NOTES for Mar 4:35-41
In today's Gospel, Mark's account ends with the disciples' question, “Who then is this?”—a question of great importance in the overall context of the New Testament. The episode as a whole shows very clearly the distance between the disciples—ordinary people just like us—and Jesus. A violent storm arose on the lake, and the evangelist emphasizes that the boat was already filling with water. This means that two or three more waves would simply send it to the bottom. At such a moment, everyone in a boat either tries to keep its bow toward the waves with the oars or bails out the water. But the Lord is asleep, because He has been preaching all day and is very tired.
The disciples must have been reluctant to wake Him, and it is astonishing that the rocking did not wake Him on its own. At such moments the tension rises sharply, and a person feels his smallness and weakness very clearly. Anyone in the boat then understands that if help does not come from the Almighty, nothing else will protect him: a grain of sand in the hands of the elements, he will go to the bottom. It is impossible to sleep at such a time. We do not know whether the disciples wanted Jesus to bail out water with everyone else or to pray, but in any case they did not expect what He Himself did.
When the danger comes too close, they wake Him and ask with some irritation: “Why are You sleeping? Do You really not care that all of us—including You—are perishing?” Against this background of the disciples' overwhelming sense of their own insignificance and helplessness, Jesus wakes, turns toward the sea, and simply tells it, “Be silent.” Not majestically or menacingly, as Siberian shamans might invoke the elements, but as a tired person says to a barking dog, “Oh, be quiet!”—such is the meaning of the Greek verbs. And the sea becomes silent.
In the stillness that follows, Jesus' questions to the disciples recall all too vividly the Almighty's questions to Job: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2) and “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out?” (38:9). They feel the presence of the Almighty Himself, and a holy awe seizes them, mingled with the joy of deliverance. They will feel something similar when He comes to them through locked doors on the day of His Resurrection. On the lips of people who know the Bible, the question “Who then is this?” is rhetorical: it is a form of confessing the divine nature of the Son of Man.