NOTES for Mar 6:53-56

On the one hand, Jesus truly reveals to us a God who accepts us as we are, with all our illnesses, needs, psychological difficulties, and childhood complexes, regardless of our merits or our unworthiness. All this is true, as is the fact that, through faith and striving toward God, many problems are sometimes resolved, illnesses are healed, or we, which is no less valuable, become able to look at all these hardships of life differently - as people say, through God's own eyes - to understand their meaning and draw benefit from them. And without doubt this last thing too can be included in what today's Gospel passage calls "healings," if by them we mean divine actions through which our mind, our whole life, though far from ideal, begins to acquire a certain wholeness, and we gain the ability to rise above oppressive problems and grasp something new and unexpected about life and about God.

On the other hand, one gets the impression that, despite the huge number of healing scenes and other miracles in the Gospel, Mark, following the Spirit and Jesus' intentions, wanted to say something more. Recovery or changes for the better may happen or may not happen, although in any case hope for the better remains. Yet in the depths of all these hopes or disappointments there lies a call addressed to every person: to look to the root and try to receive with one's whole being that suffering and distress are synonyms of human life. And overcoming them is possible only by shifting our attention from our own "sores" to the suffering and pain of other people, as Jesus did. For sharing in the suffering of others can act as an anesthetic for our own, and at the same time helps make life more bearable and, most important, not deprived of consolations and of joy shared with others.

Jesus' conversation with the Pharisees about washing hands is a fine illustration of the essence of that conflict between Jesus and part of the Pharisaic brotherhood which eventually led many Pharisees to outright hatred of the One whom, as it seemed to them, they had awaited so eagerly. In this case, of course, the issue is not hygiene, not the need to wash one's hands before eating, but precisely ritual washing, without which, as some Pharisaic teachers believed, one could not touch the bread that was about to be broken and blessed. Believing Jews did not and do not eat bread without blessing it in a special way.

It should be noted that this washing was not so much the fulfillment of Torah norms as a tribute to tradition. The Torah, which indeed requires washing for those taking part in a temple sacrifice, says nothing about the need for washings before blessing food in general or bread in particular at home. But evidently, for some, perhaps quite significant, part of the Pharisees, refusal to follow this and other similar late and secondary traditions was equivalent to apostasy from God. And Jesus responds rather sharply to the accusations against His disciples, as usual the disciples are not accused directly, with all responsibility being placed on the Teacher. He does not enter into any discussions with His opponents about tradition. He merely reminds them of Isaiah's words about true and false worship of God, that honoring God with words does not mean honoring Him with the heart.

What, then, does He mean? After all, such "excessive" piety, at first glance, does not especially hinder genuine piety. One can, of course, be faithful to God without washing one's hands, but washing one's hands would seem unable to hinder such faithfulness either. And yet Jesus sees the situation differently. The matter is probably not only that "excessive" piety so often becomes an occasion for pride and self-assertion at the expense of one's neighbor.

The matter is, above all, in the spiritual roots of such "piety." The point is that a person who does not want his relationship with God to deepen and intensify, and who fears such deepening, is often inclined to replace it with excessive religiosity, which gives rise to "super-piety." The person unwilling to go "inward," to deepen his relationship with God, will inevitably go "outward," along the path of increasing the number of religious rites and religious obligations. And the more numerous they become, the fewer the chances of returning to the path of movement "inward." Jesus, of course, understands this perfectly well. And He condemns the movement "outward" in the most decisive way. For by moving that way, one will never come to the Kingdom.

The Evangelist speaks of the hardness of the disciples' hearts: they “did not understand about the loaves.” For them, the encounter with Christ amid the raging sea almost became a “hallucination” or a fantastic vision from the spiritual world. Yet Christ, who came to them walking on the water, was and is absolutely real: He tells them, “It is I!” That same hardness of heart often prevents us from seeing Christ's action and real presence in our own lives. He is—as always—real. He is near. Especially during a storm, when we most need His gracious help. Our task is to learn to see Him amid our everyday storms, to recognize His presence by faith—the presence that can calm any tempest and overcome every triumph of death.

Mark specifically notes the connection between Jesus walking on the water and the miraculous feeding of the people. He speaks of the second as something that should have "made the disciples understand," should have given them insight into something very important that they did not understand. This new thing was the Kingdom that their Teacher had brought into the world. For the disciples, however, all the miracles being performed were precisely miracles: a manifestation of God's power.

Perhaps a manifestation of God's love as well. But they were separate manifestations, and that is the whole point. They still had not seen the main thing: the world was no longer what it had been. Something new had entered it, something called the Kingdom. Meanwhile the disciples were still looking at the Kingdom in the old way. For them it was still an earthly Kingdom, though with a capital letter. With a capital letter because the Messiah, their Teacher, was to head it, and God would be chief in it.

It was earthly because it was supposed to be founded on earth, in every sense of the word. For them the Kingdom did not yet exist; it still had to be built, created, established. They were waiting for their Teacher to begin doing this, and to begin, of course, with a messianic uprising. Yet He keeps delaying, performing miracles and healings, attracting the people, but never declaring His messiahship. Meanwhile the Kingdom had already entered the world together with Him. The disciples did not notice this, which is no wonder, since they were waiting for something entirely different.

They did not understand that the miracles and healings performed by their Teacher were not simply manifestations of God's power connected with His person. They were nothing other than manifestations of the very Kingdom for which they were waiting. In the Kingdom, nature is not the same as it is in the fallen world; there it is not confined within itself. There nature is responsive to the action of God's will and God's breath, and to the action of human will as well, provided, of course, that it is not wounded by sin and acts together with God's will. If more food is needed to feed a multitude of people, then there will be more food.

If a person needs to walk on water, then the water under his feet will become firm, or resilient, in short, whatever it needs to become in order to support a human being. There is no storm in the Kingdom at all; it remains in our fallen world. This is the Kingdom the disciples needed to see, but they were not yet ready for such a vision. They were ready to see the Messiah in their Teacher, but not ready to see the Kingdom He had brought into the world. Not ready at that moment. The time would come, and they would understand everything. But that time would come later.

The parting of Christ and His disciples from the people looked like flight. Why such haste? The Gospel of John (6:14-15) gives the answer to this question. The people simply wanted to proclaim Jesus king, to treat Him as an outstanding human being. The people's actions are completely understandable: they did not know who Jesus was. A different attitude could have been expected from those who shared bread, shelter, and all the hardships of a wandering preacher's difficult life with Jesus. But strangely enough, the apostles' faith was very weak, especially when Jesus was not beside them.

After sending away the disciples and the people, Jesus went up the mountain to pray. Several hours later He saw the disciples in the boat in the middle of the sea, unsuccessfully trying to overcome a headwind. How helpless we are without Christ! No forces of nature can hinder the Lord's desire to be near His own. The disciples did not call Him, but they needed Him. Yet the appearance of Jesus walking on the water caused only fear and astonishment. They did not expect this from Him. Mark explains this reaction of the disciples by the hardness of their hearts.

As soon as Jesus and the apostles arrived in the land of Gennesaret, crowds of people in need of healing rushed to Him. The apostles had grown used to such miracles and were no longer surprised.

We are surprised by a miracle when it surpasses our understanding of the world around us or of the one who works the miracle. We may know little of God if His actions are unexpected to us, or if we react to His works with the question, "How did He do that?" For everything God does is wondrous.

Today's reading, telling of another miracle performed by Jesus, continues the theme begun by the description of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. The connection between the two accounts is indicated by the evangelist himself, while also noting that the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves was not enough for the apostles to understand something very important about Jesus' person and His ministry (vv. 51-52). Today's passage speaks of an event that happened during the storm that arose when Jesus' disciples, leaving the Teacher on the eastern shore of Lake Gennesaret, set out for the opposite shore, wanting to reach Bethsaida (vv. 45-48). Storms on Lake Gennesaret can be strong enough to endanger relatively small fishing boats, and the apostles, caught on the lake in such a storm, found themselves in a difficult and dangerous situation.

And once again Jesus Himself completely changes the situation, this time by His very appearance (v. 51). Here, as in the description of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, there are also no details or particulars. Jesus simply appears, and the wind immediately dies down, as though He carries with Himself some other, new world with other laws that act in this world too, bringing it under their authority.

In describing what is happening, the evangelist in effect emphasizes that Jesus does not need to do anything for the miracle to take place. It is enough for Him simply to be present where His intervention is needed, and that is enough, because Jesus bears in Himself the Kingdom of God, about which He constantly tells everyone ready to hear Him. He not only tells, but also shows everyone ready to see what this Kingdom is like, where five loaves are enough to feed several thousand people, and where one can walk on water as on firm ground.

In the boat in the middle of the stormy sea, the apostles found themselves in the situation in which each of us individually, and the whole world together, constantly finds itself. It is the situation in which you search for human means to solve a problem that is beyond human power. And an encounter with God at such moments of life really does cause us fear, just as it caused fear in the apostles when they saw Jesus walking on the water. For what are these microscopic problems of ours to Him? What is our life worth before the face of the Almighty? For centuries humanity has been seeking an answer to this question and has agreed that our life is dust, nothing. This is all we are capable of inventing, and on such a miserable foundation we think that we ourselves can despise one another's value.

The Gospel, however, tells us the one and only hope, the first and the last. The Almighty Himself came to us and became one of us, because He so loved the world. This is the only thing that gives meaning to the existence of our race. When we ask Him tragic questions about what will happen to us, it would have been enough for us, as for Job, simply to receive answers to them. But the Almighty, instead of an answer, comes to us Himself and says: it is I; do not be afraid.

In today's Gospel reading there is one small but rather difficult point, namely the words: and He wanted to pass them by. They are so hard to understand that in the parallel, later text of Matthew's Gospel they are omitted. Why did He want to pass them by, if it says that He saw them distressed in rowing, because the wind was against them? That is, He saw this and went to help them; why, then, did He want to pass them by?

The simplest thing in such difficult cases is simply not to notice the words that are unclear, as if they were not there. But not everyone will find such an approach acceptable. The author of the new translation "Good News," Valentina Kuznetsova, offers us one way to solve this problem: it looked as though He wanted to pass by them. That is, everything is very simple: it only appeared so to them.

It is hard for people untrained in philology to judge, but they can analyze different translations into modern languages, comparing the work of different translators. And nowhere else were we able to find the word "appeared." But how can it be that many different translators all omitted the same word in the same way?

Yet we are not at all frightened even by the degree of paradox present in the text without the word "appeared." Do we have the right to judge the Lord's intention? No. Therefore let us not try to solve what He actually wanted to do. There was some meaning in His actions, one now unknown to us. Let us look at the disciples' testimony: He wanted to pass by. Let us look, without any mental labor of our own, at the testimony in all its simplicity (especially since this is, after all, the Gospel according to Mark), and turn to our own life: does it not happen with us that we are in extremely harsh conditions, praying to the Lord for help, yet see only how help passes by us? It does not appear so to us; rather, we simply see with our own eyes that help is coming toward us, but we cannot make use of it.

Yet in the end the disciples were saved. As we too will be saved. Adding the word "appeared," however, shifts everything onto the unstable ground of unclear sensations whose relation to reality is unknown; and one gets the impression, precisely an impression, that such an approach is rather dangerous.