Reverend Jonathan Waits
Bigger (John 6:16-21)
March 30, 2025
About fifty years ago, a man named Harold Kushner lost his fourteen-year-old son to a rare disease. It was a tragedy. All such losses are tragic. Parents should never have to bury their children. That they do is a symptom of the brokenness of sin in the world. Kushner happened to be a Jewish rabbi. As part of his efforts to deal with his grief, he channeled his emotions into writing a book. The book, released in 1981, had a major and immediate cultural impact. The title promised an insightful look into a challenging question that people have been asking for a very long time. It was called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The question of course is why. Why do bad things happen to good people? We’ve all seen it happen. We’ve seen people who seem to us to be good and faithful, kind and generous with others, conscientious citizens, and so on and so forth, but who nonetheless face tragic situations that their character seems like it should preclude as far as we reckon such things. How can there be a good and just God presiding over creation if things like this happen to people like that?
This is an entirely understandable tension. In the midst of our hardest situations, we want someone to come and make everything better. We want someone to come in and explain why it happened. We want to know who to blame, who is going to be made to pay for our pain. And if we have been told somewhere along the way that God will do all of that, we expect that He will. Unfortunately, because that’s not an expectation that aligns with reality, we are often left disappointed, frustrated, and unwilling to consider Him as someone who is worthy of our time, all because we were fed bad information about who He is and how He operates. We wind up rejecting a god who doesn’t even exist (and deserves to be rejected) without ever actually meeting the God who does. And all the while those aching questions people have always asked still pulse heavily in our chests: Is there anyone who can really help when things are falling apart? When I need peace, where can I find it? Who will meet me in my hardest moments? Those are very good questions. They are questions the next sign the apostle John presents us in his Gospel are geared toward answering.
This morning we are in the fifth part of our teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus. All during what is officially known as the Lenten season of the church’s calendar we are taking a journey through John’s Gospel, pausing as we go to give attention to each of the seven signs, or miracles, Jesus performed during His ministry that John felt were particularly instructive in terms of helping us to get a better sense of just who He really is. Each sign features a miracle Jesus performed, and over the course of John’s Gospel, the miracles become progressively more dramatic. And yet in each instance, while the miracle is understandably the thing that tends to get the most attention, these miracles were all intended to direct our attention beyond the miracles themselves to the deeper and richer picture of reality that lay behind them. Thus they are referred to as signs. They are signs pointing us to who Jesus is.
So far in our journey we have seen Jesus turn water in wine, heal a man’s son, restore the ability to walk to a man who had been paralyzed for decades, and, just last week, miraculously feed an enormous crowd with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of small fish as a starting point. And, as we just said, each one of these things, though incredible, weren’t about the miracles themselves. Looking past the obvious, we have seen that Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He really is, that Jesus wants us to see Him and not merely the things He can do, that Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well, and that Jesus can meet our deepest desires. Knowing all of this is true, though, still leaves an unanswered question sitting out on the table. And this is kind of a big question: Can Jesus actually do any of this? We know that He wants to, but is He really powerful enough to do it? Is all of this anything more than mere wishful thinking on His part?
Well, sandwiched right in between the two sections of story we looked at last week is a fifth sign John identifies that offers us the outline of an answer to these kinds of questions. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me back to John 6. If you’ll remember, when Jesus finished miraculously providing food to that massive crowd of people, He hit the road. The next conversation happened when the crowds found Him back in Capernaum a day or so later. And when they found Him, their first question was, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” The answer to that question was the day before or so. What the crowd didn’t ask was the far more interesting question of how Jesus had gotten there. Look with me at John 6:16.
“When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. Darkness had already set in, but Jesus had not yet come to them.” Now, we know from Matthew and Mark’s presentations of this same story that Jesus had told the gang to go on back to their home base of operations and that He would catch up to them later. Mark specifically mentions Bethsaida as their destination, but Capernaum and Bethsaida were neighboring towns, so this all just means they were heading in that general direction. John tells us that the disciples started making their way back across the sea when evening came. Matthew and Mark both report that Jesus sent them home immediately after dismissing the crowds. The easy harmonization is that Jesus dismissed the crowds when evening came and sent the group on away.
The more important thing to note here, though, is that the Jews were not a seafaring people. They did not like the water. They generally did not want anything to do with the water. Yes, several of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen, which meant spending a fair amount of time in the water—including overnight—but those trips didn’t tend to take them very far from the shore. Rowing all the way across the Sea of Galilee at night would not have been a very welcome task. It meant drifting much further from the shore than they would have been comfortable doing. Plus, the unpredictability of the Sea would have made things even more stressful.
And wouldn’t you know it, no sooner did they set out, than things got dicey. Verse 18 now: “A high wind arose, and the sea began to churn.” Now, instead of a long, but fairly easy trip with the wind at their backs, the disciples got to spend hours rowing hard to get to where they were going with the wind blowing right at them. Not only did they have to fight the wind, but they had to fight the waves as well. Things couldn’t have gone any worse. They were exhausted. Remember: they were coming off a long day that would have involved a ton of work. They were stressed. They were frustrated. They were scared. Given what we see of them in other contexts in the Gospels, I’m sure they were more than a little snippy with each other. Could things get any worse?
I’m glad you asked. The answer is yes. Yes, they seemingly could. After rowing for several hours, they all saw someone coming walking to where they were in the Sea…on the water. So now, in addition to fighting the winds and the waves to get off this stupid Sea and back home, they get to contend with a ghost. Of course, this wasn’t really a ghost at all. It was Jesus. But they didn’t know that. “After they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea. He was coming near the boat, and they were afraid.”
Let’s not miss the fact that not one of the disciples’ first thought was, “Oh look, there’s Jesus! Now everything is going to be better.” No, as Matthew and Mark both report, their first thought to a man was, “Ahh! A ghost!” Sure the disciples all wanted Jesus to be there with them, but they didn’t have a category in their minds for how Jesus could possibly make that happen until they were safely back on the shore. They were on their own to face this storm. But then Jesus introduced to them a new category. And in this new category, people can apparently walk on water, something that even in their pre-modern minds they knew beyond a shadow of doubt was a physical impossibility.
Jesus’ walking on water would have been shocking enough, but as Matthew reports, He wasn’t the only one to do it. Once the disciples figured out who it was, Peter’s first question was, “Can I do that too?” to which Jesus said, “yes,” and so he did. But none of that happened until Jesus gave them some reassurance that it really was Him and not a ghost. “But he said to them, ‘It is I. Don’t be afraid.’” And I love what John writes next. “Then they were willing to take him on board…”
The disciples didn’t want anything to do with whatever or whoever it was taking a stroll on the Sea of Galilee in the middle of the night during a modest storm until they were absolutely sure they knew who it was. And even then, after Jesus had told them who He was, and after they had watched Peter go out to Jesus on the water as well, they still didn’t know what to do with what they had just witnessed. Mark describes them as “completely astounded.” Matthew just says that they worshiped Him. What likely made things even more difficult to process is the fact that once Jesus had gotten in the boat with them, the wind stopped, and the Sea became calm again. They were thoroughly—to use a word I recently learned from my boys and which rather aptly captures things here—confuzzled. Yes, that’s a word. You can look it up. I had to as well. Either way, they didn’t have very long to process everything in that moment because by the time Jesus got to them and climbed in the boat, they were almost back to the shore. “Then they were willing to take him on board, and at once the boat was at the shore where they were heading.”
I’ve said twice this morning that all of these miraculous signs Jesus performed and to which John is drawing our attention have been about more than the miracles themselves. That’s really not hard to see when you think about it. The first miracle wasn’t even noticed by the people who benefited from it the most directly. The second miracle—healing the royal official’s son—was for the benefit of someone who should have never been on the receiving end of Jesus’ power in the minds of any of His current followers in the first place. In addition to that, no one had any evidence the miracle had happened until later. The third directly helped a man, but left who knows how many others right where they were. Only the miraculous feeding of a crowd of thousands was something that was known and experienced widely in the moment. All of those miracles, though, as much as they were signs pointing toward a richer and deeper reality, directly benefited at least one other person. This one, though, this walking on water, who did this help? No one. Not a single person was practically aided by Jesus’ walking on the water. This understanding points us all the more insistently to the fact that this was about more than the miracle. It was, as John identified, a sign.
Okay, but of what? Well, think about what happened here. The disciples were facing a literal storm. It wasn’t necessarily a wild storm like the one Jesus had stilled some months before. That one threatened to capsize the boat they were in. This one was really just a nuisance. It was quickly becoming an unnerving nuisance, but it was mostly just a nuisance. Their lives weren’t in any danger that Matthew, Mark, or John reports. Jesus came to them anyway. He didn’t just come to them, though. That was good, but it wasn’t the point. The point was how He came. He came to them in a way that demonstrated His total power over the storm. He demonstrated His power over the storm, over the waves, over the very laws of physics that should have had Him swimming rather than strolling. Jesus was more than enough to help them in the hard situation they were facing.
There’s more. Jesus came to them, but He didn’t force Himself on them at all. He came walking to where they were on the water, and wasn’t apparently going to say anything until they started freaking out and He had to talk them down. As Matthew rather hilariously reports, initially it looked to them like Jesus was just going to walk by them. Maybe He was going to give them a, “Hey,” as He passed, but maybe not. If they had stayed cool or refused to call out to Him or receive Him into the boat, He was going to leave them there struggling against the waves. And they had been struggling. Jesus didn’t come to them right away. But even when He did, He wasn’t going to make them receive Him. Again: Jesus doesn’t force Himself. He honors the gift of free will He has given us even if we use it poorly, because to do otherwise removes the possibility of real love and He wants us to really love Him.
Friends, can you find yourself in this tension? Maybe you were facing an enormous storm that seemed like it was going to drag you completely under the waves of life. But maybe you were just facing something that was a nuisance. It was a wearying nuisance, and the longer it lasted, the more anxious you were getting about it, but it was still just something that made life harder rather than impossible. Either way, sometimes bad things happen. The idea that they happen to good people isn’t something that finds any traction in the Christian worldview. As Paul makes clear to the Roman believers, “There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; all alike have become worthless. There is no one who does what is good, not even one.” That is, there aren’t any good people. As Jesus told the scribe who came with flattery calling Him “good teacher,” no one but God is good. All the same, some people seem less deserving than others in our view of the hard situations that get dropped on their plates. As Job could tell us, that’s how life in a world broken by sin works. Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes they happen to us. What we want to know is whether or not we have any help when they come.
Harold Kushner, writing with the grief of his son’s death weighing heavily on his heart, essentially concluded that we don’t. He was fine to accept the idea that God is good, but given that and given the presence of bad things—of evil—in the world, he concluded that God simply must not be powerful enough to help. He wants to, but there’s only so much He can do. Maybe He can stop some of it, but not nearly all of it. So we suffer. So we hurt. So we row against the waves.
Others have concluded in the opposite direction that God must not be good at all. Otherwise He would do something about it. He would prevent it, whatever “it” happens to be that we don’t like. That idea, of course, puts us on the incredibly slippery slope of trying to argue that God should prevent some exercise of free will, but not all of it, and then working out an algorithm for when and why (which generally just winds up amounting to His submitting to our capricious wills).
What we find in the Scriptures, though, is a different response. Look again at what Jesus did here. He walked on water. He demonstrated His total authority over the natural world. He miraculously subverted the normal physical operation of the world in order to help His disciples—and through them us—see something really important. He is powerful enough. He is strong enough. The God who can walk on the waves and bend them to His will is powerful enough to help us in our hard situations whatever they happen to be. He won’t force Himself on us, and we can still try to struggle along without Him if we so choose, but He can help. Because He’s enough. He’s more than enough. Jesus is strong enough to help.
Okay, but then why do we still hurt? Why do we still struggle? Why do we still face hard times of varying sorts? For several reasons. For starters, sometimes we cause our own problems. If we are walking a path of sin, God will often use the natural and destructive consequences of our sinful choices to be their own form of judgment. You’ve done that with your own children. When they are incorrigibly committed to making poor choices, the best punishment is often to just let them make them and then suffer through the consequences without help.
Sometimes our hard times are the result of the sinful choices of the people around us. This can be direct as when someone is actively trying to hurt us in some way and for some reason. It can also be indirect when we are merely collaterally impacted by them. When someone makes the decision to drive drunk and hits and kills or even just badly wounds another person, there was no intent to cause harm on the part of the offender, but his sinful choices had an impact beyond just himself as sinful choices tend to do eventually. As we said a second ago, while God can subvert the free will of those individuals before they make those choices, this pattern on His part would be an impossibly slippery slope that only ends with either a malevolently capricious God or else a complete abolishment of any kind of genuine freedom. If our choices don’t have meaningful consequences, then they don’t matter and aren’t really free. In that kind of a world, real love becomes an impossibility. That’s not the world God made or wants.
Sometimes, though, our metaphorical storms aren’t any one person’s fault. There’s no one to blame; no one who caused them. These seem like they should be the ones God steps in early to prevent, but that just assumes that the God who is perfect in wisdom and unrivaled in knowledge doesn’t have a reason for allowing us to face them whether because of what He knows they have the potential to accomplish in us or through us for the people around us. This was something the apostle Paul was pointing to when he wrote to the Roman believers that “we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.”
Now, none of this means we’ll necessarily be able to see how God plans to make everything better, to redeem the brokenness we face and experience to work His good plans for our benefit when we are walking into and in the middle of a storm of some kind. He doesn’t promise us that. He invites us to trust Him. He invites us to review His long record of doing this very thing over and over and over again. He invites us to receive the signs that point to His power and ability to work good in the worst bad, to make the broken beautiful, to bring us to a place where we can say that no matter what is going on around us, we don’t want to be anywhere but here. He invites us to receive signs like Jesus’ walking on the water; signs that demonstrate clearly that Jesus is strong enough to help.
Jesus is strong enough to help. He is patient enough to wait on us to be willing to receive His help. He is good enough to come with us and sit with us in our pain, making sure that we never face it alone. He told us that we would have trouble in this world. But He also told us to take heart because He has overcome the world. We will still face the world and its troubles here and now. As King David noted, God’s rod and staff don’t comfort us when we skip out on or speed through or just dip our toes in the valley of the shadow of death. They comfort us when we are in the valley; way down deep at the bottom of it where everything seems to be covered in shadow, and the world is on its way to victory over us. But our God has overcome the world. Jesus is strong enough to help. And if we will receive Him, He will bring that help to bear in our situations, working His Gospel good in ways that are refreshing and surprising and just what we needed. Jesus is strong enough to help.
Jesus is strong enough to help you in whatever it is you are facing. He won’t bring instant relief because that’s not how He works. He does the harder and better work of redeeming the brokenness and making it beautiful. He gives you and me the strength to want to stay and keep following Him through the storm to the beautiful shore waiting for us on the other side as the sun rises and the light chases away all the gloomy clouds of night. Jesus is strong enough to help. When you see that and let Him in, you will begin to experience the restoration of hope, of peace, of joy, of contentment, of love in ways you never before imagined could be possible. They weren’t possible when you were on your own. In Christ, you don’t have to be on your own. You have someone with you who can and will help in the ways that will be most helpful. Jesus is strong enough to help. I hope that you will let Him.