The Fisherman Page 9

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  If the events of the months that followed are to make any sense to you, two things must be clear in your mind. First, you must understand what we the followers of Jesus were trying to accomplish. Second, you must understand what Jesus needed to accomplish within us.

  For our part, the situation seemed clear. After more than four hundred years, a true prophet of God once again walked among his people. He was a prophet confirmed by God through miraculous healing powers. He was a prophet gifted with insights and teaching skills unlike anything any of us had ever seen. As with the prophets of old, this Prophet Jesus now gathered disciples to himself. Our role was to listen carefully to his message, learn it well, and apply it to our lives. We would then help him carry his message throughout the land. In time, no doubt, Jesus would follow the prophetic pattern and commit his message to written form so that it would become a part of our nation’s heritage forever. Despite all this, however, it was understood that Jesus was just a man. He was a remarkable man. He was an amazing man. He was a man powerfully gifted by God. But, still, he was just a man. His absolute, total humanity was an unquestioned certainty of our relationship with him. We knew the woman who had given birth to him. We lived with him twenty-four hours a day. We saw him eat. We knew the scent of his sweat. We watched him, overcome with exhaustion, close his eyes and sleep.

  Jesus, however, had a different agenda. He knew his ultimate destination was the cross. He knew, too, his remaining time on earth was measured better in months than years. And he knew that between the beginning of his public ministry and his departure, he would have to bring us from our comfortable, reasonable, logical belief in him as a mighty prophet of God to the discovery of his true identity. It would be nearly two years before he would ask us who we believed he was. During these two years he would make certain we had the knowledge we needed to answer that question.

  As I write these words, I know my time is short. It would be impossible for me to attempt to walk with you through a detailed account of the months that followed. I do, however, want to share with you some of the turning points in my understanding of who this man was. Doctrine in its purest form is nothing other than our honest response to what God has chosen to reveal to us about himself. Following his designation of the Twelve and knowing he had our undivided attention, Jesus began to reveal himself to us in ways that kept us in a nearly constant state of thinking and rethinking and rethinking again our beliefs and assumptions about this man from Galilee. This mental stretching process began the following day.

  We spent a night together at the house where Jesus was staying in Capernaum. It had been a wonderful day. It had also been a long day, an exhausting day. Following our evening meal together, we each found a corner in which to sleep. Sleeping has always been one of the things I do best. I closed my eyes and remembered nothing else until I woke to the early morning sun streaming in the window and the sound of Jesus seekers milling around outside the door.

  There were always Jesus seekers outside the door, waiting for him to get up, waiting for him to come out, waiting for him to come back. This morning, however, there were several prominent faces in the crowd, leaders in our community, who brought with them an urgent request for the Master.

  Rome maintains its iron grip over its conquered nations with the strategic placement of military garrisons throughout the empire. Though this hostile presence within our nation is a perpetual topic of complaint among our people, those of us in Capernaum knew we were more fortunate than many other Jewish communities. The Roman centurion in charge of the military post in our hometown was well known for his compassionate use of power and his genuine concern for the Jewish people under his control. He had been in our community for many years. He learned our customs and listened honestly to our concerns. Indeed, he personally financed the construction of our synagogue.

  The Jewish leaders at the door came on behalf of this Roman military leader. He was well acquainted with Jesus’ reputation in the community. Several times I had seen him standing at the stern of a crowd as Jesus taught.

  This morning, however, the centurion did not come in person. He sent Jewish elders to ask the Master for help. A slave boy in his house lay in terrible agony, dying. Would Jesus be willing to help the boy?

  Jesus set out immediately with the rest of us at his heels. There was something about this request that touched Jesus deeply. I think perhaps it was the obvious compassion of this Roman soldier. The boy was not his son. He was a slave. Yet the centurion cared deeply for the child. Jesus understood that kind of compassion perfectly. It was evident in his own eyes every time he touched the suffering in the lives of those around him.

  The centurion watched for Jesus’ arrival, and when he saw the Master coming, he quickly sent several close friends to meet Jesus in the street, bringing the message “Lord, don’t trouble yourself further, for I’m not worthy for you to come under my roof; for this reason I didn’t even consider myself worthy to come to you, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man placed under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.”

  For a moment Jesus did not speak, but the expression on his face showed his obvious pleasure at the words he heard. Then he turned to those of us who were following him and said, “Not even in Israel have I found faith so great as this.”

  When the centurion’s friends reentered the house, they found the slave boy standing next to his master, his little arms wrapped tightly around the man, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  It is difficult for me to explain why that particular healing affected me so much more deeply than did most of the others. I found it altogether unsettling. My Jesus was breaking out of the boundaries I had carefully established for him. He was our prophet. He belonged to the nation of Israel. He was our hope, our future. He would deliver us from our oppression and reestablish us to the glory that was due the chosen people of God. Yet here he was trotting after the request of a Roman soldier, healing a Gentile child. Gentiles had no right to his kindness. They should have had no access to his power.

  And then there were those words of praise for the centurion’s faith. I was jealous. Why couldn’t I believe like that? Why couldn’t it have been me the Master held up before the world as a glowing example of faith-filled obedience?

  And there was something else as well, something planted in the back of my mind as a result of the way in which that boy was healed. Prior to that event I saw Jesus as someone who possessed the ability to heal. I didn’t know how he did it; I just knew he did. I saw it as a gift he possessed, given to him by God. In my thinking it was not unlike some of my own God-given talents and abilities. Obviously his abilities vastly exceeded mine, but still they were not fundamentally different in kind. They were abilities given to a man in order to equip him for the work God had for him.

  But those words spoken to Jesus by the centurion bothered me. “For I also am a man placed under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.”

  He was suggesting that Jesus healed not because he had the ability to heal but rather because he had the authority to heal. But what man could claim authority over sickness and disease? Such authority did not belong to man. It belonged to God alone. It made no sense to me. And what we would witness the following day only intensified my confusion.

  Jesus left Capernaum immediately following his healing of the centurion’s slave boy. The crowds now surrounding him everywhere he went made it necessary for him to spend most of his time either in the open fields away from the city or, more often, traveling to other communities throughout the region. Not that traveling helped a great deal. As Jesus walked away from Capernaum, several hundred people followed behind him.

  We spent the rest of the day on the road, heading to the c
ity of Nain near the southern tip of Galilee, about a ten-hour walk from Capernaum. We stopped a few hours short of the city and camped for the night, then completed our journey the next morning. Though we seldom knew in advance why Jesus was doing what he was doing, we grew accustomed to the knowledge that there was always a purpose behind his choices. This was his first visit to Nain, so we assumed this trip was simply part of his broadening exposure of himself to the nation. It was certainly that, but we soon discovered it was an exposure unlike anything any of us had ever seen before.

  We reached the city about midmorning. We must have looked strange to anyone watching our arrival—hundreds of people following in a huge procession behind a single man. As we approached the city gates, our procession was confronted by another procession coming out of Nain. This procession, however, was led by four men carrying an open coffin containing the dead form of a boy in his early teens. Alongside the coffin walked a woman in her midthirties, a woman consumed with grief. The agony in her sobs left no doubt about her relationship to the still form beside her.

  Though Jesus was unknown by sight to the people of Nain, he was well known by reputation. When our two groups met, they merged into a solid mass surrounding the Master, the mother, and the undersized coffin. I could hear little ripples of “It’s the prophet” and “It’s Jesus” running through the crowd.

  The Master’s first words were directed to the mother. The intensity of her sorrow blinded her to what was happening around her. She didn’t know and didn’t care where all these strangers came from. She knew only that they were blocking the path to the open hole in the earth waiting for the body of her only son.

  Jesus stepped directly in front of the mother, placed his hands on her shoulders, waited until she looked up into his face, and then said, “Do not weep.”

  He might as well have spoken to her in a foreign language. Indeed, his words must have sounded like utter nonsense to her. We would find out later her husband was dead. Now her only son was dead. Unending grief was all that remained. Out of respect for the prophet standing before her, she became silent, but it was a silence without peace, without hope.

  Jesus then turned to the men carrying the coffin and instructed them to lower it to the ground. He walked around the still form until he was able to look directly down into the young man’s face. Then he spoke again. “Young man, I say to you, arise!”

  And immediately the boy sat up.

  For several seconds no one spoke, no one moved. I don’t think anyone even breathed. Then suddenly the boy broke into a huge grin, looked over at his mother, and blurted out, “Hey, Mom! I’m hungry! Hey! What am I doing in this thing?”

  He jumped out of the coffin and gave his mother a big hug, and the crowd went crazy. They were clapping and cheering and yelling and screaming. Everyone talked at once, telling everyone else what Jesus just did.

  The two processions became one as Jesus, the mother, and her son led the way back into the city. It would have been impossible for Jesus to design a more dramatic introduction of himself to the community. The city embraced him with a spirit of celebration beyond anything we had ever seen. By the time he departed from the community several days later, reports of his visit were spreading rapidly throughout the entire region.

  I should have been thrilled, of course. My identification with the Master gave me a position of prominence unlike anything I had ever known before. Some of his glory spilled over onto me and the other disciples simply because we happened to be standing next to him. Outwardly I shared in the celebration, but secretly I found myself troubled by what I had just seen. Once again Jesus was forcing me to expand my concept of himself. To heal, to preserve life, to give health to the living was one thing. But to give life to the dead . . . that was something altogether different.

  What did it mean? Could he, then, restore anyone to life? If so, why didn’t he? If not, why couldn’t he? Could he prevent his own death? Could he prevent mine? Was he immortal? And, most of all, what manner of man was this who could speak to the dead and summon them back to the land of the living?

  Then came the night of that storm.

  It was weeks later, long enough for me to have successfully forced my troublesome questions about this man into the back of my mind. We were traveling a good deal during that time. As he had promised, his teaching was increasingly focused not on the masses but rather on us, his disciples.

  It had been an intense day of teaching, a day in which we’d all been stretched to new limits in our thinking. It was the first day in which he taught exclusively in parables. The crowds loved listening to his fascinating little stories: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man sowing seed. . . .” “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. . . .” “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven. . . .” “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure. . . .” “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant. . . .” “The kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet. . . .”

  They didn’t understand what he was talking about, and at first neither did we. Still, they loved to listen to him.

  Throughout the day he kept pulling away from the multitudes so that he could talk with us about the hidden meanings in each of his stories. He wanted us to understand. He wanted us to learn. With each new story we gained a new principle, a new insight into his kingdom. It was wonderful knowledge, but it was hard work too. When evening came, we were all exhausted, but the crowds kept pushing closer, demanding more.

  Jesus was once again using our fishing boat as his teaching platform. He sat at the stern facing the shore with the Twelve of us at his back in the front of the boat. Late that afternoon he finally stopped teaching and turned away from the masses, talking privately with us about the parables. But it was obvious the people onshore had no intention of leaving him alone. He might have been finished for the day, but they certainly were not. With no other way of escape, Jesus told us to push off and set sail for the other side of the Sea of Galilee. We could not have been more than a few hundred feet from shore before Jesus stretched out at the back of the boat and fell into a deep sleep.

  I have seen countless storms descend upon the Sea of Galilee in my lifetime but none like the one we encountered that night. We were perhaps halfway across the lake when the fury hit. Though it was still early evening, the sky came over as black as I have ever seen it. Then came the wind. Within a matter of minutes the gentle breeze we were trusting to power us to our destination turned first into vicious gusts and then into a ceaseless raging blast unlike anything any of us had ever known before. We dropped our sail as soon as the gusting began, but within minutes our bare mast was no protection against the savage caldron in which we found ourselves. Massive mountains of water stood high above our little boat on either side, then suddenly plummeted down, thrusting us skyward. We rose and fell on the mammoth swells, blasted by the wind each time we reached another peak.

  The gale intensified still more as the swells turned into immense foaming breakers crashing down on top of us. The crushing waves and howling wind made communication almost impossible. I kept screaming instructions to the others in the boat, but we all knew that no amount of skillful maneuvering would protect us from the tumult surrounding us.

  For what seemed like hours we fought the storm. Our only hope was reduced to a frantic effort to bail out the water that kept crashing over the sides of our little craft.

  It was not until I dropped to my knees, bucket in hand, scooping and dumping as fast as I was able, that I saw him there at the back of the boat, sound asleep. He was soaked from the spray and the waves sloshing around him, yet he slept. For just a moment I stopped, frozen in disbelief. How could he just lie there, unaware that in a matter of minutes our boat would break apart and we would all be dead?

  The sight of him sleeping made me furious. I flung my bucket across the boat and worked my way to him. Then I grabbed his shoulders, shook him with all my might, and screamed, “Master! Don’t you care that we are perishing?”

  Jesus opened his eyes
, looked at me and then at the world in chaos around him. By then the others were all grouped at my back, clinging to the boat, staring at Jesus.

  Then he spoke, first to us, then to the wind and waves. To us he said, “Why are you so afraid, you of little faith?”

  To the wind and waves he said, “Peace! Be still.”

  I know there is no way I can explain to you what it was like. In your mind, perhaps you picture the wind gradually subsiding, the fury of the waves slowly diminishing until eventually there was only a gentle lapping against the side of the boat.

  If you see it that way in your mind, then you are wrong. The moment Jesus finished uttering the word “still,” everything was. And I do mean everything. The sea immediately flattened out into a dead calm, the wind instantly ceased. There was no gentle lapping of waves against the boat. There was no gentle breeze blowing on our faces. There was nothing. Jesus spoke. The winds and the waves obeyed—not gradually, not partially, but totally, instantly, absolutely. And the silence that suddenly surrounded us was even more terrifying than the storm.

  No one in that boat even remotely thought that perhaps I just happened to wake Jesus at the moment the storm began to subside. The storm did not begin to subside. The storm simply ceased at his command.

  For a moment we all stood there in silence, him looking at us, us looking at him. Then he spoke again. “Why are you so timid? How is it that you have no faith?”

  We had no answer, of course. And we knew none was expected. But it was not my lack of faith that troubled me that night. It was the unanswered question we kept asking one another but never dared to ask him. What manner of man commands the wind and the sea and they obey him? What manner of man takes upon himself the authority to forgive sins? What manner of man tells the dead to rise and they obey?