Every three years, this passage comes up in our lectionary, and every three years, I struggle with what to do with it. I’m all about it when God comes to us in the human form of Jesus. It gets harder for me to relate to when Jesus comes to us in the form of God. These so called “nature miracles,” where Jesus defies all the laws and breaks all the natural rules and upends the delicate balance on our earth, are tough for me. This walking on water, the raising of the dead, the multiplication of something out of nothing, changing water into wine, they don’t make sense. I want to understand them. I want them to make sense. I want a logical explanation that does not offend my Post-Enlightenment sensibilities.
I mean, honestly, if I hadn’t grown up with this story, I’d listen to it one time and then say, “Yeah. Right. When pigs fly.”
For reals, though. Don’t we think of this story as a little bit myth, a little bit fantasy? It’s a nice little story. But it can’t possibly be true.
- Most of us have probably heard that according to the laws of Physics, the math just doesn’t work out to make it possible for a bumblebee to fly. According to the physics, because of their shape, size, and weight, it shouldn’t be possible for a bumblebee to fly.
- Up until recently, we had no idea how dolphins could swim so quickly. Called “Grey’s Paradox,” physics states that for something dolphin-sized to swim as fast as it does, it needs much more muscle mass than dolphins actually have. This was a question way back in the 1930’s, and although they’ve made some headway in finding an answer to this question, and they know that it somehow has something to do with their powerful flukes, they’re still not totally sure how this is possible.
- The basilisk lizard actually does walk on water. Or rather, it sort of runs. But this lizard is nicknamed the Jesus Christ Lizard because of this ability to seemingly glide upon the water on its hind legs. According to Wikipedia, “the common basilisk can [walk on water] because its feet are large and equipped with flaps of skin along the toes that allow it to catch on tiny air bubbles. When moving quickly, the basilisk lizard can cross a surface of water at an average of 15 miles per hour.
So maybe Jesus just had extra big feet with flaps of skin along his toes that allowed him to catch on to tiny air bubbles, and thus, walk on water.
Or maybe, like the bumblebee, something extraordinary is happening in our world all the time, and we just don’t have the words or the understanding to explain it. Or maybe we’ve lost the wonder to even be able to see it. Remember when you were a kid, and your imagination could take you anywhere? Princes fought giant dragons and unicorns sailed through the skies and pirates battled the mighty leviathan? Remember when a treehouse was a fort in the Revolutionary War, and big wheels were race cars in the Indy 500? In our childlike minds, in our worlds where anything was possible, these worlds were 100% true. They were as real as I am standing before you. They weren’t “fact” of course, but so much more than fact. They were true. And, at least for me, truth is so much more interesting than plain ol’ boring facts. Truth is about possibility, potential, growth, and change. Facts are vitally important, don’t get me wrong, we need them to get us to what can be, but they’re static, they’re still, they describe what is right now. Facts can lead us to truth, but truth is so much more open and wild than 1+1=2 or Mars is 226.25 million miles away.
I mean, what if, someday, through the wonders of evolution over billions of years pigs really do grow wings, find their upward thrust and begin to fly? I mean, dinosaurs are the millions times great grandparents of this common brown sparrow that hovers and flutters around my bird feeder. Is it really beyond the realm of - eventual - possibility? Truth lets us ask questions like that. Truth invites us to enter in to possibility, not just actuality.
So the challenge, for me, in this passage - and maybe it’s the same for you - is to somehow hold on to the idea that I don’t understand everything yet. And taken a step further, maybe humanity as a whole doesn’t understand everything yet. Shocking. I know.
Maybe there’s more truth out there than we know. Maybe there’s more meaning out there than I can comprehend?
But how often do I do all my Jenn things with this arrogance that suggests that I know what’s going on? I pump my gas, I flip the light switch, I throw the ball up that promises to come down. How often do I live my life as if the world does make a sort of “sense,” and that people just don’t walk on water and there’s a logical explanation for everything, an explanation that we can get to right now if we just think hard enough, if we just had enough facts.
What if, like a child, we could let ourselves believe in the impossible? What if we let ourselves believe that like the bumblebee - someday pigs will fly? That dolphins really do swim that fast? That the basilisk lizard and two men two thousand years ago really do and did walk on water? What else is possible? Where’s more truth?
Peter could do it. He could ask the questions and wonder the wonders. He was willing to step out of the boat and try the impossible. I’m jealous of Peter who was able to suspend his disbelief long enough to be suspended above the water. Who could suspend his disbelief long enough to name Jesus as the Son of God. Who believed in forgiveness enough to show his face again, to look Jesus in the eye, after his terrible betrayal. Who could take the facts and then go beyond, further, out there, into the realm of truth.
But those things happened. That’s the thing. The impossible is possible all around us, all the time. Maybe it wasn’t “faith” - as we think of it - that got Peter out of that boat, but rather the simple sense of wonder that comes when we look closely at everything. Maybe every time we get on our knees to follow an ant down the sidewalk, or look up to see the V of geese in perfect formation, or those starlings that form murmurations of thousands of birds and then they all move as one, or we watch a seed break open and make food out of dirt, or we make it just one more mile on the empty tank, or we say “I’m so sorry” and we’re actually forgiven, we are walking on water. We’re reaching past facts, and entering the sea of truth. When we study bees and basilisks and dolphins, when we watch in awe as they fly in the air, and walk on the water, and race through the sea, we are participating in the impossible, we’re watching it unfold, we’re taking a step out of the boat. We don’t have full or complete explanations for how any of this happens, and yet, somehow, it does. Before there was an understanding of the world being round, of whirling planets swirling around a star, the sunrise, every morning, was a miracle. Why isn’t it still? What would change in our lives if we really tried to suspend our disbelief and just chose to believe that Jesus really did walk on water - and that Peter went with him?
So what other impossible things are actually possible if we just had the sense of wonder and radical trust to step out of our boats made of answers and limits and facts and onto a raging sea churning with power and possibility?
Maybe no one would go hungry anymore. Maybe the word “war” will lose its meaning. Maybe we can solve this climate crisis. Maybe we’d stop shooting each other. Maybe everyone would have a roof over their heads and access to clean water. Maybe, if bumblebees can fly, and dolphins can race through the ocean and basilisk lizards can walk on the water, what if Jesus did, too? How does our world change if the impossible becomes possible?
I don’t think this story is asking us to take a side or make a choice between rationality and belief. We don’t have be on team logic or team faith. I think these are old, tired questions that simply aren’t as interesting as the wonder of “what if?” If Jesus could walk on water, if bumblebees and dinosaurs can fly, if the sun can rise once again over the horizon, what else could be possible? If we lean in, if we look closely, if we experience the childlike wonder of the impossibility of everything, maybe then everything becomes possible. The relationship can be healed. The life can be restored. The addiction can end. The earth can heal. We can stop fighting and buying and comparing. We can enter in to the truth of our lives, beyond the mere facts. Men have walked on water and pigs are gonna, someday, fly. I believe it. I mean, maybe?
Thanks be to God.
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