Brian and Kathy Emmet

By now it was dark … a strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough (John 6:17-18).

My beloved New England Patriots … Well, no Monday morning quarterbacking here.  Instead, Mondays are the start of a new Connect Devotional week.  We’ve just begun a new series called For Now/Forever, and our passage for the month of October is John 6.  The chapter begins with Jesus feeding an enormous crowd using the most microscopic of resources.  This week: Jesus walks on water.

You may be familiar with a credit card commercial, whose tagline is “What’s in your wallet?”  One of the questions our passage asks is, “Who’s in your boat?”

After the miraculous feeding, the crowd attempts to “make” Jesus the Messiah, by force if needed.  Jesus quickly dismisses the crowd, and the disciples, and heads off into the mountains by himself. The disciples are heading home to Capernaum.  It gets dark.  And cloudy.  The winds pick up, the waves rise.  It sounds like Genesis 1: if you’re in a small boat in a big storm, the world suddenly seems to have become “formless and void” and there certainly is “darkness over the face of the deep.”  John tells us that the disciples had rowed three or four miles: no easy task.  No landmarks are visible, the winds are against you, the waves make everything chaotic.

Suddenly, a figure approaches.  How do they even see it in the dark?  Must have gotten pretty close.  But this is impossible.  The only possible explanations are that it is a ghost or a spirit of some kind, or that they all have lost their minds due to the rising terror of their situation.

What brought order to the chaos-world of Genesis 1?  God spoke: “Light, be!  And there was light.”  What brings order to the chaotic world of a small boat on a terrifying sea.  God speaks: “Jesus said to them, “It is I; don’t be afraid’” (John 6:20).

The Greek for “It is I” is ego eimi; it literally means “I am.”  Either way of translating it is legitimate.  Does Jesus merely want his disciples to know that it’s him, their familiar teacher and leader?  Or is he signaling that their familiar teacher and leader is far, far more than what they think?  Starting in chapter 6, John records seven “I am” sayings of Jesus: I am the bread of life, the light of the world, the true vine, etc.  Maybe this passage is preparatory and introductory to that unfolding revelation of who Jesus is?

What happens next?  The disciples willingly welcome Jesus aboard their boat.  Jesus clearly could have kept wave-walking all the way back to Capernaum, but he’s happy to climb into their boat. “And immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading” (verse 21).

Is this another miracle, Jesus “teleporting” the boat straight to safe harbor?  Or is the point that, once you’ve welcomed Jesus into your storm-tossed boat, you have already arrived where you most need to be?

What’s happening in the boat of your life these days: from where are darkness, winds and waves coming at you?  How could you welcome Jesus aboard?  What is the true ‘destination’ that Jesus wants to get you to?