When the Storm Hasn’t Stopped

Half past eight in the evening.

The dishes are done, or they’re not getting done. The television is on for the noise, and the phone keeps lighting up on the arm of the couch. The workday is over, but whatever filled it came home with you and sat down too.

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.

What this says about peace

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.

This week

The other boats. The story mentions them and lets them go. You may not be the only one out on this water: the same layoff, the same waiting room, the same kind of news. Think of one other person in a boat like yours and send them one line this week. You’re not out here alone.

Wake somebody up. They didn’t ride it out politely. They woke him. If you’ve let someone you love sleep through your storm because you didn’t want to bother them, tell them this week. A friend, a spouse, a brother or sister, an old roommate. Wake them up.