Tuesdays with Mark (6: 45-56)

We have two stories in this piece of scripture. First, Jesus walks on the water. Second, Jesus heals many people on the lakeside of Gennesaret.
I have never been able to get much out of Jesus walking on water, and I said that to the guys this morning. It is not that I don’t believe Jesus could walk on water—I believe that he could; it is that this story has always seemed rather magical to me and removed from my life.
It is until I remember where the disciples were when Jesus came walking on the water towards him. They are alone in a boat. A storm comes up and they are feeling vulnerable and at risk. They are afraid. They are pulling on the oars as hard as they can, but they are not getting anywhere. When I really get into the boat with them I know that I have had such moments in my own life. And like the disciples, I know that I sometimes don’t recognize Jesus when he comes to me. I don’t recognize him because he comes to me in ways that I didn’t expect, or maybe in ways that I didn’t think that I wanted.
Jesus was going to “pass them by,” but instead he gets into the boat with them and the waters calm down and all is well—right? No. It says in scripture, “And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves [this was the previous piece of scripture when Jesus fed the 5,000], but their hearts were hardened.”
This is where the conversation took off. “What does a hardened heart feel like?” I asked. I also asked when they had felt that their hearts were hardened against God, against their spouse or partner, against life itself. When our hearts get hardened our faith shrinks, our loves shrink, our commitments shrink, our joys shrink. It all shrinks, gets small and tight. And with a hardened heart we begin to look for yet more things, more infractions, more transgressions that will justify our hard hearts. And we will—this is a rule of life—see what we look for; we will find what we seek. If we want to have a hard heart with someone, we will be given plenty of evidence to substantiate our position.
But a hard heart is death. The death of all that is important.
I then asked the men how their hard hearts had been broken, how their hard hearts had been softened. Most of them talked about a friend or someone they love coming to them and challenging them to open up, to soften up, to see a bigger picture.
The second part of the story is about the response of the gentiles to Jesus. It says that the “whole region… began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard [Jesus] was.”
Mark wants us to see that the “insiders” had hard hearts and the “outsiders” had open hearts. The disciples had hard hearts because things didn’t go their way, because they were in a storm, because Jesus didn’t always act like they thought that he should, because… The “outsiders” get him and are open to him and receive multiple blessings from him.
Do you hear the warning? It is to the insiders, and that is to people like you and me, people who identify themselves as Christians, as disciples of Jesus. Yes, we may have faith, yes we may have given our lives to Jesus a long time ago; but we, like the disciples from long ago, can sometimes have hard hearts ourselves.
The piece of scripture invites us to look at the condition of our own hearts. Anger, resentment, entitlement, losses, disappointments, things not going our way, according to our plans—there are so many things that can harden our hearts. And with those hard hearts the disciples didn’t even see that Jesus had rescued them and that he was right there in the boat with them.
If all this talk about a hard heart in speaking to you, either in your relationship with God or with someone you love or work with, then I would invite you to go be alone (just like Jesus does in the first part of this story), and to remember all the ways you have been blessed, all the ways that God has come to you. An “attitude of gratitude” can soften your heart, whereas an attitude of hardness can poison you. We do have a choice. Everyday.