Walking on Water

1 Corinthians 3:9-17 • Matthew 14:22-34

Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Do you remember last week’s Gospel reading? It was the feeding of the 5000. It ended a little oddly: “Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go before Him to the other side, while He sent the multitudes away.” …Which is also the first sentence of today’s Gospel reading. It’s one story; we’re just reading it in two parts.

Last week a crowd was following Christ out of the towns and into the countryside. Saint Matthew reports that there were five thousand men following the Lord and hearing him teach. And he adds, “Also women and children.” So it’s likely a crowd of something like 10,000 people of all ages.

Matthew began that passage by noting that Christ had just heard of the death of his cousin John the Forerunner, so “he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns” (Matthew 14:13).

Now, since morning, this massive crowd of thousands has been following him, bringing their sick to be healed, hiking cross-country with him, and listening to him teach. Now it’s late afternoon, and they’ve been walking and listening to him all day. It’s several hours’ walk back to town and folks are getting hungry.

The apostles ask the Lord to send the people away to go back and buy themselves some food. But the Lord says, “They don’t have to go anywhere. You feed them.” The apostles protest that they haven’t got any food, just the contents of one little boy’s lunchbox, so the Lord shows them how it’s done.

“You feed them.”

Here’s a principle:  Our Lord delegates. He is not threatened at all by someone else acting in his name.

During the last few years of my mother’s life, she gave me her power of attorney — I could sign contracts in her name, and write checks on her bank account.

So the Lord says to the Twelve, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven… All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Therefore, you, go make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (John 20:22; Matthew 28:18-20).

That’s why this morning I baptized baby Matthew in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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After the feeding of the 5000, the Lord sends his disciples on ahead of him, tells then he’ll catch up with them. They set out by boat. Now the day is drawing to an end, but these are fishermen, they’ve grown up on the Sea of Galilee. It’s only about ten miles across, about twenty miles north to south, and they know perfectly well how to row on down to the next town.

But a storm rises. The wind is against them, it’s kicking up whitecaps, the waves are spinning their boat around. It’s gotten dark, and they are lost.

And since they began following Jesus they’ve seen demons, miracles, fearful works of God. So when they see a figure walking on the waves in the dim light, they assume it’s got to be a demon, a ghost, some other terror to threaten them.

But the Lord says, “Don’t be afraid, it’s me!”

And now Peter’s got an idea.

You see, he understood the lesson. The Lord gave each of the apostles about half a loaf of bread and told him to go feed those thousands of people. Peter said, “If you say so,” then he began tearing off pieces of bread… and had enough for everyone, with lots left over.

Peter has started to figure out the principle of obedience and grace. So now he’s eager to say, “Lord! Command me to walk to you on the water!” Because Peter knows that when the Lord gives a command, along with it he gives the power to carry it out.

In the Gospels we keep seeing Jesus giving impossible commands. To the paralyzed man, he says “Pick up your bed and walk home.” What’s the one thing that man cannot do? That’s the command the Lord gives him.

To the man with the withered hand, unable to straighten it, the Lord says, “Stretch out your hand.” And in the moment that man undertakes to obey the impossible command, that is when grace comes and gives him the power to do it. The paralyzed man receives the divine strength to stand and walk when he takes the Lord at his word and begins to act.

The Lord has given us some impossible commands too. Forgive your enemy (Matthew 18:23-35). Bless those who curse you (Matthew 5:43-44). Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). Be holy for I am holy (1 Peter 5:15-16). Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48).

How to respond to these commands? Saint Luke recounts an earlier command the Lord gave Peter:

[Jesus] said to Simon, “Put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” “Master,” Simon replied, “we’ve worked hard all night long and caught nothing. But at your word, I will let down the nets.” When they did this, they caught a great number of fish, and their nets began to tear. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them; they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink (Luke 5:4-7).

“At your word.”

Saint Paul writes that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:22-23). These are the fruit, the results that are seen increasingly in the life of someone in union with Christ.

But these virtues don’t emerge spontaneously. Love, joy, peace – Every one of them, you’ll find in scripture as a command.

And that’s good news because what God commands, he gives the power to accomplish.

Maybe you’ve been betrayed, lied to, disrespected, cast aside. And when you contemplate loving the ones who did you wrong, you feel like your tank is empty. You’re feeling far from peace or gentleness or joy.

When the Lord commands you to forgive your enemies, he isn’t telling you to feel different; he is telling you to do the work of love: Pray for them, bless them, find out what they need and intercede for them the way you do for your brother or your wife. 

Do you have that in you? Doesn’t matter. If you’ll set your feet on the path of faithfulness to God’s commands, it is his job to fill your obedience with grace and power, and to transform you. Choosing to act is up to you; enabling you to do it is God’s responsibility.

*      *      *

Did you notice what happened when Peter’s faith wavered and he sank? The Lord lifted him up by the hand. We do not read that the Lord slung Peter over his shoulders and carried him like a sack of grain, which would have been humiliating and noteworthy, and I’m sure one of the evangelists would have mentioned it. No, the Lord lifted Peter up and they walked together on the water until they “came into the boat.”  

Saint Paul wrote, “If we are faithless, Christ remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).

So I don’t want to say the moral of this story is just, “You need to have faith.”

Because, most of the times the New Testament talks about faith, it does not mean the strength of your certainty. Nobody reads the Creed and means “I hold the opinion that there is one God the Father Almighty…”

To believe, to have faith, is more than that.

The word we’re looking for in English is faithfulness. The way a husband and wife are faithful to each other. They don’t simply confess the dogma that their spouse exists – they practice acts of love, honor, and mutual submission to one another in faithfulness. Intentionally putting their marriage vows into action.

This is what it means to have faith in Christ: To be faithful to him. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And “By grace are ye saved through faithfulness – and even that is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

Are we perfectly faithful to the Lord? Of course not.

No, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8,9).

There it is again: We are often faithless but Christ remains faithful to us.

So those impossible commands Christ has given us – to forgive your enemy; bless those who curse you; rejoice always; in everything give thanks; be holy for I am holy; be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect – those are fruits the Lord has committed himself to produce in you, as you grow in faithfulness. Commands and obediences are gifts that the Holy Spirit intends to enable you to offer to all the saints in the Church, in obedience to him.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

In the end, since love is an act of the will, empowered by God, we love God by deciding to, and then acting on that choice. “I love the Lord” doesn’t mean “I am filled with a feeling of devotion” (though it could.) It means, “Lord, I have made my choice to offer my life to You as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). Make my life acceptable to You, change and rearrange any part of me or my life, because I belong to You.”

We’ve prayed repeatedly this morning, “Let us commit ourselves and one another and all our lives unto Christ our God.”

I know an elderly priest and presvytera whose marriage was arranged. But after fifty-odd years together they genuinely love one another. Their match may have been set up by their parents, but they’ve made the choice to do love to each other, to be faithful to one another, and very real feelings have grown in them over the years.

Our emotions are as fickle and unreliable as the weather, but even so, what we choose and practice becomes familiar and desirable to us, so that the act of will “I have chosen to do love to the Lord” really does become the heart’s confession “I love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength” (Matthew 22:37).

In Isaiah, the Lord says,

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast, and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! Look and see, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:15,16).

Who called you to hunger and thirst for righteousness, and who put it in you to seek the Lord? Whose idea was it that you should ever become a disciple of Christ and pledge yourself to his Kingdom? God who knew your name before he founded the heavens, has pledged himself with a holy covenant to you, to make you holy and number you among the saints. “Being confident of this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

So when your faith fails and you start to sink, Christ has no plan to let you fall away and drown. He is ready to lift you up by the hand like Peter, because even “when we are faithless he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”

Saint Joseph the Hesychast said, “Action is not to try out and then retreat, but to enter the battle, duel, defeat and be defeated, win and lose, fall and rise, crush the gates everywhere, and to expect struggles and fights until one’s last breath.”

“Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you unstained before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy; to God our Savior, who alone is wise, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen” (Jude 1:24,25).