“other boats were with him…”
I am now back home after attending two very good, very different events. One was the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina, and the other was the Mennonite Church Canada Assembly in Winnipeg, Manitoba. At the Assembly I was especially moved by Betty Pries’ presentation on Saturday morning, and by the various worship times in which we were immersed, again and again, in the story of Jesus and his disciples in a boat in the middle of a storm (Mark 4:35-41). In each worship time – with word, song, visuals, soundscapes, symbolic action – we experienced the whole story and focused on a particular phrase/element (“Leave… Go…”; “Teacher, don’t you care?!”; “Why are you afraid?”; “Have you still no faith?”; “Peace! Be Still!”). I was (and am) deeply moved and very grateful – those worship times, so ably planned and led, “placed” us right where we needed to be for the discernment that was before us each day. There was one phrase that kept sticking out, for me, from that Scripture reading – a phrase that we didn’t explore in those worship times, but that I have been pondering ever since. “Other boats were with him.” After teaching a large crowd “beside the sea” (Mk 4:1-34), Jesus says to his disciples: “‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.” (Mk 4:35-36). We are told nothing of these “other boats.” How many were there? Who was in them? How did THEY experience and navigate the storm? How did THEY relate to Jesus? We do not know. The narrative is focused entirely on the drama of Jesus and his disciples in one particular boat. And yet there is that tantalizing hint: “Other boats were with him.” In the midst of the details of our own dramas and discernment, and the struggles and dynamics in our particular “boat” (church, denomination), we are subtly but unmistakably reminded: We’re not the only ones. “Other boats were with him.” I think of Luke 24, after Jesus’ death and resurrection, where two disciples are on the road to Emmaus, and they encounter a stranger who turns out to be Jesus himself. When they hurry back to Jerusalem to tell what had happened to them, they discover that Jesus had not only appeared to them, but to others as well. “Other boats were with him…” I am also reminded of the prophet Amos, who says: “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the LORD. Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7) “Other boats were with him…” It turns out these hints (and more than hints) are seeded all over the place throughout the Scriptures....
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