My students and I spent a portion of our class today examining a well-known story from Matthew’s gospel. I’m sure you know it: Jesus has spent the day with crowds and crowds of people, and at the end of it all, he needs to get away. He asks his disciples to take their small boat and go ahead of him, crossing the lake. He tells them that he’ll dismiss the crowds and join them on the other side. Then he goes off by himself to pray.
The disciples obey him. I’m sure they were weary of the commotion and were glad to be “at sea,” which was familiar “territory” for these fishermen cum travelers. For someone who knows it in the bone, there’s nothing like the slap of water against the boat’s sides, the spray in your face, and a horizon wide and blue.
Three of the gospels tell this story– how the wind rose and “buffeted against the boat.” And then, in the fourth watch of the night (4 a.m.?), they see something coming toward them, walking On The Water. Weird, to say the least. To say that the disciples were unnerved by this figure would be putting it mildly. Unable to explain it otherwise, they determined that the figure was a ghost.
Which is when Jesus called out to them and told them who it was. Not that this would do much to quell their questioning. He was Walking On Water, after all. But still. Better Jesus than a ghost Any Day.
Only Matthew’s gospel contains the subsequent action, which is when impetuous Peter decides to test the ghost’s claim: “Lord, if it’s really you, tell me to come to you.” To which Jesus answers, without a beat, I’m sure, “Come.”
Which Peter does. And can you imagine? The silence falling among the eleven in the boat, the jaw-dropped awe with which they watched their friend make his way Along the Water. His feet did not sink through the water’s surface. Was his gait unsteady? Did he wonder where to place his next step? Did the water’s pitch rock him? What is it like, do you suppose, to walk on water?
I think he didn’t consider any of this much. I think he didn’t pay much attention– at first– to the impossibility of his actions. I think he must have directed his gaze at the ghost that beckoned to him, the familiar form behaving most unfamiliarly. It wasn’t until he paid attention to the weather, when he “saw the wind,” as Matthew cryptically puts it, that Peter’s corporal self obeyed the laws of physics. Yes, he began to sink.
Which is when, of course, he cried out to Jesus. Which is when, of course, Jesus came to his rescue. Which is when, of course, the two of them climbed into the boat.
Great story, that.
I wanted my students to pick it apart. To try to think of it in a way other than their second grade Sunday school class. I wanted them to ask All Sorts of Questions about this now-mundane but amazing episode. And really, they did not disappoint. We had some good discussion, some excellent questions: If Jesus is God, then what did he want with praying? Would the disciples really have thought he was a ghost? Why was it Peter, and not some other disciple, who went charging out of the boat in the quest of empirical proof?
But none of them saw it (yet) as I do, for all their being young and full of laughter and life. None of them (yet) saw the laughter between the lines. They didn’t see it simply as Jesus with his friends. These thirteen travelers who spent all their time together, who knew, I’m guessing, sometimes more about one another than they cared to.
You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Boys-turned-men who know what it is to share friendship? Nothing is not a joke among them. Nothing is not an opportunity– however slender– for affectionate derision. And Jesus, the Best Laugher of them all (for why would he not be?)– when did his laughter begin?
Don’t you think he chuckled to himself– even as he set out On the lake, even as he taught them this vital lesson– as he made his way to their boat. For he knew where they were. He chose to walk to them. Their fear sorrowed him, surely, but knew he the joy, too, of their surpassing it. He called to them above the noise of the wind, and he was laughing: “Don’t be afraid! It’s only me!”
And when Peter’s question came back across the waves, I think that Jesus’ heart swelled with greater joy, at his friend, at his boy. “Come!” he said, and laughed, and beckoned to him. And it was the laughter, more than anything, that drew Peter, for everyone knows that ghosts don’t laugh. Not like that.
And Jesus laughed, and jumped, and scooped water with his fingertips and tossed it at his ungainly friend, and when Peter started sinking, he laughed some more. Silly boy. But he went to him, the sinking one, right away, and pulled him up, still laughing.
The disciples didn’t start to laugh for some time after they clambered aboard the boat. Peter sat their sulking, his head draped in a towel, and Jesus just kept laughing, and seized his shoulders, and tousled the towel, and everyone’s fear just sort of fell away.
And after that, the disciples and Jesus teased Peter: “Remember that time, Peter, that time you walked on water?” and they aped his awkward walking and pretended to sink in the Palestinian sand.
And later still they asked Jesus if they could walk on water too. And maybe he let them. And maybe Peter was the one who was best at it.
Yes, I think this story is full of laughter, as would be any boatload of friends who are bound by love and belief– even if it’s belief that most of them don’t understand. This story is full of laughter because it’s full of faith. Because who is to say that, in the end, faith is not made of laughter– the laughter that comes beyond relief, because you know in your bones that it is all right, and has always been all right, and it will be (oh, it will be) right again?
