Three readings for a Longest Night service

Picture peace and a lot of people see the morning after. The wind’s gone through, the power’s back on, somebody’s dragging the branch off the roof. You can breathe because it’s over. In that picture, peace is weather. It comes after.

There’s a short story about a boat at night that puts it somewhere else. It puts it in the back of the boat, before the wind ever dropped.

It happened two thousand years back, in the far north of the land of Israel, on a big freshwater lake people called the Sea of Galilee. The lake sits low, well below sea level, in a bowl of hills, and wind can drop down onto it fast. Some of the men in this story had fished it for a living. They knew what it could do.

The man they were with was Jesus, a teacher from a small town nearby who had started drawing crowds. On this day the crowd on the shore was so big that he got into a boat, pushed out a little way, and taught from there, sitting down, with everyone packed along the water’s edge listening. He did that all day.

When evening came, he told his friends he wanted to cross to the other side. They sent the crowd home and pushed off, and the story mentions a small thing. They took him with them, since he was already in the boat. He’d been sitting in it all day. Nobody waited for him to get out and stretch his legs. They just untied it and went. There were other boats out with them, too.

Then the wind came.

Soon a violent windstorm came up, and the waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was being swamped.

These were men who knew that water, and they thought they were going to die.

And where was he? The story puts him in one exact spot. But Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on the cushion. The stern is the back of the boat. The story says the cushion, as if there was only one on board and he had it. He’d talked all day. He was asleep, with the water coming in.

So they woke him. And the first thing out of their mouths wasn’t polite.

Teacher, don’t You care that we are perishing?

It’s a rude question. It’s also an honest one, the kind people still ask in hospital hallways and in parked cars at two in the morning. You’re right here. Don’t you care?

He didn’t answer it in words. He didn’t tell them to mind their manners, either. He got up, in the dark, in the middle of it.

He spoke to the wind and the sea, the story says, the way you’d speak to something that could hear you. The modern translation has him say Silence! and Be still! An older translation has the first word he said to the water as Peace, be still. Either way, the wind died down, and the story says it was perfectly calm.

Then he turned to them and asked them something, and it stung a little. Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith? He didn’t scold them for the question they’d asked. He asked about the fear underneath it.

The calm didn’t settle them, either. Overwhelmed, they asked each other who this was, that even the wind and the sea obeyed him.

Most storms don’t stop when someone speaks to them. The diagnosis doesn’t. The layoff doesn’t. The phone call from the police doesn’t. This one did, the story says, and anyone is free to wonder about that part.

But look at the order of things, because the peace in this story doesn’t wait for the calm.

There was someone calm in that boat the whole time. He was asleep in the back, on the cushion. While he slept, the wind was still howling. The waves were still coming over the side. The boat was still filling. The fishermen were still sure they were going under, and somewhere out in the dark the other boats were in the same water. He wasn’t somewhere dry. He was in the same boat, getting the same water on him. He just wasn’t afraid of it.

And notice, in that older wording, which word came first. Peace was said to the lake while it was still raging. The word went out over the water before the water had done anything to deserve it. The weather obeyed afterward.

Mark mentions the other boats once and never again. The story doesn’t say what happened to them. It only tells you about the one with him in it.

· · ·

Peace, the way it’s usually drawn, is what’s left when the storm has passed. In this story, the calm at the end was real, but it wasn’t the first peace on the water. The first was a tired man asleep in the back of a boat that was filling up.

Peace, here, doesn’t belong to the weather. It belongs to whoever is in the boat with you. And it didn’t mind being woken up by a rude question.

· · ·

The story says the lake was perfectly calm at the end. But the first calm thing on that water was a tired man asleep on a cushion, with the boat still filling.

When somebody hits the floor, a lot of us think the first thing they need is straightening out. We’re hardest of all on ourselves. On the worst night, the first voice in the room is usually our own, reading out the list of what we did wrong.

This one is about a man who hit the floor about as hard as a person can. What came to him first wasn’t a lecture. It was bread.

His name was Elijah. He lived in the land of Israel nearly three thousand years ago, and he was a prophet, which meant a person who carried messages from God to people who mostly didn’t want to hear them, kings included.

He had just come off the biggest day of his life. On a mountain called Carmel, in front of a huge crowd, he had prayed for fire from heaven, and the story says it fell. The country had gone three years without rain. That same afternoon he crouched on the ground with his face between his knees and sent his servant to look out toward the sea. Seven times the servant went. The seventh time he came back and said there was a cloud, as small as a man’s hand. Then the sky went black, the rain came down, and Elijah tucked his cloak into his belt and ran ahead of the king’s chariot all the way to the city.

Everything he’d said had turned out to be true.

Then the queen sent him a message. By this time tomorrow, it said, you’ll be dead.

He ran. He ran the length of the country to the last town in the south, and there he left his servant behind, the same one who had gone out to look at the sea seven times for him. Then he walked one more day into the desert alone, sat down under a broom tree, a scrubby bush with not much shade to it, and prayed.

I have had enough, LORD. Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.

That sentence deserves to be taken seriously wherever it’s said, then or now. If you’re thinking about ending your life, or someone you love is, call or text 988 (US) tonight.

Then he lay down under the bush and went to sleep.

What woke him was a hand. An angel touched him and said, Get up and eat.

He looked around, and there by his head was a jar of water and a round of bread baked over hot coals.

A few days before, this man had asked for fire out of the sky in front of a nation. The fire under the broom tree was the size of a cooking fire, and it was for his breakfast.

He ate, drank, and lay back down. Nobody said anything else.

Then the angel came a second time, touched him again, and said this.

Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.

Elijah hadn’t said anything about a journey. He had asked to die. The answer wasn’t yes, and it wasn’t how dare you. Nobody argued with him at all. The angel just spoke of the road ahead as though there was going to be one, and handed him bread for it.

He got up and ate, and on the strength of that food he walked forty days to Horeb, which the story calls the mountain of God. He found a cave and spent the night.

Only then, after two meals, two sleeps, and forty days of walking, did the question come. What are you doing here, Elijah?

He answered with a speech. He had worked so hard. Everyone else had turned away. He was the only one left, and now they were trying to kill him.

Then a wind came, strong enough to shatter rocks, and God wasn’t in the wind. Then an earthquake, and God wasn’t in that. Then a fire, the very thing Elijah was famous for, and God wasn’t in that either.

And after the fire came a still, small voice.

The voice gave him somewhere to go, and the name of a man, Elisha, who would carry on after him. And it told him one more thing. There were seven thousand others in the country who had stayed faithful too. He had never been the only one. He just couldn’t see them from where he was.

Here’s what was still true the morning the bread showed up. The queen still wanted him dead. He was a day’s walk into the desert with no servant and no plan. He hadn’t taken back his prayer or apologized for running or decided anything at all.

He was fed anyway. Twice.

It was a Sunday evening in Jerusalem, about two thousand years ago. Three days earlier the man these people had followed for three years had been arrested at night, tried in a hurry, and executed by the Roman government on a cross outside the city. Most of his friends had run when he was arrested. One had sworn he’d never met him. They’d watched him die, or heard about it from the women who stayed.

Now they were in a room with the door locked. The story says why. They were afraid. The people who had killed their teacher knew their faces.

That morning some of the women had gone to his grave and found it empty, and one of them said she’d seen him. Nobody in the room knew what to do with that. So they did what people do when they’re scared and nothing makes sense. They stayed together and kept the door shut.

And then he was in the room.

The story doesn’t say he knocked. It doesn’t say anybody opened the door. Jesus came and stood among them. And the first thing he said was this.

Peace be with you!

It’s worth thinking about what he could have said instead.

These were the people who left. They had promised to stand with him and then disappeared when it counted. If anybody had a speech coming, it was them. A lot of us would have opened with “where were you?”

He opened with peace. Then he did something that’s easy to read past. He showed them His hands and His side.

The wounds were still there. Whatever had happened on that Sunday morning, it hadn’t erased Friday. The marks from the nails were still in his hands. He didn’t come back looking like nothing had happened to him. He came back carrying what had happened, and he showed it to them first, as a way of saying “it’s me.”

That’s the last thing that was still true when peace came. The wounds stayed. The city outside was still dangerous. Nobody’s failure had been undone. And the first word in the room was peace.

There’s a line a little further on that most people skip, and it might be the most hopeful line in the story.

One of the friends, Thomas, wasn’t there that first night, and when the others told him, he said he wouldn’t believe it until he’d touched the wounds himself. A week went by. And the story says this.

Eight days later, His disciples were once again inside with the doors locked, and Thomas was with them.

Once again inside. With the doors locked. A whole week after peace had walked into that room, they were still locking the door.

It didn’t take the first time. Not all the way. They’d seen him, they’d heard the word, and a week later they were still scared enough to bolt the door. And he came back. Same room, same locked door, same first word. Peace be with you. Then he turned to the one who doubted and didn’t scold him. He held out his hands.

If peace has come to you once and then gone again, if you were sure for a while and then found yourself locking the doors, that’s in the story too. The story doesn’t treat it as failure. It treats it as the second visit.

· · ·

The story of that room has a line between the two visits, almost thrown away. After the first Peace be with you, the friends saw him, and the story says what happened to their faces.

The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

Nothing outside that door had changed. They rejoiced anyway.