Re:Verse passage – Mark 6:45-53 (day five)
It might be easy to become critical and skeptical of the disciples and their inability to perceive who their Rabbi actually was. Perhaps they’re not so different than we are- even thousands of years later. The words and thoughts of Donald English are too profound and convicting to try to summarize or restate.
“We are often no better. We may be fine when God comes to us in Christ along the recognizable avenues, even if they are miraculous, so long as they are good and affirming. How awesomely splendid to have distributed bread to a crowd, knowing how little Jesus began with and yet seeing that there was more than enough for everyone. Many of us have our own version of that experience. But how different it was in the middle of the night, when the wind was high, and rowing hard, and safety threatened, to see a ghostly figure dimly passing you by on the water!
Most Christians have our own version of that, too. It happens when events conspire to disappoint us, or trusted friends hurt us, or illness and loneliness overtake us, or spiritual dryness oppresses us. The bread-providing master at the center of the crowd is often then more like the ghostly figure on the stormy sea ‘wishing to pass us by’. It is much easier then to take fright and cry out. But such experiences are meant to have the opposite effect. They are intended to strengthen our faith, to assure us that we are growing, to signal that Jesus can trust us to go through such storms, not needing to have our hands held all the time, but knowing that the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who feeds his people and stills the storms and walks on the waters, will never leave us or forsake us. It is in that sense that the darkest days we go through can produce the greatest degree of inner illumination”.
