January 25, 2004
Igreja Nova Vida - Tampa, Florida
Delivered in Portuguese, reconstructed text

O maior susto (The Biggest Shock)

Mark 4:35-41

Before anything else I want to thank you for the warm reception you have given me tonight, and I want to thank you for that country where I have found my life.

What is in life, that shocks and surprises you the most? It might not be what you think it is. It wasn’t what you would think that night when Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee in a boat, as Mark tells the story.

I suppose we all have different experiences with boats. Mine have been with canoeing in Maine. This past year I got the benefit of one of my students, who comes from the commercial fishing life on the southern part of the Sao Paulo coastline, and who helped his class in its discussion of this passage. However, he is not to blame for anything that I have gotten wrong about boats.

Jesus was in the stern of the boat, seated on what was called the “pillow,” but we understand that this was the skipper’s seat. Sleeping in a storm is in fact normal, my student told me; professionals get used to the movement. The others in the boat go to wake him up. That is normal, too. They address him as “Teacher” or “Master,” which is normal for them, and they ask the normally urgent question: Don’t you care what is happening to us? You might ask this question to someone who can work a miracle, but you would ask the same question to someone who can help by bailing, or by bending an oar, or perhaps by steering the boat perpendicular to the oncoming wave, which is what we do on a Maine lake in a canoe. From the tone, it would seem that such a task may well have been what the boatmen/ disciples had in mind: It’s an emergency right now, and all hands are needed to work.

It wouldn’t have been their first emergency, even if were their worst emergency. These are people who have been in rough seas before. They are not unprepared, and in the emergency they get to work doing what they know how to do and pray that that will be enough. Religious language is on their lips, but they get to work immediately, without taking any time out for a sweet hour of prayer.

Jesus’ response is normal, too, but with a difference. Jesus doesn’t take any time out for a Socratic dialogue about faith; they will talk about faith later. Like the others, Jesus gets right to work, but it isn’t work with an oar or a bailing can: he commands the sea to knock it off, and a great calm suddenly ensues. It is time to say something about faith, and Jesus does so.

Now, Mark tells us, the fishermen are petrified. These veterans of rough water are terrified of the calm that one man’s word has produced. Wasn’t it just what they had prayed for? Of course it was. They had been ready for stormy weather; they had not been ready for the answer to their prayer.

Now somebody might think that what I have told you is some kind of accident about how Mark told the story. It isn’t an accident, and we can tell that from the very next episode in Mark, where practically the same thing happens again.

Mark tells us that the night crossing took them to the land of the Gergesenes, and they were met by a person who was out of control, just as the sea had been out of control. We conventionally refer to him as the Gergesene Demoniac. This man was a problem to everybody around him and above all he was a problem to himself. He raged and bellowed, and if he raged and bellowed up in the hills, down in the valley the people would hear the raging. Nothing would restrain him. They could put something like handcuffs on him, and he would simply break them. They could put shackles on his legs, and he would break them. Chains, irons, whatever, would be broken. When he threw his shackles off, his clothes fared no better. And for good or for ill, the people were used to it. When Jesus arrived in those parts, this wild man was there to meet him at the boat, with words of defiance. You know the story of how the legion of spirits entered into the pigs and the pigs rushed off the cliff. We can say they charged off that cliff; Mark uses a military word. To the end, those spirits were army spirits, so to speak.

Now what was the greatest shock for the people of that region, the Gergesenes? It wasn’t that man’s outrageous behavior, frightening as that must often have been. One might think it was the charge over the cliff, which must have adversely affected the local economy, but Mark doesn’t say that it was. When they saw the ex-crazy man, with his clothes on and in his rightful mind, then they were afraid. That’s what Mark says.

Once upon a time, and I won’t say where or when, there was a young married couple. They were very young. The husband went to work every day, and the wife stayed home. The wife had plenty to pray about. Every day, the husband left work at quitting time and went with his buddies to the corner botequim, where much beer was consumed. Eventually he would show up at home, under the influence and bringing what was left of his pay. The wife did everything. She pleaded, negotiated, wept, prayed, and wept some more. One fine day, for a reason that we shall never know, the husband came straight home from work, and there he was, in the house. It was exactly the thing that the wife had pled for, negotiated for, and prayed for. And what do you suppose this young woman said?

“What are you doing here?”

The divorce was not long in coming.

She had wept and prayed, prayed and wept; but she wasn’t ready for the answer to her prayer. Her story raises the question for us, whether we are ready for the answer to our prayers.

I remembered her story and Mark’s story in São Paulo, when I was invited to speak at a service of thanksgiving in the home of a family I knew. A young man, one of the sons of the family, had just returned from two months, if memory serves, in an Evangelical casa de recuperação, where he had been treated for drug addiction. It was his mother who organized the service and who invited me. It was a very important moment, and it was a privilege for me to be invited to speak. A moment like this is important because a change in the boy is not enough, and the family has to change too, has to adjust to living with a person who no longer has that problem. Will they? Will they accept the answer to their prayers? Will they believe in it? Mark’s story came to mind.

Are you ready for the answer to your prayers? God sends us some hard times, but God also sends us some very good moments. We don’t have to say much about the hard times. I cannot believe that anyone in the Nova Vida Church is not familiar with them. But God sends us good moments too. They may come as surprises, we may not be ready for them. Are you ready for them?

Are you ready for the answers to your prayers?

Archibald M. Woodruff

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 146