It’s one of the most familiar Sunday School lessons, and the subject of countless Bible classes and talks. You can tell it yourself, without looking. A storm on the Galilee lake, and Jesus came walking on the water.

The problem with familiarity, as I’ve remarked before, is that we stop thinking about it. We know it. So we probably don’t think to ask, “Wait a minute. Isn’t that exactly the kind of display of power Jesus refused to supply?” His enemies pestered him for such a demonstration, and he said he wouldn’t do it. Remember the temptation he faced in the wilderness, to jump off the temple platform? Same kind of display, and he (rightly!) refused to do it.

At this point you might want to stop, and read again the accounts of the incident in Matthew 14:22-33, Mark 6:45-52, and John 6:15-21. (Luke doesn’t record it.)

Done? I’m sure you noticed one big difference from both the wilderness temptation and the give-us-a-sign demand. Both of those would have been public displays, whereas walking on the stormy lake was very private. An important difference. But still—this incident stands out as almost unique, matched only by the other time he calmed a storm. He was in command of all the forces of nature, but he didn’t need to make a display, didn’t need to show off. In fact, as he responded to the temptation, to do so would be to put God to the test.

John tells us that, in the wake of the miraculous feeding of 5,000, the crowd tried to make Jesus king by force. That feeding was indeed an awesome display of the power given to Jesus by his Father—and even though it was done quietly and without hoopla, a lot of the people got the implication. But it was not yet the time. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus made the disciples get in the boat, and sent them away, so that he could disperse the crowd. It seems to have been a near thing. By the time he got people calmed down and on their way, it was getting dark, and Jesus was (I have to believe) both agitated and exhausted. He needed to calm down, to breathe, to sort his own feelings. He walked up the hill, and turned to the Father in prayer.

A little detail in the Mark account may help us with our questions about the incident. After praying for some time, Jesus came down the hill to the water. He looked over the water, through the storm that was raging, and saw the disciples were having a very tough time battling the weather. And he started walking across the water. He didn’t get near the boat until the wee hours of the morning. And here’s the startling part: Mark says, “He meant to pass by them.”

In Sunday School we follow the Matthew account, which includes the super-dramatic part about Peter’s failed walk on the water toward Jesus. But Mark tells us it wasn’t Jesus’s intention to actually join the boat. He was going to walk by them. In other words, walking on the water wasn’t a demonstration of power, it was simply transportation. He was left alone on the shore with no boat, and he needed to get to the other side. So he walked.

It’s strange, though, isn’t it? If he meant to go by, he could have taken a detour far enough away that they didn’t see him. As it was, they jumped to the irrational, superstitious conclusion that they were seeing a ghost. That’s when he headed to the boat, had the interaction with Peter (including saving him from drowning), got into the boat, and shut down the storm.

He could have detoured but didn’t. He meant to walk by but changed his plan. This incident was recorded for a reason, and the very strangeness of it underscores that there must be something here we’re supposed to figure out. If we take the whole thing as an acted-out allegory, what might it mean?

It seems to me that figuring out the allegorical is more straightforward than the literal event in this case. Meaning the literal may have been engineered as an allegory: We, like the crowd, would make Jesus king by force, right now, if we could—but it’s not yet time. He sends us, his disciples, off on our own—he’s not physically present with us. But he can see us, can see our struggles. We may struggle for quite a long time. Then something happens in our life, and it’s him checking in on us, coming close to us, showing us a bit of himself, just to reassure and encourage. More often than not, we don’t react well; we have a tendency to leap to wrong conclusions about what he’s doing. Eventually, we get it. We see that he’s right in the boat with us, that he’s in control, and we’re all right—filled with awe as we should be.

At least, we have to hope we take that final step, and not get stuck in wrong conclusions, panic, superstition. We disciples are, after all, kind of prone to not getting it.

Love, Paul