Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Reading this story in the season of the church year where we focus on how Matthew’s Gospel is a guidebook for discipleship today, the storm-tossed boat becomes a symbol for the church’s storm-tossed journey through history. Highlighting the symbolism is the description of the boat as “battered” (Greek: basanizo, better translation, “being tortured”). Jesus sending the disciples out alone across the lake, where they were beat up by a storm is reminiscent of the spread of the church after Jesus, where during the time of Matthew especially, the followers were facing harsh persecution from the political “storms” of their time.
• In scripture the sea is usually an image to connote chaos or lack of control (eg. Gen 1:1-10 (creation); 7:11 (Noah); Psalm 18:15-16 (“Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. He reached down from on high, he took me; he drew me out of mighty waters”); 69:1-3 (“Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.”); 107:23-32; 144:5-8). For Matthew’s audience, being on the sea represented all the anxieties and dark powers that threatened order. In this story, the sea separated the disciples from Jesus, leaving the disciples at the mercy of the chaos of the world.
• Into this chaos, Jesus walked across the water to reach the disciples. While modern minds tend to focus on the gravity-defying nature of the miracle, for the ancient audience, the effect was more theological. Since the Epic of Gilgamesh in the Babylonian culture, walking on water was a skill reserved for deities. That Jesus walked on water to reach the disciples confirmed the presence of God in Jesus. That connection is strengthened by Jesus’ words to the disciples. “It is I,” or “I AM,” is the divine name of God from the Exodus.
• The section about Jesus helping Peter to walk on water is unique to Matthew’s Gospel. It helps underscore the symbolism of the church, because here Jesus extended his authority—the ability to walk on water, a gift reserved for the divine—to one of his disciples.
• Jesus gently rebuked Peter has having “little faith,” a common rebuke of the disciples by Jesus in Matthew. Rather than no faith, little faith evokes a mixture of courage and fear. That tension is underscored by the word translated as “doubt.” The Greek is distazo which is more indecision or wavering than it is skepticism.
• In Mark, the story ends with astonishment and hardened hearts. In Matthew, the disciples fall down and worship Jesus, hard to imagine in a small boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee. Like so often in Matthew, the image is theological more than it is historical, it represents the gratitude of the church for the presence of Christ in its on-going mission.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
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