Quick and Safe Passage

John 6:16-26

Now when the evening came, His disciples went down to the sea, and after getting into a boat, they started to cross the sea to Capernaum. And it had already become dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. And the sea began to be stirred up because a strong wind was blowing. When therefore they had rowed about three or four miles, they beheld Jesus walking on the sea and drawing near to the boat; and they were frightened. But He said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid." They were willing therefore to receive Him into the boat; and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going.

The next day the multitude that stood on the other side of the sea saw that there was no other small boat there, except one, and that Jesus had not entered with His disciples into the boat, but that His disciples had gone away alone. There came other small boats from Tiberias near to the place where they ate the bread after the Lord had given thanks. When the multitude therefore saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they themselves got into the small boats, and came to Capernaum, seeking Jesus. And when they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, "Rabbi, when did You get here?" Jesus answered them and said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves, and were filled."

Sometimes we see things clearly but in a haze at the same time. We see clearly that something extraordinary has happened, but we can’t see to save our eternal life the importance of the extraordinary events in our life. We miss many things important simply because we are filling some perceived need.

Which need to fill today? Shall we fill our face, our wallet, our shopping bag, our mind with psycho-babble, our calendar with events that keep us from seeing ourselves as we really are or maybe fill our phone book with names that we will never call. There are those names we won’t call just because it doesn’t come up, like an old friend who just isn’t in the same life’s path anymore or the older woman down the street who would give her few remaining memories up just to share a half hour of anyone’s time. It’s the ordinary people that gets forgotten. Celebrities and popular folk don’t get forgotten until they are not celebrities or popular anymore, but the strange thing is that God gets forgotten even when He’s extraordinary.

He gets forgotten when He walks on water. He gets forgotten when He changes physics at will. I’m sure many people would like to think that the bread that filled the multitudes was just a trick or some symbolic way to say that generosity is contagious, that Jesus convinced the disciples to give up their bread with reckless abandon, and that others saw this and gave up what they had, and on and on until all were fed. But Jesus did not call it a sign because it was clever or educational. Jesus called it a sign because it was a miracle of the kind that only God can do. Only God the creator can change physics and duplicate bread or make it grow without more flour. Only God can get on a boat when it is only a part of the way to Capernaum and get to Capernaum at the same time. Jesus was let aboard and they were just there, immediately. John records this clearly, however it was somewhat obscured to the visionless masses that some wrinkle in time had occurred. They asked "when" He got there instead of "how" He got there, so they may have suspected that the times didn’t add up. Those people knew that Jesus left without a boat, but they didn’t ask about that. They asked about the time of His arrival perhaps because they knew he left much later than His disciples and should not have been able to get there so soon with any means of transportation that they were familiar.

It’s like when you run after someone who is much faster on their feet than you. When you finally catch up to them you find them sitting quietly in a chair reading a book, sipping a soda with the ice cubes half melted, and your trying to catch your breath. That’s what it is like keeping up with Jesus. But we’re too busy figuring out where the soda bottle and ice tray is to figure out that we just witnessed someone transcend quantum physics. The guys from the bank opposite Capernaum saw it twice and didn’t get it.

Maybe they didn’t want to get it, because getting it means that you might have to leave your pile of consumer junk behind or all of those unhealthy relationships or some old resentment. It’s easier to have that cloudy ignorance there. Agnosticism is the opium of the masses, and it works about as well as opium too. We usually use our mind to avoid pain and extra work. Thinking about what Jesus did and said about Himself is a bad reminder that our lives are hanging by a scarlet thread. Giving up some comforts and ungodly pleasures isn’t our idea of pain avoidance, and picking up a cross and following someone who could easily be mistaken for a masochist is not our idea of avoiding pain and sound like a heap of extra work. It’s still a bit funny that all those people were willing to search the Sea of Galilee for Jesus for a good meal, yet they failed to see that they sought after the King and Savior and Son of God.

The Gospels keep telling the same funny tale of people breaking their back to get an inch when they could have the mile. But that’s the funny thing about Jesus, isn’t it? He lived what He spoke to an extent that’s hard to imagine. He told us that if someone hijacks us, at gun-point, to get to the convenience store we should take them to the supermarket and help them cut out the coupons. He told us that, and then he lived it: We asked Him to tell us some stories, heal a plethora of physical maladies and answer all sorts of trick questions. We asked Him to become a politician and liberate us, become a teacher and make us wise and solve our personal problems. We asked Him to smell our bad breath and sit with us as we drank ourselves blind and listen to us boast about things that we invented to get our own way. We asked Him to get along with our incessant whining about oppression. Then we asked Him to take our oppression and betrayal and denial all together, and in return He gave us His life as a ransom for our desperate, foul, misguided souls.

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