The Lord Of The Sea
THE LORD OF THE SEA
MARK 6:45-56
“Take heart: have no fear” is God’s word to his people in distress.
There is good reason to think that Jesus sent the disciples away while he dismissed the crowds because the latter were in the mood to adopt him as their leader for an uprising there and then (John 6:15). Jesus may have feared that his disciples, who still understood his purposes so imperfectly, might be led astray by the crowd. Perhaps he himself also felt the pull of temptation, for he retreated into the hills to pray, and the fact that his prayer is mentioned so seldom (though we know it was his regular custom) suggests that this day was one of crisis.
Meanwhile the disciples were making little headway at sea against the wind. By the Roman method of reckoning four night watches (see 13:35 for their names; the Jews reckoned only three divisions in the night, Matthew 24:43; Luke 12:38) it was between 3 and 6 a.m. when they saw Jesus walking on the sea. To calm their terror Jesus came near and spoke words of reassurance. Their significance is to be explained from the Old Testament. “Take heart; have no fear” is God’s word to his people in their distress (Isaiah 41:10,13f.; 43:1; 44:2). “It is I,” literally “I am,” may simply be self-identification, but there may just possibly be an echo of the Old Testament form of revelation of God, “I am (He)” (Exodus 3:14; Isaiah 41:4; 43:10; 52:6). Finally, mastery of the sea is a divine attribute, and this incident ranks with the earlier one in 4:35-39 in showing that the power of God is revealed in Jesus (Job 9:8; Psalm 77:19; Isaiah 43:1—note the occurrence of Isaiah 43 in each of these three sets of references). Were they beginning to realize the truth? Mark says that they were “utterly astounded,” but Matthew states that they worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God” (Matthew 14:33). Does Mark mean that they were “taken by surprise” at this revelation of the divine power of Jesus because they had failed to understand the significance of the feeding of the multitude?
Although the boat had set out from the north-east corner of the lake for the nearby village of Bethsaida Julius at the head of the lake, the disciples finally landed farther round to the west at Gennesaret (the region around Capernaum), and once again the crowds began to throng around the disciples. The “fringe” was a border of blue tassels worn on the outer cloak (Numbers 15:37ff.; Deuteronomy 22:12), and it was this that the woman with the haemorrhage touched (Matthew 9:20); Jews who liked to be thought especially pious made them unnecessarily long (Matthew 23:5).