11 Pentecost, A p 14, August 13, 2023
1 Kings 19:9-18 Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15, Matthew 14:22-33
Can we agree that the Bible readings are "textual events?" Can you and I agree that we are "word events" too? I means that you and are are constituted, made up in our insides by the words that have come to order the details of our lives. And to change our lives, we need to do some serious re-ordering of our interior word life in hopes that such re-ordering will help our body language lives behave different toward more excellent actions.
We get involved with the words of the Bible because we look for biblical words to interact with our worded lives so that we might be advanced in creative excellence in our lives.
When people say, "it's only words," they cheapen and limit the meaning of words. Our entire existence is ordered because of words and so there is nothing "cheap" about words.
The Gospel writers were so certain that words re-create our lives that the writer of John called the pre-existent Jesus Christ, the Word from the beginning who is God. That makes Word a powerful co-extensive entity with God.
The Gospel writers were wordsmiths of their eras. They used language within the styles and forms of their times. Bible mis-readers in our times like to think that Gospel writers were writing exact eye-witness journalistic reports about Jesus. How could this be so when the Gospels were not written in Aramaic and were written in an Greek style of educated scribes who were writing decades after Jesus had left this world?
Versions of the reality of the Risen Christ were placed into teaching parable narratives of Jesus, which of course, had remnants of oral traditions which had been passed on to them.
The Gospel writers understood the spiritual codes of their contexts; they understood the hero types of the Hebrew Scriptures and so Jesus as the Risen Christ for the Gospel writers used narratives of Jesus to portray the reality of the effects of knowing the presence of the Risen Christ.
If Jesus walking on the water and calming the storm was an actual event and not an allegorical visionary presentation, then it should be the normal practice for followers of Jesus to expect such miraculous interventions within the actual storms of wind, earthquake, floods, and fire. And seeing that such interventions are not regular, but perhaps very rarely uncanny, it betrays the purpose of the Gospel writer to set this story up as the normative expectations of deliverance from every event of harm that is faced in nature.
However, to understand the visionary intent of the Matthew writer to present Jesus as the one has a special place within nature, even with the worst storms of nature, is to present the Risen Christ as the All and in All accompaniment to our lives who can help us survive, thrive, and ultimately live beyond the harming events of nature, including death itself as the supposed terminus of life.
Please don't literalize what is meant to be figurative, unless you know in your life of faith the consistent intervention in the laws of nature to exempt you from all of the forms of harm which can happen in life. To literalize Jesus as some kind of super hero then means that such a super hero is drastically missing in our lives today where we are subject to the obvious conditions of weal and woe in our everyday lives.
I believe that the purpose of the Gospel writer is to help us live with our lives as they are not exempt from the probabilities of what might befall us, including the harms from natural events of winds, earthquakes, floods, and fire. In our lives subject to human probable events, we can know the accompanying presence of the Risen Christ, surfing over and within the storms that face us.
The Risen Christ always already accompanies as the always already intervention before bad things happen, when bad things happen, before good things happen, when good things happen, and even when death happens.
You and I can subscribe to a disappointing magical Christianity of perpetual disappointment about the lack of super hero interventions in our lives; Or we can experience the Risen Christ whose presence accompanies us always already and who is as Paul wrote, "All and in All. Amen.
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