Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

‍Jesus said to Peter: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” The “little faith” of the disciples is a theme that runs through the Gospel of Matthew.  Matthew has Jesus using the concept five times always in relation to the disciples.

Littleness of faith does not mean utter lack of faith; the disciples waver back and forth throughout the gospel.  The specific nature of the “little faith” varies from passage to passage.  In chapter 6, the problem is worry over material welfare; in chapter 8, it is fear in the face of physical danger; in chapter 16 it is lack of understanding; in chapter 17 it is lack of confidence in God’s power in the face of a demon.

In today’s passage, it is again lack of confidence in divine power, this time combined with fear, as Peter loses heart in his attempt to join Jesus in walking on the water.  It is precisely that element of losing heart that distinguishes this passage from the others, because Peter is initially able to walk this miraculous kind of walk but allows doubt to overcome him when the going gets tough.

Fear is present throughout the story.  The disciples are at first terrified when they see Jesus, in the night, walking on the sea; they think he is a ghost.  We can thus see and hear that sense of the awesome and terrifying mystery of the holy as an important component in religious experience.  It is a sense of the utter otherness and inexpressibility of the divine, an unsettling combination of difference, fear and fascination in the face of ultimate mystery.  Such as we see in the call of Isaiah in the temple, where Isaiah says,

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple.  Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.  And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.  And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’

The fear and understanding of difference are here expressed by the perception of Jesus as a ghost, but they are balanced by his comforting words: “Take heart; it is I; do not be afraid.” 

The disciples by now know Jesus and trust him, even if their faith remains incomplete.  Thus, for him to say, “It is I” is to bring their fear and awesomeness of the scene under control by relating it to what is familiar.  This is the Jesus with whom they have walked and shared bread, who has offered compassion to the suffering and fed the hungry, even though he has also spoken words of judgment.

Peter’s fear, however, seems to be of another sort, a more mundane timid state of mind in the face of physical danger.  Here again, as in the story of the feeding of the five thousand, it is doubt, doubt about what human beings can do by making use of the divine power to which they have access, which undermines the accomplishment of a task. 

In the feeding of the 5000, it is a ministry to the hungry that is momentarily delayed, but here it is something that Peter himself has desired that is undermined.  It was Peter who asked to join Jesus on the water.  He did so, however, in full knowledge that he needed Jesus’ help in order to accomplish the feat, as we can see in the fact that he asks Jesus to command him to do it.  ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’  And yet, in the face of the wind, he loses heart and begins to sink.

Although he has clearly earned the title of “little faith”, he has confidence enough in Jesus to ask again for help: “Lord, save me”.  Thus we might suspect that his lack of faith was less in Jesus’ ability to unilaterally perform mighty deeds than in the process of divine-human cooperation.  This is an unwillingness to trust what he could do when empowered by Jesus.  We should not think of this as a simple lack of confidence in himself.

To understand the reading in this manner is to challenge the tendency in our culture to overemphasize the power of the individual will: a bit of illusionary idolatry that we might call the “you can be anything you want to be” or “believe in yourself”. 

As important as it is to teach children to dream big dreams and make use of their capacities, it is equally important both to avoid creating unrealistic expectations and to dispel the illusion of self-sufficiency.

I have no doubt that I might have accomplished more in some areas of life if I had worked harder at them.  I am also equally certain that no amount of effort on my part would have made me a star player in the Australian cricket team, a competent theoretical physicist, or a great musician, an historian of note; however much I might have desired to be such!

Faith requires of us to walk the tightrope of self-sufficiency verses total dependency by fostering a sense of interdependence.  We are not what we are as a result of simple self-creation, nor are we the helpless products of genes, social conditioning, or divine direction.  We are all parts of larger wholes that contribute to our evolution as who we are but which leave room for our individual decisions and actions.  Social systems, from the immediate circle of families to whole societies, both open us to possibilities and limit our options. 

In the end, we, like all entities in the universe, are parts of the universal whole from which our being and our power to act derive.  The self-made individual is an illusion, but no more so than the passive cog in a machine beyond our control.  Those who attribute everything to God or society or genes and those who claim self-sufficiency are equally wrong.

At the end of the story, the disciples worship Jesus and proclaim him Son of God, thus anticipating Peter’s definitive declaration later in Matthew’s gospel: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

This confession of faith by the disciples, in the reading this morning, is presumably a response to all that they have seen Jesus do so far.  It is now brought to a head by the dramatic events portrayed: the walking on the water, the rescue of Peter and the sudden cessation of the wind as Jesus and Peter get into the boat.  It is, also, a clear advance over the disciples’ reaction to Jesus’ miraculous powers when he calmed the winds and the sea in chapter 8: “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and sea obey him?”

The disciples have thus come to a much clearer understanding of Jesus’ identity, and that is a step forward in their faith development.  However, just as in chapter 8, Jesus still makes the charge of “little faith” and will continue to do so.  Although they have made progress in one dimension of their faith, they are lacking in others; and one of those dimensions appears to be a failure to believe what Jesus can do through them.

Peter’s failure might have been that he was thinking too individualistically.  The desire to walk on the water with Jesus was, after all, Peter’s idea, not Jesus’!  As well as that his request was only for himself, not his fellow disciples.  Why did he want to do this?  To prove his own faith as a matter of pride or simply to get in on the bandwagon of deeds of power? 

His problem I think was a failure to accept our essential connectedness.  The truth is that when we deny our connectedness whether to God or our fellow creatures, we end up losing our individuality as well.  Without access to the power that comes from outside us, our limited power is cut off from its sources.  Conversely, when we deny the degree of power that we do in fact have, by thinking that others or God must do all the work, we also lose the channel through which to work cooperatively.