Calming the Sea -- Human or God?

Jesus Asleep in the Boat

Jesus has been teaching in parables all day (Mark 4:2-9, 21-34). The crowd at the side of the lake was so large that he had to preach from one of the boats at hand so that he would not be trampled (Mark 4:1). When evening came, Jesus looked around and saw a crowd still surrounding him, so he gave orders to set sail for the other side of the lake (Matthew 8:18, Mark 4:35, Luke 8:22). Several would-be disciples clamored to go along with him  (Matthew 8:19-22). Although they had made no preparations for travel, they departed just as they were (Mark 4:36).

Jesus got into the stern of one of the boats, and the other disciples jumped in also. Other boats followed him as they set sail. Jesus had been preaching and tending to the needs of others all day. He was tired, and fell sound asleep right there in the stern of the boat. That's a very human thing to do. If you or I were tired, we might take a nap. If we were exhausted, maybe even a storm would not wake us up. Jesus was human.

But wait! I thought Jesus was God! Does God get tired?

God Commands the Storm

And the disciples fear a great fear

As John Mark, the assistant to Peter in Rome, tells this story, he hearkens back to an earlier story found in the Holy Scriptures of the Jewish people: namely, the story of Jonah the Prophet on a boat fleeing from God. In the story of Jonah, the boat captain says to Jonah, "How can you sleep?" In Mark's story, the disciples say, "Don't  you care that we're dying?"

But later, Mark quotes the Jonah story more directly. The crew on Jonah's ship "feared a great fear" when they saw the ferocity of the storm. When they tossed Jonah overboard (at his request) the sea became calm and the men "feared a great fear of the LORD [Yahweh]" (Jonah 1:16).

In Mark's storm story, when the sea became calm the disciples "feared a great fear" of the One who could command the wind and the sea. They said, "Who then is this?" In Mark's reworking of Jonah's story, Mark replaces God with Jesus as the One who is to be feared.

Side note: the Cognate Accusative.

Use of a noun as the "accusative" in a sentence where the noun is a cognate of the verb (if you followed all that) is called the "cognate accusative." Thus the sentence, "I dreamt a scary dream" uses the cognate accusative. We see this in English sometimes. It is very common in Hebrew and in the Old Testament.

But it is very rare in Greek, the language John Mark was using. In fact, in all of Greek literature--and that's a lot of literature--the phrase "feared a great fear" appears only twice. The first appearance is in the story of Jonah in the Septuagint--the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was written 200 years before Christ. The second appearance is in Mark's story of the storm, written 20 years after Christ (Mark 4:41). As Mark was writing his story, he had the story of Jonah before him.

God's Peace Abides

In Jonah, "the raging sea became calm" (Jonah 1:15). In Mark's story, "the wind died down and there was a great calm" (Mark 4:26). Mark accentuates and contrasts the intensity of the storm with the perfect stillness of the ensuing calm.

Only a god could do this. The gods Thor (Norse), Peyrun (Slavic), Baal (in Egypt), and Donar (German) come to mind. Yahweh, the only true God, is said to speak with thunder, hailstones, and coals of fire (Psalm 18:13).

Jesus is God.

But wait! I thought Jesus was human! Now you're confusing me!

The theologians have a solution for this--of sorts. Christian belief is that Jesus is both fully human and fully God. How that could be is, of course, beyond us.

Bonus:

C. S. Lewis on the Claims of Jesus Christ: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

---Thanks to Howard Eames.

Second Bonus: The Storm at Sea by Rembrandt