Don't limit what God can do.

John 6:16-21

I’d like to focus on the second half of our reading today. The story of when Jesus walks on water

Audio of the talk can be found here

For most of us, even if we profess to be Christians, it is as if we are down here and God is up there.  We live parallel lives. It might be like having an older teenager in the house. You think they are there, there is evidence that they are there – dirty clothes, unwashed dishes - but you never see them.

But occasionally God comes to us and there is a meeting.

Maybe we experience him coming to us in church, as we hear his word read and taught, and those words speak to our heart; or as we receive him through bread and wine.

Maybe we experience him in encounters, when we become aware that God has come very close to us.

I remember Jenny dying of cancer in a side room in the West Suffolk Hospital. Jesus came to her in a very real way. She couldn’t look at him, but he lifted up her head so that she looked into his face.

Well, the disciples are rowing across the sea of Galilee.
They have been with Jesus, as he did ‘Jesus’ things on the other side.
And now Jesus has gone off, and they are going back home.

I think it was back in April when Alison and myself were out in our Twinkle Twelve. It had suddenly got very gusty. Our boat was filling up with water. The rope connected to the boom broke. But fortunately, we had put the oars in, and so I began to row. The wind was against us, the tide was against us, and we were getting nowhere fast, and we simply moved from one bank to the opposite bank.

Well, the disciples were rowing. It was rough, but that doesn’t scare them. Some of them were fisherman. They were used to rough seas. They were moving in the right direction, but it was very hard work.

We read, “It was now dark and Jesus had not yet come to them”.

But now Jesus does come to them – he comes to them in a way that was completely unexpected, impossible, scary

They saw a figure coming on the water and they thought: this is impossible. This must be a ghost.

Perhaps some of us have stories of encounters when Jesus has come close – possibly in very unexpected and scary ways.

Trish was a member of our church in Holloway. She told me that on one of her first occasions coming to church she was sitting in the back row. She heard someone right behind her calling her name. very clearly. She turned round and saw that there was nobody there. She said that she was so spooked that she ran out of the church building.

Perhaps the disciples should have done better.

They have already seen Jesus do some remarkable things; they have had grandstand seats when he turned water into wine, healed an official’s son with a word, and healed a man who had been an invalid for 38 years.
And they were the ones who he asked to feed the huge crowd with 5 loaves and 2 fish.

They had seen what he had done. So perhaps they should not have been too surprised when they saw Jesus walking on water.  

And here he says to them, as he comes to them, ‘It is I’ or, literally, ‘I am’.

‘I am’: Yahweh, Jehovah, is the name which God Almighty gives to Moses, when Moses asks God to tell him his name. God replies to Moses, ‘I am who I am’. Or ‘I will be who I will be’.

In other words, he is saying to them, ‘It is me, Jesus who is here; but it is also God who is here with you. Don’t limit me. I am ultimate freedom and power’

Don’t limit what God can do

It is a sign of arrogance.

We say to God that we will only expect of Jesus, of God, what I can understand.

It is what leads people to dismiss this story as a fairy tale. They say, ‘People cannot walk on water. It is impossible. So it did not happen’.

The story is told of three friends, a Jew, a Moslem and a Christian who were walking together and came to a river. There was no bridge. The Moslem calmly stepped onto the water and walked across. The Jew calmly stepped onto the water and walked across. The Christian looked on in astonishment. He looked very very nervous. He thought, ‘Jesus, I can’t let you down’. He looked up to heaven and said a prayer, and was about to take a step onto the water, when the Moslem said to the Jew, ‘Perhaps, for the sake of our friendship, we really should tell him where the stepping stones are’.

But if Jesus is the eternal Son of God, the ‘I am’, the one who was there in the beginning, the one who was with Moses as he led the Israelites through the red sea, the one who fed 5000 plus people with 5 loaves and 2 fishes, the one who was raised from the dead – then of course he can walk on water.

Job writes of God

“He alone stretched out the heavens
and trampled the waves of the Sea” (Job 9:8)

And the Psalmist writes of ‘I am’:

“Your way was through the sea,
your path, through the mighty waters;
yet your footprints were unseen” (Psalm 77:19)

The problem when we limit God, when we say to God that I will only accept what I can understand, what is acceptable to me, is that it leads to the pick and mix God of contemporary spirituality. I choose this aspect of God or of the bible’s teaching, and I reject what I find unacceptable. I choose the New Testament and not the Old. And if I choose the bits that I like and reject the bits that I don’t, then I am effectively making myself my own little god.

When we limit God it seems to limit what God can do.

We recently read of when Jesus came to his hometown Nazareth they did not accept him. We are told that because of their lack of faith he could only do a few works of power there.

Perhaps it is not surprising that in a world where we are so able to rely on ourselves and our own understanding, we see so few astonishing works of power

And perhaps it is not surprising that in those communities or places where people are more dependent on God and more open to the God who can walk on water that they do see astonishing works of power.

3. It means that when God does break open the box we are very scared.  

We try to think of any other explanation; and if we are unable to rationalise the event then we even end up talking about ghosts – rather than admit that it might be Jesus who is walking on water.

INVITE JESUS INTO THE BOAT

The key it seems to me here is how we respond to Jesus when he comes to us, however he comes to us.

Jesus comes to the disciples when it is dark.

Yes, they are afraid, but when they realise it is Jesus they ‘want to take him into the boat.’

I spoke about how I was unable to row against tide and wind, and we were stuck on the bank. The ferry came close and the ferryman called to us, ‘Do you need help’. I, in my man self-reliance and unwillingness to ask for help, would have said, ‘No we are OK. We’ll get back on our own – somehow’. But I didn’t get the chance. Alison called out, ‘Yes we do’. And the ferry man came over and towed us back in.

And when Jesus, the one who can walk on water, comes to us – as he does now, as he will do when we break bread; as he will do in myriad little ways this week, if only we have eyes to see; and occasionally he will come to us in the very big way – we can choose: to carry on living our parallel life, in our old way, pulling with all our might on the oars, trusting our own strength and wisdom – or we can have the courage to call out to him and ask him to come to us and to be with us.