Lent 6 ¢ Introduction
This week’s Face By the Wayside is an anonymous one. He is simply called a Disciple and represents all those nameless ones who took off and followed Jesus because there was something in the way he looked, something in the things he said, something in who he was, that made life richer, fuller, truer than it had even been before. Don’t ask them what it was. Most of them, all of them really, didn’t even begin to understand until much later, much much later. All they wanted to do was to be near him, to learn from him, to laugh and even weep with him, and maybe even to become just the tiniest bit more like he was, even if it came to walking on water!
(Matthew 14:22-33, Mark 6:45-52, John 6:16-21)
I hadn’t been part of the group –
that inner circle that formed around Jesus
both to learn and, later, to protect –
I had not been among them all that long,
a few weeks at the most,
when the strange, uncanny thing happened.
It was late one evening, after a full day
of teaching and being with the people along
the lake shore,
and the Master seemed particularly exhausted by it all.
As the crowds dispersed,
he pointed toward my fishing boat
and told us to go on ahead across the lake
to seek overnight lodging somewhere on the other side.
As for himself, he looked so drained,
so tugged and torn and tired out,
so much in need of solitude, that holy quietness
from which he always seemed to return
renewed in body and in soul,
that none of us could question him,
dared ask him how he intended to make
his own way to the meeting place he spoke of.
We launched the boat again
and set sail for the opposite shore.
Darkness settled in,
and with it there arose a wind,
easy at the first, but later swinging round against us,
so that we had hard going of it,
tide and current sweeping us out from the land,
and the wind beating us back in again.
Finally we hauled down the sail,
it was only a hindrance anyway,
and settled in for a weary night of heavy rowing,
that and bailing too, for she was almost over-laden,
shipping water steadily both across the bow
and backwashed from the stern.
We had struggled nearly half the way across,
about two or three miles out,
and it was well on toward the dawn,
when we caught sight of him.
There was, as I recall, a kind of light,
nothing pale and eerie, phantom-like,
more a reassuring radiance,
comforting and gentle, like the tiny oil lantern
we set close beside the bed at home
when the children cannot sleep, or someone’s sick.
I suppose it was the light that we saw first,
drew our attention to him.
No one mentioned it right off,
I guess we all thought we were seeing things,
that the constant straining
through those hours of heaving on the oars
had made our heads swim and our eyes lose focus.
Folk see all sorts of things out on these waters,
things they never wish to see again,
and do not talk about.
Then he drew closer,
seemed about to pass us by,
and it was Jesus, unmistakably.
Jesus, slogging across the wave tops
as if he were crossing a ploughed field on land.
There was no uncanny floating,
or hovering just above the surface,
as some kind of apparition might have done.
He actually walked, the wind and waves,
as I recall, whipping about his ankles.
But in our shock at such a sight,
coupled with sheer exhaustion,
we were convinced it was a specter
and began to moan and even to shriek,
cry out in naked terror.
Don’t be afraid, my friends. He cried.
I’ve come to help you, guide you to the shore.
If it’s really you, Master, called Peter –
a fellow swift to speak and act if ever I saw one –
If it’s truly you then call me to your side.
And he responded, Then join me, Peter.
So over the side he went, quick as a flash.
And, by all that’s holy, didn’t he too begin
to tramp his way across those waves.
But then, as he was almost to the Master’s side,
Peter looked down.
He took his eyes away from Jesus’ face,
and immediately was up to his knees,
and then his waist in swirling waters.
Save me, Master! he shouted. Oh help, save me!
And the Lord stretched out one hand and bore him up.
What happened, Peter? Jesus inquired.
What was your problem, Faintheart?
Why did you let your eyes wander away from me?
Then he hoisted Peter back into the boat
and, just like that, the wind dropped,
the waters calmed, and, almost in a flash,
we were tying up at the dock on the opposite side.
We were all so stunned,
nobody quite knew how to react.
Many of us had seen him heal the lame and blind,
cure lepers and the like,
but this was a quite different kind of marvel,
more mysterious and strange, yes, uncanny.
At that moment, of course,
there was nothing else to do
but to fall down right there on the old wharf
and worship our friend Jesus,
treat him as the deity he appeared in truth to be.
But as time went by we began to ask ourselves
whether we hadn’t dreamt the entire thing.
We didn’t mention it again among ourselves
because we couldn’t understand.
It was just too much for us, yes,
that and the feeding of the multitude.
We began to wonder – don’t you see? –
just what this was we were getting involved in;
began, as Peter had done on the deep,
to take our eyes from Jesus face
and look around us at the perils and the risks.
It was about that time, it seems to me,
that Judas Iscariot started all his questioning,
began keeping himself to himself,
apart from all the rest of us.
I wonder where he is off to now,
leaving the Master’s table before the meal is ended
and the final blessing given.
Almost makes me afraid, until I turn
and see the Master’s face,
and share the confidence and peace
that rests within his quiet gaze.
Sometimes, since then, I’ve wondered,
if he’d called to me to join him
on the deep that night,
would I have followed Peter overboard?
And might I have stayed afloat?
Barrie Shepherd retired from historic First Church in New York City in 2000. He currently lives in Wallingford, Pa., and is a parish associate at Wallingford Church.
