Second Sunday before Lent 2025
Luke 8.24 “The disciples went and woke him saying ‘Master, master, we’re going to drown.’”
Here’s a question for you. Were Jesus’ disciples the original bunch of “woke” people? Well the historical evidence suggests perhaps not. After all the nation of Israel was founded on some pretty “woke” principles, given by Moses the great lawgiver. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t cheat. Everybody matters, especially the poorest and weakest and most powerless among you, the widows and the orphans. Debts are to be forgiven and slaves to be freed every seven years. Treat everybody with respect, especially the foreigners amongst you because you were once strangers in an alien land. If the dictionary definition of “woke” as being “alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination” applies, then I think the nation of Israel was pretty “woke”, at least in theory. It may not always have been so in its practice, hence the need for the prophets.
Then along came this man, Jesus, raised in the rural agrarian society of Nazareth. Nazareth was, and is, in the northern part of Palestine, in the former northern Kingdom of Israel, then ruled by King Herod (with permission from the Roman Emperor). The Herod dynasty were cruel and arbitrary rulers. Herod the Great, who was around at the time of Jesus’ birth, is memorialised in the Bible for ordering the “slaughter of the innocents”, of every child under 3 years old. Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, who ruled at the time of Jesus’ ministry, is remembered for having John the Baptist beheaded at the request of his step-daughter. Nice people.
Into this world came Jesus, asking a small group of people, ‘the disciples’, to follow him in living a way of life that ran totally contrary to the world around them. They were to give up all their security, their social status, their way of life, their families and have all things in common, to share everything and live a life of radical dependence on God. They were to follow the rule of God, the ‘kingdom’ of God, and make this real in their lives. They were to care for one another and love another, and even love their enemies, those who hated them. They were to follow a totally different way of life than the ‘might is right’, ‘winner takes all’ culture around them. Yeah, well, totally unrealistic, Jesus. You’re not going to last long. And he didn’t.
But in today’s story from Luke’s gospel we find Jesus and the disciples literally ‘at sea’ in a storm. You can draw all sorts of parallels with the modern world from that picture. I’ll leave you to go figure, as the Americans say. The disciples get in a panic. Surely this can’t be how it all ends; we’re all going to drown at sea in a storm. Jesus, do something. So he does. He calms the storm.
This is typical of the stories about Jesus that circulated during his lifetime and after his death. He had power over nature. He healed the sick. He fed thousands, turned water into wine and raised the dead. I don’t know what you make of these stories about the ‘miracles’ of Jesus. Many people, even some who claim to be followers of Jesus, dismiss them as just made up stories, typical of the stories told about important figures, especially religious figures like the prophets, in the ancient world. Personally I am inclined to believe that, though some may have been exaggerated by later story tellers, there remains a kernel of truth behind them. This makes logical sense to me because I believe in God. And if you believe in an omnipotent God who created the natural world then that God must have power over the natural world. If Jesus was, and is, as he claimed, the Son of God, God become one with human beings, then you would expect him to be able to call upon those powers of the creator God. The most important thing Jesus reveals about that God is how he used those powers, to heal, to calm, to bring peace, to reconcile.
That is not to say that I believe any other human being can claim to have those powers. No one, be they Pope, Archbishop, prophet, King, President or Prime Minister, is omnipotent. There’s an ancient, and probably apocryphal, story which every English schoolchild of my generation knows, about an 11th century English King called Canute, or more properly Cnut. He was a real person, who ruled over England from 1016 to 1035, and also became King of Denmark in 1018 and Norway in 1028, earning the epithet Cnut the Great. In his 12th century Chronicle of the History of England, Henry of Huntingdon tells the story, which is probably apocryphal, of a group of flattering courtiers who persuaded Cnut that he could do anything he wanted just by saying the word. Cnut duly set up his throne on the beach and commanded the tide to stop coming in. Needless to say, it did not. Now, either Cnut was vain enough to believe what his courtiers were telling him, or he was wise enough to know better and wanted to prove to them that he was not omnipotent. You decide.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.