Sermon — August 13, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Now, I’m not usually one to jump to Saint Peter’s defense. Peter is the central disciple, the first leader of the Church after Jesus’ departure, the Rock on whom the Church is built. But of all the disciples, Peter can sometimes be the hardest to love. He has a big personality, to put it politely. Peter’s inconsistent, impulsive; he tends to make every momentous occasion about himself. Who is it who feels the need to insist that he’ll never deny Jesus, even at the point of death, and then immediately denies him three times before the cock crows? It’s Peter. Who’s the one who sees the glory of the Transfiguration and then says, “Lord, it’s good that we were here!” Peter. Who sees the risen Jesus standing on the shore, and jumps into the water with all his clothes on to swim to him, leaving the others, less dramatically, in the boat? If you guessed Peter, then you’ve won our prize: free coffee after the service!
Peter can be hard to love. But in this moment, in this story, I feel bad for him. I wonder whether Jesus is being a little unfair. Because—let’s be honest. If you were Jesus, and you saw Peter coming toward you on the water, trusting so deeply in your divine power that he would step off the side of a boat and start walking, would the first words out of your mouth really be, “O you of little faith”? (Matthew 14:31) It seems to me that must’ve taken quite a bit of faith.
But then again, I’ve found it useful from time to time to remember that I am not in fact the Son of God. And if there’s a story in the Gospels in which my initial reaction is that Jesus is wrong and I’m right, it’s usually worth a second look. So I wonder what Jesus is actually saying here about faith, and doubt, and what they mean in practice in our lives.
There’s an old ice-breaker game called “two truths and a lie.” I might call this story “two faiths and a doubt.” It seems to me that Peter shows his faith in this story in two very different ways, and we’re left wondering: What does Jesus see as Peter’s doubt?
Peter’s first form of faith, of course, is his conviction that Jesus’ power can enable him to do more than he could do on his own. It’s late in the night, in the “fourth watch,” Matthew says, and the boat is battered by the waves, going headfirst into the wind. It’s cold and dark and rough. It’s not time for a swim. But when Peter sees a figure walking on the surface of the sea, and hears that it’s Jesus, he believes that if it really is, then Peter can walk on water too; that not only can Jesus conquer the chaos and the danger of the sea for himself, he can share that power with others, too. It’s the faith that Jesus is not a magician trying to impress us with his own skills, but a God who wants to share his blessings with us. I can’t imagine how much faith it would take to take that first step off the side of that boat.
And Peter’s first form of faith is actually backed up by a second one. Peter doesn’t only believe that Jesus will give him the miraculous ability to walk on the water. He also believes that if he falls, there will be someone to catch him. And to me, this act of faith is even more impressive than the first. It’s one thing to believe that God will give you some extraordinary blessing, because it’s a relatively low risk. The worst that can happen is that you remain ordinary. If Peter had taken a step and just splashed straight into the water, well, I guess he could just scramble back into the boat.
But to take step after step as the boat recedes behind you takes another kind of faith. That’s not the faith that you’ll succeed. It’s the faith to know that if you fail, and it will be okay. To believe that even if you start to sink, you will not disappear; that Jesus will reach out his hand to save you from the storm.
And these are the two halves of the courage that many of us need. We’re often faced with situations that seem to be too much for us, with challenges or opportunities that frighten or intimidate us, with an invitation from God that seems to be beyond us. And we have to believe, on the one hand, that by the grace of God, we can do more than we can imagine, that you are, as Christopher Robin said to Winnie the Pooh, “you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” And we have to believe, on the other hand, that if and when we inevitably reach our limits, when we reach the point beyond which we cannot go, and begin to sink, God will be there to catch us when we fall. It’s much safer to stay back in the boat.
This is the incredible faith it takes to walk on water, and yet Jesus says to him, before he says anything else, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31)
We’re accustomed to think that Jesus is talking about that moment at which Peter becomes frightened, and begins to sink, and calls out, “Lord, save me!” (14:30) He begins to sink, and Jesus immediately asks him, “why did you doubt?” as if it were a relationship of cause and effect, as if, if he were just a little more faithful, had just a little less fear or doubt about what was going on, he could have made it all the way. And that raises some complex theological questions and concerns that boil down to one problem: we can never try hard enough, believe hard enough, to earn God’s love for us. And yet, as Paul reminds us, “no one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.” (Romans 10:11; Isaiah 28:16)
So I wonder if it’s really something else. I wonder if Peter’s true lack of faith is that revealed by the fact that he didn’t stay in the boat. I wonder if his more radical moment of doubt came when he saw Jesus walking toward him, and wouldn’t just stay put, when he found himself in a storm, and he didn’t trust that God would come to him, when he was afraid that Jesus would walk on by. And as a matter of fact, the Gospel of Mark comes right out and says this: in a similar scene, Mark writes that “Jesus meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out.” And Jesus turned aside instead and got into the boat. (Mark 6:48-49)
I wonder whether this is Peter’s doubt, whether this was Peter’s fear: not that he doubted that he could walk all the way to Jesus, but that he doubted that Jesus would walk all the way to him. That he found himself in a cold, dark boat, in the middle of the night, battered by the wind and rocked by the waves, halfway between one place and another, and he was afraid that God had left them all alone. I wonder whether this is what Jesus wanted him to believe, whether Jesus wanted him to stop being Peter for just a minute, to stop being the center of attention and the man of action, and to trust that God would keep them safe, to trust that God would act in God’s own time. I wonder, in other words, whether the lack of faith that Jesus identifies was not so much a lack of faith in Peter’s own sudden miraculous abilities, but a lack of faith that God would come to him, exactly where he was.
I don’t know. I could be wrong. Maybe it is this other kind of faith. But it seems to me that we spend most of our lives on a boat from here to there, working hard with the wind against us, battered by the waves. And it seems to me that there are moments when God is calling us out onto the water, and moments where God wants us to stay put. There are times when we need the faith and the courage to take that step out of the boat, trusting that God will strengthen us and guide us, trusting that God will not let us sink. And there are times when we need to trust that, however rough the waves, we will weather the storm, and that sometimes, the best thing to do is to endure it, for now, with faith that God will not abandon us. It’s genuinely hard to know which of these is right, at any given moment, in any given situation. It takes discernment, and prayer. It takes the effort to slow down, and listen; to wait through the roaring noise of the wind and the earthquake and the fire and to listen for God in the “sound of sheer silence,” in the “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-12); to hear Jesus saying to us, wherever we are, and wherever we are going, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” (Matthew 14:27)