Miracle: Walking on Water
Jesus Shows His Power to the Disciples
This event happens after the feeding of the 5,000. Both Matthew and Mark’s accounts begin with Jesus sending the disciples off “immediately,” which suggests some sense of urgency. After seeing Jesus feed a crowd with a few small barley loaves and fishes, the crowd is mumbling about forcing Jesus to be king. Instead of directly confronting this issue, Jesus decides it’s time to send the disciples off and for Him to withdraw for prayer.
The disciples went out on the water in their boat. It was the middle of the night, and Jesus saw the disciples straining against their oars. The wind was strong enough that they had a hard time making any real headway.
The Setting
When the disciples first see Jesus walking on the water, they don’t recognize Him—in fact, they don’t even think He’s human. Their impulse to assume Jesus was a ghost makes sense. They didn’t really have a framework for their miraculous experiences with Jesus, but they do have some shared cultural stories about ghosts. It makes sense that a figure out walking on the waves in the middle of the night or suddenly appearing in their midst after death would make them first think of ghosts. This isn’t the only time that the disciples will mistake Jesus for a ghost. After His resurrection, the disciples will voice the same fear.
This is helpful for us to consider because God often acts in ways that might not always make perfect sense to us. In order to wrap our minds around these actions, we’re tempted to attach meaning or significance to events in ways that make more sense to us but aren’t always accurate.
Jesus Walks to The Disciples
For instance, when our prayers aren’t answered in the way that we hoped, we might assume that God was cruel or angry with us. The truth is that there is a lot that goes into running the universe, and we can’t always understand why or how certain decisions were made. Sometimes the explanation we come up with makes the most sense to us—like the disciples assuming Jesus was a ghost—but it’s completely inaccurate and unhelpful.