A Gospel story retold: Jesus walks on the water

(Kenny)

He needed to get away.

It had been inevitable, of course; in a sense his cousin John had committed a particularly lingering form of suicide the day he decided to attack Herodias publicly. But, still, John hadn't thought he was signing up for his own death. John had had faith that Jesus was the Messiah; he had had faith that Jesus would overthrow the detestable regime that John was attacking and would usher in the new age of David's throne, and so John had preached his sermons with what he thought was impunity. It had not been long ago that a messenger had come to Jesus, with a message that made it clear that John had started to fear that Jesus was going to dawdle around too long, and that he, John, was in sore danger of becoming one of Herod's last victims. Finally, just moments ago, Jesus had heard the news that had long been inevitable.

If only John had understood what "the coming of the Kingdom" really meant. It had been no part of the Father's plan -- it had never been part of the Father's plan -- that Jesus would save John from execution. Jesus was not even going to save himself, when the time came. But there had been no way to make John understand.

And now John was dead.

He needed to get away.

"Peter," he called softly. Peter scrambled clumsily to his feet. "Yes, Rabbi?"

"Get the boat ready. We're going to go along the coast to the hills so we can get away from the crowds for awhile. I need some time alone. "

One thing about Peter, he chuckled to himself: one never had to say, "Come on, Peter, hurry it up, would you?" Neither planning nor prudence was the big man's forté, but no one would ever accuse him of laziness or lack of initiative. Besides (and Jesus' face grew grave), Peter had been worried about his rabbi for a while now, as Jesus well knew. Peter thought Jesus was overworked...and Jesus knew that his headstrong follower was, in this case, quite right.

He needed to get away.

The little band habitually traveled light, and in short order they were clambering into the boat. But they were being watched, as always -- the comings and goings and doings of Jesus of Nazareth were by far the most fascinating subject of public discussion in all of Galilee. Before the oars could even begin their rising and falling, a crowd was gathering: "Jesus, where are you going?"

He didn't answer, except with a vague, "I have to leave for a little while; I have other places to go." They would have to be satisfied with that...except, of course, they weren't. The boat began to move away from the shore, but the calls and questions followed; and the crowd on the shore was growing, as the rumor flashed through Capernaum: "The Prophet is sailing away, and he won't tell us where he's going."

They rowed out further, forty yards or so from shore. In a moment they would turn to head slightly south of west in the bright morning, headed for open country and deserted hills well out past the villages where Jesus had been ministering. But already, as Jesus gazed back at the crowd, watching its numbers swell, he could see his hopes of silence and solitude and regeneration wavering and dissipating like morning fog.

The boat turned west.

It was, of course, the boys who were first to race west along the shoreline, though the young men were not far behind. Here was a game indeed: who would be the first to figure out where the Prophet was headed? The mass of people on the shore wavered and then changed shape and started to become a long line, like a snake writhing its way down the shore: first the boys, then the rest of the crowd -- younger men, fathers with children on their shoulders and wives in their wake, here and there an old man riding donkey-back. The excited back-and-forth calls of the younger boys in the van played a high-pitched descant above a lower, pianissimo rumble from the bulk of the throng, in accordance with a reasonable division of labor: it was the job of the boys to run ahead and shout back up-to-the-minute news of what the boat was actually doing, whereas the job of each adult was, first, to make a guess about where Jesus intended to land, and then to explain to his neighbor why his own shrewd guess was clearly superior to said neighbor's foolish and groundless speculation.

The crowd, especially the boys, was simply too raucous and distracting; he needed peace and quiet. "Move a little further from the shore." Obediently the disciples put some more water between Jesus and the crowd; and now the calls of the boys came to his ears with the peculiar clarity of sound echoing across a calm, peaceful lake, shrunken in volume but still perfectly clear, like a Greek miniature carved by a master artist where every detail is perfect but the scale is a tenth of real life.

They rowed past the first cluster of houses west of Capernaum, and he shook his head with mingled frustration and compassion. The boys sprinted delightedly into the tiny fishing settlement, each eager to be the first to proclaim the news: "Jesus is sailing toward Gennesaret; we're going to figure out exactly where he's headed." Door after door of house after house burst open, and as the settlement fell leisurely astern he could see that the long caravan of the curious and the excited had swollen, not shrunk.

For perhaps a half-hour longer they rowed, a gentle eastern breeze beginning to stir at their backs, and he could tell that the excitement along the shore was building rather than dying down. Even when trees and underbrush forced the crowd temporarily inland and out of his direct view, he had no doubt that they were keeping pace inexorably; and sure enough as the boat approached every headland that extended into the lake there were pointing and dancing youngsters who had run on ahead. He sighed as he realized that among the young men there no doubt were a few self-appointed heralds hot-footing it ahead of him on down to the settlements further south and west with the news of his approach, stirring up villages he hadn't even reached yet -- that, in fact, the longer the disciples might row, the larger the crowds would grow.

"Enough," he said. "We'll put in over there at the Seven Springs, where all that soft grass is."

They altered course to bear shoreward, and across the water they heard the boys' cheers of glee at the change in direction, and then a growing rumble as the men and families in the boys' wake picked up the pace. As the shore drew near and there ceased to be any question of where they intended to land, the crowds spilled over the last ridge of the last headland before the hillside of the Seven Springs and fanned out across the curving shoreline; so that by the time he landed he was already surrounded by a roiling, festively boisterous assembly of onlookers.

Peter and the other disciples were openly glowering; but Jesus greeted the crowds with gentleness and cheerfulness. With a sigh the disciples beached the boat. They knew the drill by now, and before long Jesus was settled on the hillside and the disciples were back at their stations, directing traffic, settling the crowds...and then Jesus began to teach.

The hours went by, and the sun began to sink, and still Jesus taught. Philip could see the thunder beginning to gather on James's brow, and he grumbled to James, "How long does he intend to teach these people? I thought he was supposed to be taking a day off."

"Yeah, and when are we going to eat? I'm hungry."

The ever-present undertone of sotto voce neighbor-to-neighbor running commentary from the crowd suddenly swelled into the dull roar of two thousand full-voiced conversations as Jesus paused for a short breather, sitting quietly alone on the hillside. Philip got to his feet. "I'm going to talk to him. He needs to send these people home for their dinners."

He walked up to Jesus, who turned his head toward him with a weary smile. "Rabbi, it's getting late, and there are all these people out here, and I'm sure they're hungry..."

Jesus interrupted, his air one of innocently bland gravity. "I'm glad you mentioned that, Philip; I was just wondering myself, actually -- what are you disciples going to do about feeding all these people?"

The disciples stared at each other, dumbfounded. James was the first to find his voice: "Rabbi, just tell them to go find a village and buy themselves some food!" Then he flushed, recollecting that Jesus had after all gone to rather a lot of trouble precisely in order to get to a place where there weren't any villages handy...and besides, anybody who lived in any village within half a day's walk, had spent his day working up an appetite by listening to Jesus, not making bread to sell to other people.

Jesus looked at them, still carefully straight-faced. "No. No, I have a better idea: you feed them."

Philip couldn't believe his ears. "Rabbi, you gotta be kidding -- you could spend half a year's income buying bread and you wouldn't feed all of these people."

Jesus allowed himself the smallest of smiles. "Go ahead, Philip; that's you disciples' job tonight: get these people fed."

The disciples looked at each other in astonishment, then huddled together to brainstorm. It was Peter who suggested, "Do you think maybe any of these people brought some food with them?" and, naturally without waiting for any response, he turned to the crowd and began asking, "Does anybody have any food?" The other disciples, having no better ideas of their own, fanned out into the crowd as well, but over and over came the same few answers: "No, sorry, we didn't have time to pack anything." "No, sorry, we didn't realize he was going to go this far down the lake." "No, sorry, can't help."

He watched them quietly, that same small smile still on his face. Then there was a bit of a commotion around Andrew, and after a few moments the disciples turned and headed back toward Jesus. A little boy was with Andrew, and he had a small wicker basket in his hand, a little basket that must have come conveniently to hand to a foresighted housewife pausing to collect a small lunch for her family as they harried her out of the house and onto the road. They came up to Jesus, did Andrew and the boy and the other disciples, all of them (except the boy) the very picture of confusion and discouragement.

"Rabbi," began Andrew, "this little boy here has a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread, but I don't see what good that's going to do with all these people..."

Jesus rose decisively to his feet. He spoke just as calmly and quietly as a few moments earlier, yet somehow now the familiar steel tone of irresistible authority rang in his voice, that clarion trumpet-note of power that no voice but his possessed, firing their spirits and setting their pulses throbbing with anticipation of they knew not what: "Tell the people to sit down on the grass."

Five decades later, looking back, John could remember the lushness of that thick, green spring-fed grass shot through with a joyous welter of crimson and golden and sky-blue wildflowers, flourishing in the few brief weeks before the summer sun would beat down upon the fields and bake everything brown. Peter would tell the story in later years as well, in his case as he chatted with John Mark amid the chaos and noise and stench that was Imperial Rome. And the orderly pattern formed by blocks of earthy brown and tan homespun peasant clothing, set in dull contrast against the glorious riot of that grass and those flowers, would be still so vivid in Peter's mind that he would tell Mark, "He had us organize the people on the grass in flowerbeds, fifty and a hundred people at a time" -- as if Jesus had been spading up plots in a garden, not seating a crowd.

Even as Jesus stood and the disciples gestured for silence, there was an unmistakable buzz in the crowd, for was this not the Prophet? Whatever he was planning to do, was it not likely to be a story they could tell over and over again to their children and their children's children? Then Jesus raised the bread and fish in his hands, and for the first time all day utter silence fell, as five thousand and more held their breath in expectation. He addressed his Father, his voice weighty as gold, clear as summer dawn; he broke the bread; he gave it to his disciples and ordered them, "Pass it out to the people..."

A couple of hours later, as the disciples gathered up twelve baskets of leftovers from the five loaves and the two fish, Jesus sat on the hillside looking out over the crowd and thinking about his problem -- and a very serious problem it was. He had long ago come to accept the fact that other than himself nobody, not even his cousin John the Baptist, could understand what it was truly going to mean to be God's Anointed. He had from the very earliest days of his ministry seen that the temptation to empire that he had rejected in the wilderness, was a temptation that would be constantly thrust upon him from every side, simply because the common people of Israel were desperate for just such a Messiah as John had expected, and as Satan had offered to make of Jesus. This burden, he wore with the ease of long custom.

But there was a new and ugly feel to the crowd this evening. John the Baptist had grown tired of waiting; but John had been in prison and could do no worse than send hurt and sarcastically rebuking questions. Now, however, he could hear in the tone of the crowd -- he could feel in the very air -- that of the five thousand men on that hillside, a sizable number had also grown tired of waiting for Jesus to act, and were beginning to talk of forcing his hand. And these were five thousand men, not one, and they were out roaming free, not confined to a prison. Nor did they have the slightest intention of allowing him to escape; he had already tried that this morning, and they would be far more fanatically watchful now.

Yes, he certainly had a problem.

But he also had a plan.

The disciples had finished with the baskets and stacked them all together on the shore. Wearily they trudged up the hill toward him. He rose and went to meet them, in the shadow cast by the hill on which they had spent the afternoon.

To their credit, they did not rebel when they heard their part of his plan, the plan that involved their turning back around, climbing into their boat, and striking out for the northeastern shore five miles away, rather than going to an early and well-deserved bed. "I'll stay here and dismiss the crowds; you go on ahead, and after I've sent the crowds away I'm going to go pray. I'll find you later."

They had not been happy, though, especially because he could see the questions none of them put into words: how long will it be before we see him again? and how are we supposed to know when to come back and get him? or where will he catch a ride across the lake if we're not supposed to come back for him? And though none of them mentioned it, they all knew, standing there on the hillside above the shore, that the pleasant eastern breeze of the morning was strengthening, and that crossing the lake now meant a stiff five-mile pull at the oars into an obstinate headwind, and that at the end of a long and tiring day. But he was their rabbi, and so they got in their boat, under the curious gaze of the crowd, and wearily began to toil their way toward the far shore.

He stood and watched for a moment, then turned to the crowd. He blessed them there in the deepening dusk, then said firmly, "I must be alone to pray. I am going up to the top of the mountain. You must allow me to be alone."

He knew that they would not follow. But he also knew that they would not leave, not all of them. He knew without looking that they were taking up stations, each man and boy making a guess about where Jesus might be headed next, and each finding a post where he could watch the road or path he thought Jesus most likely to take. He knew that many of them expected him to head for the other shore to meet up with the Twelve, and therefore that every fishing village and boat between Gennesaret and Capernaum would be closely watched.

And he would have congratulated this latter group on their perspicacity, in at least one respect: they were quite right that he intended to cross the Sea and meet back up with the Twelve.

He just wasn't going to use a boat.

He chuckled to himself as he topped the summit of the hill, and then, with unspeakable relief at having finally found the solitude he had so longed for, he entered into communion with his Father.

It was well after midnight when he rose to his feet. The moon rode high in the sky and the steady eastern wind swept the dark hair back from his face as he walked calmly down the hill. The trampled grass now lay empty in the ghostly moonlight; most of the crowd had gone home or fallen asleep, and those who still watched were watching the roads, not the empty shore. Confidently he strode across the grass, and then across the white rocks at the water's edge, and then out onto the sea itself.

He wanted to be at the other side before the first pre-dawn stirrings of the fisherfolk. The hunt would be on again soon, and he wanted to have some rest time before he was found. He strode across the water with the long, deceptively easy, ground-devouring stride of the lifelong country dweller, the wind in his face, the three-foot whitecaps sinking respectfully ahead of him to ease his path. He mused to himself that the Twelve were no doubt having a rough time of it -- he knew they had already been tired when they set out, and rowing into a headwind was no picnic even when one was fresh. It was not part of his plan to raise inconvenient questions by arriving at the eastern shore in a boat that had left the western shore without him, but still, he planned to check on them en route.

He was still quite some distance from landfall when he caught sight of the boat ahead of him in the moonlight.

He shook his head in sympathy as he drew near them, unnoticed in the night despite the full moonlight. He could see from the very movements of the rowers that they had reached that stage of exhaustion in which one strains at the oars with wasted and inefficient motion because one is too tired to muster the form and leverage that make a boat leap eagerly forward at one's every stroke. Still, they had spent their lives as fishermen, and tired as they were, and slow as their progress was, his critical eye judged that they were going to be fine. And he was running out of time; he needed to reach the other shore. He smiled to himself and lengthened his stride as he started to move on past them, bearing some twenty or thirty yards to their left, and then he saw Thomas's head turn in his direction.

He started to raise his hand to give Thomas a friendly wave, but before his hand could rise above his waist, the oar had fallen from Thomas's hand, and the wind carried across the waves Thomas's shriek of pure terror. A moment later every oar was abandoned and every eye fixed in horror on Jesus, and above all the outcry rose Judas's piercing tenor: "A ghost! God save us all, a ghost!"

Ah, well, it was an understandable reaction, after all. He held up his hands in reassurance and called to them, "No, no, it's me -- don't be afraid, it's me, Jesus. I'm not a ghost." He changed course and took a couple of steps toward the boat, drawing near enough to make out their faces in the full moonlight, then paused to take stock of their emotional state.

They fell mostly silent, though their expressions still betrayed terror and confusion. He could hear Thomas and Peter arguing vehemently, though, both talking at once and at speed; and he realized that Peter, bless his heart, was already convinced that it was really Jesus -- but Thomas was having none of it; everyone knew water wouldn't hold the weight of a living man. A moment later Jesus laughed out loud in purest delight as he realized that Peter had leaped to exactly the sort of practical refutation that would of course have occurred to Peter, even though it would never have occurred to a single other person in the whole wide world. "Well, you don't think I'm a ghost, do you?" demanded Peter of Thomas, and then without waiting for an answer he swung around and called to Jesus:

"Rabbi, if it's really you, why don't you command me to come out there with you?"

Merriment danced in Jesus' voice: "Certainly, Peter, come on out."

And sure enough, Peter hopped out of the boat, just as Jesus had known he would -- and Jesus now began to stride swiftly toward Peter, since he also knew that after the first moment of impetuosity had passed, it would sink in on Peter that Thomas did, after all, have rather a point about the whole water-holding-the-weight-of-living-men bit. Peter took one step, then two, then a third...and then Jesus saw self-awareness dawning on Peter's face, saw the moment when Peter's eyes flickered to one side and widened at the sight of the whitecaps, saw Peter start to pitch forward as at his next step his foot was seized by the suddenly ravenous and heaving water -- and then Jesus caught Peter's wrist as Peter fell.

He pulled Peter up beside him, the corners of his mouth twitching. "Peter...only three steps?" he teased his abashed, and still wide-eyed, disciple affectionately. "Why did you run out of faith so fast? What made you start doubting?"

He looked at the disciples in the boat, and he looked at the shore shadowy in the distance, still a mile or so off. There wasn't much time, but after all of this it was obvious that they would be in no shape to function if he were simply to drop Peter off at the boat and then walk on. A silent consultation with his Father, and then after helping Peter back into the boat, he climbed in himself: his Father had agreed; the disciples could hitch a ride with Jesus. And so, as he eased himself over the gunwhale, the wind sighed away into nothingness, like an exhausted, already half-asleep man sinking into a soft bed at the end of a long day.

He patted Thomas on the shoulder.

They searched for words. "Rabbi...you...you really are the Son of the Most High..."

He smiled. "Let's get to shore."

The sea lay ahead of them like glass. They scrambled to the oars, and at the first stroke the boat leaped forward like a dolphin at play, rushing toward the shore like a lover at day's end who sees his beloved waiting on the threshold with open arms and eager eyes. They were there, almost as quickly as thought. They beached the boat.

"And now," said the Son of God, "I think we could all use some sleep."

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Author's notes may be found here, if you're curious about the degree to which this retelling has a factual basis.