August 9, 2020
The Episcopal Church of St. Thomas the Apostle
Dallas, Texas
Stephen V. Sprinkle
Theologian-in-Residence, and Professor of Practical Theology Brite Divinity School
Water-Walking Jesus
The Gospel, Matthew 14:22-33
Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
The summer went on and they moved the herd to new pasture, shifted the camp; the distance between the sheep and the new camp was greater and the night ride longer. Ennis rode easy, sleeping with his eyes open, but the hours he was away from the sheep stretched out and out. Jack pulled a squalling burr out of the harmonica, flattened a little from a fall off the skittish bay mare, and Ennis had a good raspy voice; a few nights they mangled their way through some songs. Ennis knew the salty words to “Strawberry Roan.” Jack tried a Carl Perkins song, bawling “What I say-ay-ay,” but he favored a sad hymn, “Water-Walking Jesus,” learned from his mother, who believed in the Pentecost, and that he sang at dirge slowness, setting off distant coyote yips. — Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain published in The New Yorker Magazine October 13, 1997
Annie Proulx who wrote Brokeback Mountain as a short story for the New Yorker Magazine in 1997, and Director Ang Lee who made it into a major motion picture in 2005 starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall were both trading off of a deeper foundational source recorded in the Bible. If you listen closely, you will be able to hear the resonance of stories from the Bible like Water-Walking Jesus throughout world literature, arts, and culture. Without the story of Jesus walking on the water, and Jesus’ command to Peter to step out of the boat into the sea to join him, that scene from Brokeback would have been impossible.
You remember, I imagine, that Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry adapted Annie Proulx’s story for the film’s screen play. Ossana and McMurtry captioned the plot of their film rewrite this way:
“A raw, powerful story of two young men, a Wyoming ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy, who meet in the summer of 1963 sheepherding in the harsh, high grasslands of contemporary Wyoming and form an unorthodox yet life-long bond — by turns ecstatic, bitter and conflicted.”
So, when Jack Twist belts out the lyrics to “Water-walking Jesus” the night before his life and Ennis Del Mar’s life become entwined and changed forever on Brokeback Mountain, there was the whole story of God turning toward humanity for better or worse lying behind it. “I know I shall meet you on that Final Day/Water-walking Jesus, take me a-way!”
God turning toward humanity—toward us, for better or worse, like a lover. Water-walking Jesus, the Incarnate One, beckoning us like Peter to join him in the midst of the tempest. Look at the components of this story with me: God turning toward humanity, and humanity turning toward God, barefoot atop the roiling sea, all in one strange narrative. I am stunned by this story, longing for Jesus to take me away, fearful that love and loyalty, the free bond between God and us, might not be enough to save me from the bottomless sea, the wind, the waves, and the storms of life.
“Are love and loyalty enough?” the gospel story seems to ask. Can we trust the God who in Jesus the Christ has so decisively turned toward us, with our hopes and dreams, with our lives? Even in the midst of the unprecedented perils of a topsy-turvy world in which we are forced to live?
Of course, these are two different questions. We must untangle these questions in order to find hope in the midst of a tempest that makes God turning toward us seem more like that “ghost” coming at the disciples over the whitecaps, rather than the Jesus of Nazareth who had called them to follow him.
If the degree or strength or doctrinal correctness or purity of our religious intent, the love and loyalty we possess toward God, are the deciding factors in whether we can trust God, then the answer decidedly is “no”. The fervor of our religious piety or the number of our prayers is not enough. If the deity we worship is just a flickering reflection of our own culture-bound religion, and if God is no more than our own wishful thinking blown up large and projected on the Big Screen, we are already sunk, to borrow the metaphor. All we have is the ghost of a hope, not real hope.
When the storm is upon you, it does not matter if you know of storms before that came and went—or that ‘this, too, shall pass.’ The existential crisis, the tempestus upon us now, occupies all our senses and all our efforts just to keep our heads above water. At times like that, everything else gets shrunk down to the size of our own wounded selves, our hurts and fears. Even God is reduced to become as small as our desperation for rescue. We all feel the strain of these days of disease, rotten politics, collapsing economies, and loss of control over our own lives. No matter if you sit high or lie low, you know in your viscera what I am saying.
Even the former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, gives a prime example of how the long-term storms of these days affect us all. She said in her most recent podcast, “I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression. Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.” Obama said her sleep has been affected and she has been waking up in the middle of the night “‘cause I’m worrying about something, or there’s a heaviness”.
When I was a child in western North Carolina, the sole image of God in the sanctuary of my home church was a large, imposing painting of Jesus walking toward us on the water, right in the midst of the wind and the waves. Now, since then I have been in hundreds of worship spaces large and small. But the depictions of God in Jesus Christ honored in all those spaces have never been of Water-walking Jesus. Oh, there were often artistic renderings of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus and the Little Children, Jesus on the Cross (in one form or another), Jesus in Profile, or Jesus the Good Shepherd. Yet the church of my childhood, the one that sent me into ministry as a young person, chose Water-walking Jesus, an image that in my limited experience I have never seen centrally honored in any other sanctuary or chapel space. The apostle Peter was not shown in that painting back home, no fishing boat full of the other disciples, no visible shoreline at all—just the oddly singular likeness of Jesus that a country, self-taught artist imagined striding on the waves. That strange image of Jesus oversaw me through the joys, the heartbreak, and all the spiritual awakenings of my early years.
I have lived with this biblical story long enough to become familiar with its oddness for contemporary readers on the one hand, and on the other, for its revelatory power. This story is in three of the gospels, Mark, John, and here in Matthew, but Luke does not include it. Whatever motivated Luke not to include this striking narrative, for 21st century readers, this story is a decided anomaly in our scientific age. Its oddness is rooted in our suspicion of anything we consider “supernatural,” defying the laws of physics and trotting about on the surface of the sea. Its revelatory power, however, is this story’s unapologetic queerness about who God is—where the uncanny strangeness or “queerness” of this encounter with the Incarnate One opens onto mystery, human and divine. Perhaps that is why, of all the stories in the New Testament, Water-walking Jesus is woven into the attraction of two lonely cowboys in the Wyoming wilderness—two star-crossed lovers who use fishing as a desperate excuse to leave their other lives behind, and rekindle a love that will not let them go. Is Jesus a ghost to be feared, a water spirit or mirage, or the One in whom all the strands of the fullness of the divine in humanity, and the human in God come together so irresistibly?
In this one story, God is revealed decisively as choosing us in love in the ultimate expression of God’s divinity and God’s humanity. Humanity and divinity are not separate in the Person of the One who comes walking toward Peter and the disciples on the waves of the storm. Can the love and loyalty of God incarnate-God fully human-be trusted no matter what? The Savior who strides toward Peter and grasps him by the hand as he sinks into the deep demonstrates that this is utterly who the Living God is, since in Jesus God decides in complete freedom to be for us. This is not a god of our own making, or who is at our service whenever we call. This is the full revelation of the God upon Whom we may rely in life and in death. Karl Barth put it this way in his little book, The Humanity of God:
“God is human….In the mirror of this humanity of Jesus Christ the humanity of God enclosed in [God’s] deity reveals itself. Thus God is as [Jesus] is. Thus [God] affirms [human beings]….If Jesus Christ is the Word of Truth, the mirror of the [parental] heart of God, then the truth of God is [God’s] loving kindness and nothing else” (pp. 51-52).
Is this not a mystery, how God in Jesus Christ braves the storm to reach out to us, to hold onto us, to be for us for better or for worse as the Divine Lover God has decided to be? And because Jesus who is God-with-us reaches out toward us in the crisis of storms and doubts large and small, like Peter we can finally make a free choice of our own—to risk becoming human beings for God. To step out of the boat against the prevailing winds, and throw ourselves toward God in trust and hope and love.
When Annie Proulx penned Brokeback Mountain, she was delving into the depths of anguished love between two same-gender lovers. But despite what she may have intended to do, her writing also points us toward a way we can come to grips with this strangest, queerest of New Testament stories, until we learn what it means that God turns toward us in relentless tenderness, and refuses to let us go. So, Annie wrote these words:
“There was some open space between what [Ennis Del Mar] knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”
Ennis was conflicted about his love for Jack, yet it was the undeniable truth of his life. Nothing could be done about it. It is more certain than death, as two lonely cowboys finally had to admit. Love is like that. It claims us, wholly and completely. We wander in the wild, wide open spaces of love and doubt, and struggle with whether we believe anyone can love us that much. Not someone like us, surely! But remember the rallying cry of the human rights movement, “Love Wins!” Love Always Wins!
When it all comes down to dust, what ultimately counts is not so much whether we believe in Water-Walking Jesus, or how much we don’t or how much we do. What matters is that Love Incarnate has made a divine decision we can do nothing about—the decision to come for us and for our kind, to be for us by a divine act of sheer loving kindness, and nothing else.
Yes, wild seas, pandemics, or unsettling wide open spaces yawn between what we hope we know and what we believe, but do not let fear overcome you! God is for us! Utterly for us. And if we can’t fix it, then we’ve got to learn how to stand it. Thanks be to God!
Amen.
