms is something God does.
There is an older account as well: a prophet asleep in the hold of a ship in a storm, with frightened sailors waking him. Jonah is the trouble in that one, and the sea only settles once he has gone over the side. The man asleep in this boat is not the trouble.
Then he asked them two questions, neither of them comfortable, one about why they were so afraid and one about the faith they did not have. And the men who had just been kept from drowning came out of it more frightened than they went in, asking each other something none of them could answer.
“Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?”
How We Know
The squall in verse 37 belongs to that particular lake. The Sea of Galilee lies about seven hundred feet below sea level in a basin ringed by hills, with the Golan rising steeply to the east. A study of its wind system describes a daily pattern driven by that setting, including night winds draining off the surrounding slopes onto the water. Weather that arrives that fast on water that enclosed is what verse 37 describes, and the conditions fit the scene as reported. On their own they do not favor a report from people who knew the lake over any other route by which it reached Mark.
The disciples' question at the end has an answer already in their scriptures. Psalm 107:29 says of the LORD that he calmed the storm to a whisper and the waves of the sea were hushed.
- Arieh Bitan, "Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and its exceptional wind system," Boundary-Layer Meteorology 21 (1981), pages 477 to 487.
Questions
1 When something goes badly wrong for us, what do we tend to say to God first?
AnswerWhatever we say, the men in that boat said something blunter. They did not ask him to save them. They asked whether he cared that they were drowning, which is nearer to a complaint than a prayer, and Mark wrote it down the way it came out of them.
2 Several men in that boat fished the lake for a living. Why does that matter?
AnswerBecause they knew what the water could do. This was not a group of landsmen panicking in a bit of chop. Men who had spent their working lives out there thought they were going to die that night, and they were the ones best placed to judge.
3 There is a psalm about sailors in a storm. What does it say the LORD does?
AnswerHe calms the storm to a whisper, hushes the waves, and brings the sailors in to the harbor they were making for. Then a man gets up in a fishing boat and does it, in front of people who had grown up on that psalm.
4 Why were they more afraid after the water went flat than during the storm?
AnswerA storm is frightening in a way you understand. What happened next was not. Their question at the end is the honest one, and the rest of the book is spent answering it.
What This Means for Us
He did not tell them their fear was silly, and he did not tell them the storm had not been dangerous. His question was about where they were afraid, which was in a boat with him asleep in the back of it.
Somebody at this table is in weather right now, and the others probably have some idea what it is. Say what it is out loud, in plain words, without making it sound better than it is. Then say the second thing as well: and he is in the boat. Both sentences, in that order. Neither one cancels the other out.
Prayer
Father, we have said "don't You care that we are perishing" more than once, and you did not throw us out of the boat for it. Thank you for being patient with frightened people. When the water comes over the side, remind us who is with us. Amen.