NOTES for Mar 4:35-41

Jesus' calming of the storm undoubtedly made an indelible impression on the disciples. None of Israel's great prophets could do such a thing: they, of course, also sometimes worked miracles, or rather, God sometimes performed miracles through their prayer, but no one had ever managed to calm a raging lake with one word. Of course, God's power, acting through Jesus in all its fullness, could do anything at all: God is the complete and sovereign Master of His world. Here, however, it was not simply God's power at work; here the breath of the Kingdom was blowing, which was especially important and relevant.

Indeed, humanity has encountered manifestations of God's power from the very beginning of its existence, and the fall did not change anything here in principle: God is God, and after the fall He remains God; His action is still the same as it has always been. It is another matter that after the fall a person perceives the action of God's power differently, often not even understanding what kind of power it is or where it came from. God's power by itself does not always change a person, and even more, it does not always change him radically. For radical change, the conscious participation of the person himself is needed in the process, first of all the participation of his will, and such participation for a fallen person often proves to be, if solvable at all, a very difficult task. That is why miracles in every age have been relatively infrequent in the fallen world.

It would be more accurate to say that few people saw them: one can see a miracle only when the heart is open to God, when God's great world is a reality for a person and he lives precisely in that world, and not in the little fallen world of the human being separated from God's world. Before the coming of Christ this little fallen world, which sometimes appears large to us, was completely isolated from God's great world, which is called the Kingdom. In those times miracles existed only for those for whom God and His presence in the world were an unquestionable and absolute reality.

Now, with Christ's coming, the situation has changed. His coming broke the barrier, destroyed the separation of our fallen world from the Kingdom that had existed before. Now a miracle has become an objective reality, and everyone sees the calming of the storm, regardless of their condition and their attitude toward God and toward Christ. The Kingdom, its power, and its breath have become part of our world. Outwardly nothing special happened, but in reality everything changed.