Charles Kutz-Marks
“Our Awesome Inner Power”
Pentecost 3, b, June 25, 2006
Mark 4:35-41
Our Buddhist brothers and sisters have an expression which is shocking:
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Those who have invested much in the spiritual journey, or who guide others it, understand the reason for this admonition. We tend to take our leaders – particularly our spiritual leaders, put them up on a pedestal of perfection…regarding them as all wise; allowing them to direct us, to act for us. We relinquish our own responsibility to them. In psychological terms, we are projecting on to our leaders, what we want them to be for us. Then we work hard at keeping them on that pedestal. i
Now, because life is … so messy… there may be times when a doctor, or a teacher, or a pastor… needs to accept that projection for a while. But left in the position indefinitely, not only do we make our leader’s life unbearable; we trainees forfeit the development of our most important human potentials.
For example, in college one of my philosophy classes had us reading Nikos Kazantazaki’s classic novel of spiritual life, Zorba the Greek. I quickly identified my own spiritual state with that of Zorba’s boss, a fellow who was too intellectual, too analytical, to removed from real life. Along with a nearly complete break down of my own freshman year Christian theology, what Zorba challenged me to see, was that no matter how honestly and intently I wanted there to be some simple Christian answer to every life challenge; nearly all the really important matters were shades of gray that I could not forever hide from or ignore.
I would have to decide… I couldn’t push it off on God, or Jesus, or the leader of my Bible study. But oh, how I tried to! I’d leave all sorts of issues unfinished, just “waiting on the Lord.” With pious friends’ colluding, I managed to put off relationship decisions, career decisions, academic life decisions… always just waiting for “the Lord’s will” to become manifest. In retrospect, it was a faithful way of living… but was it the kind of faithful that Jesus desired of me then?
And I had good company in the disciples of Jesus. Here in the earliest gospel, Mark, chapter 4, the disciples are projecting their messianic visions on Jesus. They are projecting on Him their hopes. They are counting on Him to be the answer man for all their issues. They quickly come to depend on Him as the only possible fulfillment of their needs. Was that faithful? Yes. But what kind of faith?
And while that might have been OK for a while, you get the sense that by now in Chapter 4, Jesus is doing everything he can, to get those disciples – including us- to open their own eyes…. And to be responsible!
Jesus had had a long day of teaching in the hot Galilean sun. Mark tells us the crowds have been massive and pressed in upon Jesus and the disciples. He has just told:
The Parable of the Sower, The Parable of the Mustard Seed. And so much more. Jesus is tired. No doubt, the crowd and disciples are, too. So Jesus tells the disciples that they should cross over the north edge of the Sea of Galilee… probably no more than 4 mi. at the most.
But in the midst of the crossing over, a storm hits and it whips up a wind driven wave machine threatening to sink the small fishing boat they are riding. And calmly, serenely, Jesus sleeps on a cushion in the stern.
Now, they could have awakened him with a team spirit, saying, “Jesus, wake up. Things are bad here. Please grab a bucket and help us bail this boat!” But they don’t. They leap into full panic mode. They interpret his ability to trustingly rest, in the midst of their own raging FEAR as
He must not care for us!
"Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"
They put themselves in the victim position, put Jesus in the savior position, and freeze as if they have no power to act. It puzzles me, because these Sea of Galilee storms were frequent. I spent the summer of 1973 in the southern Galilee and these storms, sometimes with ferocious winds and sometimes with the addition of pounding rain, were a common part of life there. No doubt these same disciples had previously been caught in them and successfully piloted their craft home safely, time and time again. But this time, Jesus is with them… and since they here perceive Jesus is the powerful one, they themselves are able to find no courage of their own at all. It sounds like Dependency. And as we shall hear, Jesus isn’t going to enable it.
We have grown up in this dependency ethos. Half of our hymns teach us to trust wholly in Jesus:
A few moments ago we sang…
“Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.” A Mighty Fortress Is our God…
The previous hymn in our hymnal is “We Sing Your Mighty Power, O God,”
The following hymn is “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,”
The next one, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And Our eternal home.”
Do you hear my point? In our trusting of God, we can sometimes overstate God’s responsibility for what unfolds in life and understate our own responsibility to act wisely, powerfully, courageously. At least that is one interpretation of our current story.
“Well, Jesus stilled the storm, didn’t he?”
Yes, but if His intent was to foster a single minded reliance on Jesus himself, how do you make sense of his words to the disciples when they woke Him were:
"Why were you such cowards [deiloi, cowardly, timid]? Have you still no faith?"
You know, I recognize that every Sunday when we gather here, we each enter with different assumptions about our Christian faith. The lesson that we each hear from scripture will mean different things to each of us depending upon which worldview we bring.
For some of you, this morning’s lesson can be incredibly simple and straightforward … especially if Jesus’ nature miracles don’t trouble you. The lesson is this: Jesus is powerful enough to stop a raging storm. He can take care of anything that comes your way in life, too. That has been the faith perspective of most Christians for 2,000 yrs. For most Christians this is answer enough.
But others of you here this morning can’t buy that. So thank God, these scriptures can be interpretted in many ways to feed the spiritual hunger of almost every kind. For some of you, this miracle – which originally was just a kind of proof that God’s power was in Jesus- this miracle, itself, is a problem. You can’t believe that such miracles happen. And storm-stilling is so central in this passage, that you run the risk of finding nothing here, except, perhaps, one more instance of why Christianity may not really be for you.
Skeptical friends, in this skeptical age, let me suggest another understanding, an old and well-trodden path blazed by a smaller number of unconventional Christians for 2,000 years, and resurfacing again today in documents like the sensational Gospel of Judas that has tongues still wagging from earlier this year, or the more important Gospel of Thomas found just a few years ago. These teach a perspective that many Christian Gnostics and Christian mystics alike have found powering their own understanding when conventional Christian teaching could not.
Turn off the projector, they say. Jesus was upset with the disciples because that kept leaning on him! In this view, we have an AWESOME INNER POWER that is available to us to directly be in the presence of God… and to wholly and wholesomely TRUST in God. And Jesus was upset with the disciples because they didn’t have their own faith that was active and propelled them to act. Jesus was upset with the disciples because they insisted on worshipping Jesus as the Christ instead of becoming Bob the Christ and Sallie the Christ and Zorba the Christ. Jesus was upset because they counted on Him to stop the storm instead of turning directly to God…and perhaps he expected them with God’s help to be stopping it themselves.
The Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus saying, “I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."
"Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him."
Gnostics and mystics and Christians who cannot bear orthodoxy all claim in common Jesus’ own words in John 14:12
“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”
What the Gnostics, the mystics, and some contemporary skeptics say is:
Stop projecting what we want Jesus to be and start internalizing it.
Stop looking so much for Jesus’ for help, and start becoming the help others need because that Kingdom of God is ALIVE inside you.
In this view “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” He isn’t real. The real Christ is inside you… and empowers your action… or there is no Christ at all.
This is my understanding of what took place with those disciples at Pentecost. Finally, finally, the Spirit of Christ entered them in power and led them forth in teaching, in preaching, in healing ministries, in care for the downtrodden.
When Jesus was gone in body, they could no longer simply sit around and wait for this Superman to save the day. They finally got it.
Have we?
Notes
i The structure and main ideas of the first part of this sermon are largely drawn from Walter Wink’s article in the The Christian Century “The Projector is Running” in the June 1, 1994 issue.
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