To say that the last 15 months were challenging is a bit of an understatement. There has been a broad range of difficulties that we have had to face as individuals, families, communities and nations. Those challenges produced different responses on individual, communal and national levels; ranging from despairing to opportunistic and everything in between. To make this planet-sized crisis worse, every time hope started to emerge it was soon dashed by a new twist or turn. Even now, when we could already see the safety of the shore, the progress towards it has been slowed down. It’s as if we have been battling against the headwinds all the time and doing so on our own. Like Jesus’ disciples in today’s gospel crying at the sleeping Jesus: ‘Master, do you not care? We are going down!’
On Friday 27th March 2020, four days after the first lockdown had been announced in the UK, Pope Francis cut a lonely figure in front of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where he addressed a rainy, gloomy, completely empty St Peter’s Square. Yet millions of people watched and listened to him thanks to modern media; it signalled a new medium that would become a spiritual lifeline for the months ahead. Pope Francis delivered a deeply moving meditation based on today’s gospel reading. I have no chance to offer anything that would even come close to his sermon. But there’s a different connection between today’s gospel and Pope Francis’s address. I will come back to it shortly but first, let me present some interpretation of the story described in the gospel reading.
The story is pretty ordinary and totally plausible; here in Scotland, a sudden change of weather is pretty much the norm. The gospel seems to suggest that the weather gradually deteriorated rather than changed in the blink of an eye. That would also explain a rather strange remark that ‘[Jesus] was in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep.’ So far, so ordinary. But then a miracle happened when upon Jesus’ intervention the storm immediately calmed down. Many modern readers can be a bit sceptical about that or even consider it as a made-up story. Such a perception can be explained by our journalistic approach shaped by scientifically rigorous methods of investigation and more or less factually accurate reporting by the mass media. Which is the wrong way of reading the gospels. They weren’t written as final reports produced by a public inquiry. Jesus’ speeches, deeds and miracles were told and shared by the spoken word. Only later on were they used to compile a more comprehensive narrative. But they were written in a way that we would describe as ‘based on a true story’; the actual facts worked as springboards to convey the deeper meaning of the story. The Gospel of St Mark was mainly addressed to a pagan audience, unfamiliar with the Jewish Holy Scriptures but deeply immersed in a world inhabited by a great number of deities, who governed various aspects of the natural world. Poseidon, the powerful Greek god of the sea and storms, was very popular with the pagans. When Jesus subdued the storm, it automatically meant that He was more powerful than Poseidon. This is just a simple example of how multi-layered biblical stories can be. However, is the story in today’s gospel relevant to us, people in modern Scotland? Of course, it is! To find out how, we need to unearth the factual story and here’s my interpretation.
‘Leaving the crowd behind the [disciples] took [Jesus], just as he was, in the boat’ It was a rare moment when Jesus could get some rest. During their journey the weather was gradually worsening but not beyond the disciples’ abilities to cope with it – a good number of them used to fish in those waters for a living. At one point something triggered their panic and Jesus was woken up and responded to their hysteria: ‘Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?’ His actual words might have been different, but they effectively calmed their agitation down and subsequently, the storm looked less frightening. Jesus’ strong leadership ‘steadied the ship’. Exactly what Pope Francis did on that memorable evening on 27th March last year when we were facing an unknown, yet dreadful and frightening future. He didn’t miraculously stop the pandemic but gave us hope that ran deeper and stronger than any threat or danger. We are in a different position now, 15 months later but we can be sure that we will face different individual, communal, national or global challenges that will test our resilience and faith. Let me quote St Paul: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8:35.38-39) Or if you prefer a modern version: You’ll never walk alone…