Out of the heart of the storm | Third Sunday After Trinity

8:00am Holy Communion, 20th June, 2021 - Angela Tilby

Job 38.1; Mark 4.35

‘And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm’.

I am always moved by these verses we have heard from Mark’s Gospel about the storm at sea, and Jesus sleeping in the boat until his disciples’ panic made him get up and quieten the storm. One reason I am drawn to the passage is that I worked very hard in my first 6th form year to get what was then an ‘O’ level in scripture, and it was possible in those days to opt for Mark’s Gospel in the original Greek. It was amazing when I got good enough to recognise the words galene megale (great calm) and to notice how the words were onomatapeic: galene megale, to my ears at least, actually sounds like a great calm.

So this is a gospel for the anxious! This is the presence of Jesus as the ‘great calm’ in the storm of life. And his presence in the calm is not only proclaimed but made real, actualised, whenever the passage is read. This made a deep impression on me. It also shook me to the core. For it suggested that this was not just a story about Jesus being awfully tired after a busy day and then being woken up to do one more kind and helpful thing by quieting the storm. The text shows us why the early Christians worshipped Jesus and called him Lord. The preacher of Galilee, the friend of the fisherman, yes. But ‘What manner of man is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

That very question goes with me still, all these years later. When my father died I read this Gospel at his funeral. Not that he was a particularly religious man, but he had served at sea for many years and he had a calmness of spirit that drove my mother mad from time to time, but was very much part of his character, and enabled him to deal with illness and disability with an extraordinary equanimity. And it brought me comfort to read at his funeral of that great calm, that galene megale, that Christ brought by his word and presence.

The Gospel is a comment and a contrast on the lesson from Job. Here God speaks out of the heart of the tempest itself, out of the whirlwind, not to comfort and assure Job but to rock him with a whole barrage of questions, spat out from the whirlwind like bullets: ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth, declare if thou hast understanding?’ And this passage too I came to love, especially at a time when my own life was full of the chaos of unexplained sorrow and unanswered questions. God, riding upon the storm, God at the heart of the whirlwind. God meeting my sorrow not with any obvious comfort or assurance but rather with challenge and a kind of furious energy which blew self-pity.

Both readings show us, as if we needed telling that this world of God’s creation is not tame. It is wild, driven by God-created energies we only half-understand. The world of nature holds together with extraordinary and mathematical elegance, but there is chaos too within it. Some years ago I got interested in what’s known as chaos theory, a branch of mathematics that states that the randomness of chaotic systems uncovers deeper patterns and connections which enable nature to produce genuine novelty. Tiny events can have huge consequences. One popular way of explaining chaos theory was to point out that ‘a butterfly flapping its wings in Florida can lead to a hurricane in China.

And I ‘ve often wondered whether prayer is a bit like that, and whether we are connected to those pray for and with in ways we don’t see or understand. Our prayer may be tiny, but it has effects. But back to the Gospel and the terrified disciples. Of course they had no idea when they had set out on a calm sea that they were going to face a real threat to their lives. We can feel for them. We know we are always only a heartbeat away from catastrophe, accidents and errors break in and break us. We crack under the strain of illness, worry, need, anxiety. In Job God challenges us to see his hand in everything; that there is an order, a meaning in the chaos, that the whirlwind is the portal into a deeper connection, the face of a holiness which could be more than we can bear, except that God shields us from what we cannot yet face, still pouring up on us the day to day blessings on which we depend.

Those Christians who were with Jesus in the boat were as terrified and challenged as Job had been at the whirlwind. And there in the boat at the heart of the storm Jesus slept, as secure and trusting as he had been as a baby in the arms of Mary. In that experience they encountered the mystery of his being. That he was not just a gifted, charismatic healer, a marvellous prophet and teacher, a messenger sent from God. He was all those things, but there was more. John in his Gospel speaks of the Word of God in whom all things were made (John 1.3), and Paul of Christ as the one ‘in whom all things hold together’ (Colossians 1.17), and as Christians we come to see that he is the one by whom all things in earth and heaven are ultimately reconciled and transformed.

So he is our hope, our one true security in this life. And the one true hope and security of the world. This Eucharist, like every Eucharist, is that hope made visible and edible. He gives himself to us through the natural gift of grain turned into bread, the product of storm and rain and sun. Here he is at the heart of life, the great, furious gladness, the still heart of the raging storm.

So when we go from here we know we are free to bring him our daily burdens and anxieties without fear and without shame. Julian of Norwich the 14th century mystic wrote: ‘He did not say, “You will not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be work-weary, you shall not be discomforted.” But he said, ‘You shall not be overcome’”. And the recognition of that is the moment of the awe that made the disciples say, ‘Who then is this….’ The wind ceased, the waves dropped and there was galene megale a great, great calm. This is the peace of the Lord, and may it always be with you.