In my meditation time tonight I found myself recalling the story of Jesus walking on water. Specifically, I was thinking about Peter and his moment of horror when he saw the wind and began to sink. I wonder if the story has perhaps a little more than the simple interpretation that I usually throw at it.
Usually, when I encounter this story, I think it is about faith and doubt. When Peter takes his eyes of Christ, he begins to doubt, and needs to be rescued. If only he had not looked away, perhaps he never would have doubted. What we need to do, is keep our eyes on Christ. Now, I don’t want to imply that this is a bad way of reading this story. I just think there is more here.
I was thinking how my life over the past few months seems a lot like this story. The difference is, I don’t know when it was I stepped out of the boat, I just notice that God keeps blessing me, and after awhile I start to get a little scared. What if the next stage of life doesn’t have the same blessing. Surely, I would sink. What if I don’t manage to get my loans paid off this month? What if some crushing burden gets me down and I can’t figure out what to do? Of course, putting my anxieties down in writing makes them all seem flimsy, or perhaps silly. Obviously you can’t spend your life worrying if one day you will wake up and not have all the blessings you currently have. If you do, you will never learn how to share the blessings you do have.
But back to the story. Peter sees the wind. Now that’s really something, since most of us never can see the wind. We usually feel only the effects of it. And that’s probably what the author means here, so I don’t want to go around belaboring the point in order to make it mean something else. But I do want to draw out the literary effect. Peter is so concerned with the wind, which presumably he knows because he can see the waves frothing a little bit, the water getting just choppy enough to make him think, hey, this isn’t what I thought I was getting into. And there it is, he stops just seeing what the wind is doing and starts seeing the wind. The wind he sees, the wind he expects, the wind that’s all around him becomes the next insurmountable problem. And all along he forgets not only that God is holding him up on the surface of the water, but that all along God had was the provider. Peter is blinded by the one thing he really can’t see in this story, the wind. That’s how it goes not just when we take our eyes of Christ, but when we go about making all the surrounding circumstances into something to worry about, or a problem we feel responsible to solve.
I almost want to laugh at this story too. You know, Peter is out there walking on water. WALKING ON WATER! That’s when he worries about the wind. OK, so you’re already out there, then you think the wind might be challenging? I mean, I would be worried about the whole standing on water thing, right? That’s when it hits me though. We are just like Peter, in that most of time, when God is working some crazy miracle in our lives, we’re thinking about how if just one more thing goes wrong in our live we are going to lose it. Or we’re busy thinking about everything else in the world, so busy we never see that God is already doing something in our lives. So the more I laugh at Peter, the more I have to laugh at myself.
Let’s face it. The God of the universe is right here, His Son is right here loving us, and at the same time all things subsist in Him. And we think to ourselves, what I fail this test before me. My life would be ruined, etc. But the very God who created it all is asking “Why did you doubt?”
That’s the real question here. Why did we doubt, when God was doing something so utterly amazing in our lives. What prompts us to doubt when we are already walking out in faith? Why does doubt seem to creep in from other angles? Why does doubt blind us?
I think sometimes we need to spend a little more time in awe of God. We need to spend a little more time realizing how great God’s power is in our lives. We need to see just a little bit more clearly how good God is.
So what do I take away here? I’m not sure yet, honestly. But I think the point is not so much to be careful to keep your eyes on Christ when you step out of the boat, as to keep you eyes on Christ whether you’re in the boat or not. The walking on water wasn’t really the issue in the story. It’s almost like a tangent. The story is more about letting our doubts get the better of us when those doubts are about such minuscule things compared to the greatness of God’s miraculous work in our lives. He raised Christ from the dead, shall he not also give us everything we need? He gives us life itself.
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