Mark 4:35-41 and "intertext" reading
An exercise in method
What does it mean to read a Bible passage “intertextually”?
Straightforwardly, intertextual reading is the method of reading one focal passage in the light of one or more other texts. A good intertextual reading is mutually illuminating—both texts shed light on one another.
But how do you choose them?
When you’re writing an academic paper, there are some rules. And part of that work is entering the scholarly discussion of what those rules should be. Another part is stating your goal (e.g. Are you asking how Text B receives, quotes, alludes to, develops, or subverts Text A?)
When you’re writing a homily, you can (and should) take for granted that the whole canon, made up of both testaments, is the inspired Word of God, and that the Holy Spirit still witnesses to Jesus and leads us into truth through spiritual reading of the texts.
I do this naturally because this is how my mind makes sense of things. And, ever since I read this book in 2015, I have been making it a personal craft. As I prepare my last homily as a priest of Christ Our Hope Valparaiso before moving to Philadelphia, I want to take the opportunity to reflect on method. Here is the text:
Mark 4:35-41
On that day, when evening had come, [Jesus] said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
1. The texts given in the Lectionary
This is a forced exercise, but the happy kind of forced. It means playing the same game as every other preacher who lives on Lectionary time. They’re all going to be reading Job 38:1-16; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; and 2 Cor. 5:14-21. Of the three, the first two are chosen to match the vibe of the gospel (so Fr. Hans Boersma has told me), and the epistle is a consecutive reading that, if it vibes, makes for a happy surprise.
Job 38 begins with God asking of Job, “Who is this?” (v. 2) which sounds like the last line of Mark 4: “Who then is this?” Then God talks about his own corralling of the sea (vv. 8-11).
Psalm 107 has been clipped in order to focus on sea stuff. The psalmist exhorts those “whom he has redeemed from trouble” to give thanks to the Lord (v. 2). The lectionary passes over the profiles of three kinds of redeemed people:
“Some wandered in desert wastes” (v. 4),
“Some sat in darkness” (v. 10),
“Some were fools through their sinful ways” (v. 17), and finally,
“Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters” (v. 23). For them, God “commanded and raised the stormy wind” when “their courage melted away,” and “they reeled and staggered like drunken men and were at their wits’ end” (vv. 25-27). The clearest line: “He made the storm be still” (v. 29).
I take the lectionary texts as preaching prompts, homiletical guidance from the Tradition. Here are the broad strokes: The sea is a place for business (Psalm 107:23), which provokes existential questions (“Who is this?” Job 38:2; Mark 4:41), and differentiates God as the one who corrals the chaotic waters. This is one of at least four kinds of danger that God redeems people from (contra. deserts, darkness, and foolishness; Psalm 107:4-22).
2. The texts that are obvious structural partners within the book
Mark is structurally interesting for lots of reasons. For one, he tells four pairs of partnered stories:
Two stories about leaving crowds, getting into boats, and corralling the sea at nighttime (4:35-41; 6:45-52)
Two stories about feeding thousands (6:30-44; 8:1-10)
Two stories about exorcising children (7:24-30; 9:14-29)
Two stories about healing a blind man (8:22-26; 10:46-52)
Why does Mark do this? I don’t know. But after five more months of Ordinary Time, maybe I’ll have an idea.
How does knowing that 4:35-41 is Episode I of two episodes of Sea Stories help me understand it better? I don’t know. But when two things present themselves as similar, you look for potentially significant differences. And when two things present themselves as sequenced, you look for conceptual development.
The first thing that makes me curious about Episode II (6:45-52) is the explanation of the disciples’ astonishment at the end: “They were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves (cf. the Loaves story 6:30-44), but their hearts were hardened (cf. Jesus brings this up at 8:17).”
By ch. 2, the scribes who watch Jesus forgiving “question in their hearts,” and Jesus doesn’t like the direction it’s going (2:6, 8). When they watch Jesus healing on the Sabbath, looking to accuse him, Jesus is “grieved at their hardness of heart” (3:5). He hopes, it seems, that what he does with the loaves (6:30-44) will address his disciples’ hardness of heart (8:14-17). This is relevant because there is something about the disciples’ fear in Sea Story II (6:45-52) that indicates that they haven’t learned the (apparently heart-softening) lesson of the loaves. That’s interesting because “fear” is one of the differences across the two stories.
In Sea Story II, Jesus doesn’t say “Why are you so afraid (deilos)?” (4:40) but “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid (phobeō)” (6:50). Phobeō is common, the Greek root of our “phobia,” and appears in Mark twelve times. Deilos is less common, and I prefer glossing it as “cowardly.”
Why? A few reasons:
If phobeō is Mark’s more common term for fear, and he chooses deilos in this instance, I think he wants us to understand it in a more nuanced way.
Elaine Heath thinks so. She puts this to work in her book, The Mystic Way of Evangelism. She understands this state of anxiety not as fear itself, but the state of being easily driven by fear. She translates deilos, “anxiety.”
The only other appearance of deilos in the New Testament seems to corroborate this understanding. In Revelation 21:8, these are among the people who are prepared for the second death: “the cowardly (deilois), the faithless, the detestable…” The “coward” is not the one who has a fear, or who is afraid, but whose character is, in its final form, determined by its capitulation to that which it is afraid of.
Psalm 107:23-30, which describes the experience of those who are storm-tossed at sea, attests that “their courage melted away in their plight” (v. 26).
Among the appearances of deilos (cowardice) and deilois (the cowardly ones) in other Greek literature, I’m interested in its appearances in The Odyssey. For one, I like The Odyssey, and, for another, it features men calling other men deilois while they’re on the water. The term is derogatory, and translated, “You wretched ones,” or “You vile ones,” implying that the ways in which the men’s fears and anxieties have rendered them worthless. This use of “wretched” reminds me of the epilogue of Les Misérables: “For the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest day will and and the sun will rise.” (Maybe we should sing this on Sunday lol.) But even in these instances, there are expressions of what could be called pity or compassion, not bravado. It is always “Poor wretches.” Maybe not words we’d use today, but, then wasn’t today.
The fact that Mark switches between these two internal states, deilos and phobeō, suggests to me that he thinks the difference matters. And the fact that Sea Story I features the wind and the waves, whereas Sea Story II only features wind, makes me think that the combination of “the wind and the waves” is a key. This leads me to more intertextual possibilities:
3. The OT texts that introduce this text’s idioms and concepts
“The wind and the waves” was a thing before Mark. That’s worth reading about.
Job 26:5-13 is a good place to start. It addresses the Lord’s authority over “the shades (refaim) below” and “the waters and their inhabitants” (v. 5). This smells like Mark.
Mark is about Jesus rebuking spirits, and the fact that he “rebukes” (Mark 4:39) the wind and the sea, read in concert with Job 26:5 suggests that his rebuke of the wind and the sea includes a rebuke of water shades, etc. Further down in the Job passage, God “binds up the waters” (v. 8), and the pillars of heaven “are astounded at his rebuke” (vv. 8, 11).
Perhaps most helpful are the final two verses: “By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he struck down Rahav. By his wind the heavens are made fair” (Job 26: 12-13a).
This introduces a curious difference. Earlier in the Old Testament, when the wind and the waves show up together, it’s God’s wind stilling the chaotic waves. See Genesis 8:1, “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind (ruach) blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.” And earlier, “Spirit (ruach) of God hovered over the face of the waters.”
God’s wind settles the sea, but it also stirs it up. Remember this curious scene in Jonah (1:4-6), interlaced with my own comments.
“But the Lord hurled a great wind (Gk: pneuma, for Heb: ruach) upon the sea, and there was a mighty (megas, cf. Mark 4:37, “mighty [megalē] wind”) tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.
Then the mariners were afraid (ephobēthēsan, from phobeō), and each cried out to his god. And they hurled (ekbolēn, cf. translated “cast out” throughout Mark) the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep (sleep is ekatheuden, cf. Mark 4:38, katheiudōn).
So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish (apolōmetha; cf. Mark 4:38, Do you not care that we are perishing [apollumetha]?).”
So there’s a lot. Jonah is “sleeping” on a boat, when a “mighty” storm rises, related to wind. There is “fear,” and the sailors’ response is “casting out.” There is an appeal to the sleeping Jonah to do something, with a concern about “perishing.”
Whereas “casting out” (4x) is a feature of Jonah 1, and a feature of Mark more generally, the opposite is the case in Mark 4:35-41. Instead of casting out cargo, or a person, Jesus stands and delivers his rebuke. This omission and subversion makes the subtle point that, when Jesus is in the boat, you don’t need a scapegoat, you need Jesus.
This matters especially because of the following story in Mark, which is an optional extension of our gospel lection. In Mark 5:1-20, Jesus addresses a demoniac who had been scapegoated by and cast out from his community. After Jesus heals the man, the community tries to get Jesus to leave. Jesus will “cast out” demonized crowds from (e.g.) the temple (ch. 11), but he does not quell storm gods by scapegoating and casting out other people.
Jonah goes on to pledge to sing a song of thanksgiving for his deliverance (2:9), just like the psalmist urges (Psalm 107).
4. Apostolic Application
In my seminary preaching class, we were supposed to be making “practical applications.”
Some of my classmates bucked against this, using the “Religion says do; Jesus says done” line. I bucked against this because the applications we were taught to make were frustratingly specific: “Ask God to give you the name of one person you one person to forgive.”
I knew from (spiritual) experience that the way the Holy Spirit uses texts is so broad, and it’s ridiculous to give a room of people the same spiritual advice. I also knew, as a teacher, that this felt like giving kids kids a worksheet instead of teaching them to read and reflect on the book themselves.
So I needed to find a better way to “do” application.
In my investigation of how to apply Scripture to a whole room of people, I was interested in the Medieval fourfold sense of Scripture. (Here’s a Catholic view; here’s a Protestant view.) The literal sense addresses the historical question: What happened? Then three spiritual senses: the allegorical sense addresses articles of faith; the tropological, or moral, sense addresses matters of love; and the anagogical sense discovers future-oriented images of hope. Here is a quick and dirty on Mark 4:35-41, as an example:
Literal: One night, Jesus demonstrated power over the sea.
Allegorical: The wind and the waves are the chaotic powers of nature and of the spiritual world. The text shows us Jesus’s divine power over them, and witnesses that he is the Son of God. Believe that Jesus has the power of God.
Moral: Jesus’s responses—peaceful sleep, waking up, rebuking, proclaiming peace—show us, in an improved version of Jonah, how to carry ourselves in the storms of life, especially toward those who are anxious and are in the same boats as us. Take the courage to invoke the power of God in the madness of the world.
Anagogical: The men in the boat are not faithless, but they are types of the martyrs who are crying, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10) as they see the chaotic powers “filling” (Mark 4:37) our boat with injustice and with blood. Jesus’s series of actions—awake, rebuke, proclaim peace—symbolize his sudden and triumphant return. Join the martyrs’ prayer. While there are some storms we can weather, there are others we can’t, and people really are perishing while Jesus does not intervene to save them.
Fortunately, as a priest in a BCP-using parish, I’m able to give a “practical application” that’s simply: “Do the rest of the liturgy.” Each of the applications listed above have a corollary in the liturgy:
Believe in Jesus by… confessing your faith in the words of the Nicene Creed.
Love your neighbor by… praying for them (election cycles, international wars, SBC drama) in the Prayers of the People and by “going in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
Join the martyrs’ prayer by… praying for the dying people in over-filled boats around the world when it comes time for the prayers of the people.
That’s easy.
But still, a preacher could do more.
Anyway, I’m toying with an idea that I’m calling “Apostolic application.” That is, finding the places in the epistles that are the most promising intertexts for the gospel lection. And I think this week’s are fairly simple. It turns out that, in addition to being an OT concept, “the wind and the waves” was a NT concept, too.
“The wind and the waves” factor into St. Paul’s vision for Christian maturity in Ephesians 4:1-16. Here is an excerpt of the passage:
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Paul would see the Church grow up “in every way” and “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” a consequence of which will be that we will…
no longer be children
not be tossed to and fro by the waves
not be carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.
Paul takes the Homeric notion of the “poor wretched ones” (deilois) and enfamiliates it: “You aren’t a wretch, you’re just a child in this community.”
Paul doesn’t describe the waves. I think “waves” still just refers to the general chaos of life. You know how life be.
Paul does describe the wind. The wind, as in Genesis, Job 26, and Mark, is related to spirits and demons. Being “carried about” isn’t the issue. Peter describes prophets (cf. Eph. 4:11) as “carried about by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). Wind isn’t bad. Bad wind is bad. And “bad wind” in Mark meant demons, unclean spirits, and demonized crowds. Cast that ish out. Rather, per St. John, “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). God gives prophets (Eph. 4:11), and part of speaking the truth in love (v. 15) means testing whether the prophets (etc.) in the community are carried about by the Holy Spirit or by other spirits: demons like Mastemah and Beelzebul, water shades who like messing with people, or the various spirits of the age.
Ephesians doesn’t describe casting someone out of the community—Matthew does, John does, but Ephesians doesn’t. What Ephesians has in view is a community which is “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (v. 3). The bad guys in Ephesians are the cosmic powers of spiritual darkness (1:21; 3:10; 6:12); their prince (2:2); the crafty and the cunning (4:14); and the flaming dart-weilding evil one (6:16).
No matter who you are—Jew or Gentile, slave or free, husband or wife, man or child—you can speak the truth in love and achieve unity.
This makes it possible to read Jesus’s words in Mark 4:39-40 as an example of speaking the truth in love. Jesus awakes (cf. “Awake, O sleeper!” Eph. 5:14) and addresses three subjects:
He rebukes the wind.
He says to the sea, “Peace! Be still!”
He interrogates his disciples’ cowardice (deilos) and questions whether they yet have faith.
Notably, Jesus does not rebuke his disciples or cast them out, nor does he tell them what to do, but he attends to their souls, which he understands to be on the way toward faith.
This fills them with great fear (phobon megan). Now here is a sermon concept: “From cowardliness to great fear: How Jesus speaks the truth in love.” This is not Jesus gentle and lowly—which he sometimes is—but Jesus stern and frank, yet no less attentive to the soul (“Why are you so afraid?”) and to progress toward perfection in the faith (“Have you still no faith?”).
Discerning what it means, at any given time, to “speak the truth in love,” is in a manner of speaking, the whole question of Church ethics, at least in Ephesians, and it’s good to read Mark 4:35-41 as shedding light on that question.
Another “apostolic application” text is James 1:5-7, as it also invokes the wind and the waves:
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
Paul offers us a picture of the spiritual child, tossed by waves and carried about by winds.
James offers us a picture of the doubting, double-minded, or unstable man who is like a wave of the sea, both “wind-driven” (anemizomenō) and “tossed about.” Time’s “scorching wind” (kausōni) withers the grass and all beauty perishes. Whereas Paul addresses the community (Ephesians 4:1-16), James addresses the individual (James 1:1-18).
Like Paul, James gives a picture of steadiness under trial (perhaps more wave than wind), that must stand steady under the scorching pain of mortality that lends trials and tribulations their sting. Movement, in James, may movement toward sin (vv. 12-15). Steadiness is a righteous plantedness that receives God’s gifts and brings forth good fruit. Both apostles aim at perfection: “Let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (v. 4).
5. Texts with existential resonance
To what human situations does this text apply?
I mean, to all of them, in so far as we live in a windy, wavy world.
But, for the Psalmist, God’s redemption looks different from the “desert” (107:4-9), from the “darkness and in the shadow of death” (v. 10-16), from “foolishness” (v. 17-22), and from “the sea” and its “stormy wind” and “waves” (23-30). The people who “went down to the sea in ships,” like the sailors in Jonah 1, were “doing business on the great waters” (v. 23).
Most of us don’t do business on the great waters, although we should pray for those who do, as it remains dangerous.
But those who put themselves “out there,” who make themselves subject to the forces of chaos, the demonized crowds, and the spirits of the age—who subject themselves willingly or otherwise to “the wind and the waves”—live as if they are “doing business on the great waters.”
I think of my parishioners who have fundraised salaries, who are hoping for administrators to give them tenure, who are trying to find men to marry, who are spoken to badly by their families, who are trying to keep alive desires for further education and ministry, who are looking for places to rent with non-predatory landlords.
I think of my own four-month job search, which has made me feel, like Ruth, at the mercy of landowning “mighty men” in a foreign-feeling environment.
I remember that the first blessing given in Scripture is the blessing given by God to the fish (Genesis 1:22). In The Lion and the Ass, Leon Kass says that God blesses fish first because of the inherent danger of navigating the dark waters in order to carve out a life. The meaning of the blessing of the humans (by God in Genesis 1; by priests today) is at least inclusive of the blessing of the fish.
Thomas Jefferson expressed his wariness of merchant-life as he praises farmers (here, “cultivators”) in his 1781 Notes on the state of Virginia.
I think that engaging key documents that introduce or establish the various spirits of a particular time or place helps to address the question, What does this (Bible) text mean today?
Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phænomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
This bridges the gap, and at least helps us read the figure of sailor (cf. Jonah 1; Mark 4) and those “doing business on the great waters” of Psalm 107:23-30, in an American context. Jefferson would say “Don’t do it,” with the same energy that a parent asks their child, “Are you sure you want to major in English?”
Choosing a life of dependence subjects one (unnecessarily?) to the storms of life, and, per Jefferson, susceptibility to “subservience” and “ambition.” Is it possible to foster virtue in a life of harnessing the wind, that is, depending on the “caprice of customers”?
Jefferson says “No.” The American dream without frills, which is perhaps the American virtue, is to achieve individual economic stability based on a steady stream of income from a reliable source of capital.
Mark knows no such world. His Jesus does not question whether we should be getting into boats at all. His Jesus enters the boat and endures the storms with us.
Jesus’s goal is to convert our cowardliness to the fear that produces faith.
And the apostolic goal is the perfection of that faith, grown up in every way; achieving the fullness of the stature of the Christ who rebukes the waves and says “Peace! Be still!” to the sea; speaking the truth in love, stable, upbuilding, fruit-bearing, dying yet rejoicing.
Conclusion
That was a long exercise. But it produced a list of inter-texts with which to read Mark 4:35-41 and drew out some keys to the spiritual meaning of the text:
The Odyssey
Genesis 1
Genesis 8
Ruth 2
Job 26
Job 38
Psalm 127
Jonah 1
Mark 6
Ephesians 4
James 1
2 Peter 1
1 John 4
Revelation 6
Revelation 21
Thomas Jefferson’s 1781 Notes on the state of Virginia
The epilogic reprise of “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Misérables
As always, I have no idea how I’ll preach this.