Preparing for the Storm
After the parables of Mark 4, Jesus embarks upon a series of works of power. Already there have been healings of individual people. Now, we have the stilling of a storm, and the death of thousands of pigs. After raising a child from the dead, and miraculously feeding thousands of people, Jesus will again aid the disciples out on the sea as a storm is building, this time walking out to them on the water, and climbing into their boat so that the wind ceases.
These stories have always had those who doubt them. But for our age they are not implausible; they are simply impossible. How, then, do we read them? The reductive materialism of our age sees them as nonsense. Their presence calls all of Mark into question. Most of us ignore the hard edge of reductive materialism; we accept the reality of morals and values, beauty, and love even though such things theoretically have no real meaning. But we know that storms are not quelled with a word. This is a reality which has no wriggle room.
Yet when I sit in the bush and contemplate a massive gum tree, or ride in the night with the evening star tracking me, the calming of a storm does not feel quite so offensive. Away from our pretensions to power and control—the computers, the climate-controlled buildings, the GPS-guided self-driving car—our technological hubris rapidly fades. It is not that I somehow adopt (or regress into) a precritical naivety about the world. Rather, my insignificance and powerlessness before nature enables me to recognise the limitations of human cognition and the tininess of our alleged technological prowess. I am able to re-enter1 the world of poetry2 in order to express the inexpressible. C S Lewis wrote:
In a sense, one can hardly put anything into words: only the simplest colours have names, and hardly any of the smells. The simple physical pains and (still more) the pleasures can't be expressed in language. I labour the point lest the devil should hereafter try to make you believe that what was wordless was therefore vague and nebulous. But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague, but because language is… Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual. (Letter to Rhona Bodle, 24 June 1949)3
Language is vague, as he puts it, because of our limitations and smallness.
The nature miracles (and the healings) are not examples of human credulity or scientific naivete. They are the expression of what is by creatures who, full of richness and glory, made in the image of God, know they have yet the barest grasp of reality. Our task is not to account for, and work around, a supposed scientifically naive or foolish story of the stilling of a storm. Our first task is to escape the conceit and deception that our literal, factual, prosaic language, is adequate for dealing with anything but the simplest material issues.
Our second task is to learn to hear and read poetry, to get beyond naive literalism, to go beyond the poverty of one-to-one this-means-that allegory, and to submit to the experience of that which just is, and which cannot be contained by our explanations.
In the poetry of Mark 4:35 to 6:52 we will see the experience of that which just is intermingled with political terror, brute hunger and illness, and the fear of death. This enchanted4 life where the just is has entered our perceptions is another aspect of the mystery of the Basileia of God. It is a perception of reality to be coveted rather than scorned or treated with condescension.
A great deal of effort has gone into explaining away the difficulty of the miraculous. Some healing stories have what I have called wriggle room: We can say to ourselves, "It was psychological," or "The story is really about how the person was accepted back into society." Both of these things may have been true, but that is not the key issue here. The true purpose of wriggle room becomes clear when we consider Vincent Taylor's infamous assertion that in Mark 6:45-56, Jesus was wading triumphantly through the surf.5 The purpose of that statement is obvious; it was theology submitting itself to sceptical (and over-reaching) science in a futile attempt to remain credible and therefore relevant. The perceptions of Jesus and Mark were indeed limited by their times. But to pretend that our perceptions are not so limited is to miss the fact that the scientific gaze6 , or the scientific image7 ,—call it what we will, is an expression of empire. It has been developed to avoid the claim of God upon Creation; that is, it is an expression of human sovereignty, and is idolatrous. The world view of Mark and of Jesus is not something we have to work around, or have embarrass us; it is something we need to recover. Indeed, our final task—we should call it our hope, for it is something given and done to us rather than something we achieve--our hope is that in this terrifying world, the stilling of the storm becomes for us scientifically educated people, a source of hope rather than a source of embarrassment or stumbling.
The texts of the storms are not using fiction to tell a truth. That is an understanding nurtured in empire. When Jeanne Murray Walker speaks of the telephone ringing8 even though she has smashed it, we do not think to say this is a fiction to make a point. Or, if we do, people realise the impoverishment of our perceptions. She is simply speaking about the experience of the just is. In the end, our discomfort with such events in Mark is a judgement of our lack of understanding of our reality, and perhaps a sign of how much we are in the thrall of the kingdom of Caesar.
Andrea Prior (23 vJune 2025)
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1. I use the phrases "nature enables me," and "I am able to re-enter…" instead of my original phrase "nature forces me" because nature does not force us. We Australians increasingly go bush with satellite TV, iPads, and some many other accoutrements of consumerism, with the result that we refuse the grace offered to us via the natural world.
2. Reductive Materialism says poetry is meaningless.
3. Quoted at https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2023/01/poetry-as-language-of-actual.html
4. See, for example Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, "The Bulwarks of Belief" Chapter One, Kindle Edition. (pp23?)
5. Vincent Taylor wrote that Jesus was ‘wading through the surf near the hidden shore and this was interpreted as a triumphant progress across the waters.’ The quotation is referenced at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_walking_on_water, but I am not able to find a direct source.
6. Richard Beck, working from Tolkien says, " Enchantment isn’t “seeing things as they are” but “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” Enchantment isn’t concerned with a scientific description of the world but with beholding the sacred meaning of the world. Enchantment is the daily work of “cleaning the dirty windows” of our perceptions so that the familiar surprises us again with joy, wonder, and gratitude. Suddenly, we are startled anew by the color green and feel a fresh surge of love gazing into the face of a loved one. The windows of our perception become dirty when we own, master, and possess the world… And the possessiveness here is fundamentally psychological in nature, assuming that we “know” this thing or person. This is how the detached, objective scientific gaze can become so diabolical." Hunting Sacred Eels, Chapter Six "The Good Catastrophe" eBook published by Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis 2021
7. Kit Wilson uses "scientific image" in a similar fashion to "the scientific gaze." It is that view in which everything is reduced to its material components, and things that cannot be so reduced are said to have no meaning. Wilson, Kit "Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?" https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/after-neoliberalism/articles/are-we-really-living-in-a-materialist-age He attributes the term manifest image and scientific image to the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars.
8. See above
