Jesus seems superhuman, but is superhuman the right way to describe him?
Is there something more going on? If so, what does that mean for us?
Jesus is more than super-human. But what does that mean?
All Age Intro:
Olympic Top Trumps
Who would win…? In which category?
Usain Bolt
Won 8 gold medals including both 100m and 200m in three successive Olympic games.
He still holds the 100m and 200m world records.
He ran 100m in 9.58s.
Laura Kenny
In terms of her 5 gold medals, is the most successful, female cyclist in Olympic history.
Michael Phelps
Won 28 medals including 23 gold medals,
top US swimmer. Nearest anyone else has come is 9 gold medals.
Categories: cycling, swimming, running
We would describe these people as kind of super human.
Human beings like you and me, but absolutely superb in certain areas,
better than anyone else at cycling, swimming or running.
They can do things beyond what normal human beings can do.
In top trumps, they win hands down in their category.
Jesus, top trumps… (So far in Mark’s gospel)Makes
Mark’s gospel has been showing us the things that Jesus was doing.
Jesus was clearly a human being like everyone else,
but he seemed to be super human,
to be able to do things that went beyond what normal human being can do.
So far Mark has already shown us Jesus:
Making lepers clean,
Making lame walk,
Casting out a legion of demons
Calming a storm
Bringing back a girl from the dead
Feeding 5,000 people with a pack lunch…
and now,
Walking on water…
Jesus seems superhuman, but is superhuman the right way to describe him?
Is there something more going on? If so, what does that mean for us?
Jesus walking on the water
Re-tell the story… With props…?
Three questions:
Why did Jesus make the disciples go off without him?
Why does Jesus walk on water?
Why were the disciples completely amazed?
Why does Jesus walk on water?
Card – turn around – ‘I am…’
Jesus healed people to make them better.
Jesus cast out demons to set people free.
Jesus calmed a storm to save them from drowning.
Jesus raised the girl to bring her back to life.
Jesus fed people because they were hungry.
Jesus did all these things to help people.
But walking on the water did little to help anyone,
if any miracle was done just for the sake of showing off this was it!
So, why does he walk on water?
It seems that at this moment,
Jesus does seem to want to show them something about himself,
to really push their understanding of who he is even further.
So, what is he trying to show them?
Well, the fact is walking on water is not just super human.
Usain Bolt can run incredibly fast, but he cannot walk on water.
Michael Phelps can swim through water at incredible speeds,
but he cannot walk on water.
Jesus is doing what no human being can do unaided.
But that is the point.
Jesus is not acting as a human, but as God.
In the Old Testament,
the part of the Bible that talks about before Jesus came,
the scriptures from which the disciples would have learnt about God,
there is a book called Job and in chapter 9,
Job reflects on how much greater than man God is and includes this line:
“He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea…” (Job 9:8)
In walking on the water, Jesus was revealing that he was not super-human,
rather he was human, but also Divine, man and God combined.
He was pushing his disciples to think more deeply about who he really was.
Some commentators also suggest that the details of the story also point to this idea that Jesus was showing himself to be God.
The fact he was passing them by,
when they spotted him, rather than just coming to them,
shows that he was mimicking what God did when he revealed his true character to Moses, by passing by him.
Some also argue, that when Jesus says,
“Take courage! It is I! Don’t be afraid!”
The words he uses, for ‘It is I’ are literally, ‘I am’, the words used by God to describe his name, when he meets Moses in the burning bush.
Certainly, the only other time he says, ‘I am’ in Mark, is when he is asked directly by the Sanhedrin, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One”?
The disciples main need was not help crossing the lake,
it was help to understand that Jesus was far more amazing than they had
so far realised.
He wasn’t superhuman, he was God with us.
Why were the disciples completely amazed?
Why card… turn around hard heart…
This leads us to the next ‘Why’? Why were the disciples completely amazed.
After all, they had already seen Jesus do some amazing miracles.
Only the day before they had been involved in helping to feed 5,000 people with just a packed lunch.
His answer is that they had not really grasped what Jesus was doing with the miracle of the loaves.
Because in that he was also acting more like God than man.
In the Old Testament, Israel’s origins are bound up with God acting in power to rescue them from being slaves in Egypt.
He forced Pharaoh, the king of Egypt to let them go,
by sending 10 plagues on Egypt.
Then when Pharaoh chased Israel after they had left and trapped them
by the Red Sea,
God made a path through the sea, so Israel could cross on dry land,
but drowned the Egyptian army that followed them.
Then when they were in the wilderness,
God made sure they had food to eat by providing a special food called Manna for them to collect every morning.
So, Jesus feeding masses of people in the wilderness,
should have been a sign to the disciples that he was more than superhuman,
he was behaving like God, giving manna for Israel in the wilderness.
If they had realised the true significance of that miracle,
then they would not be surprised that if Jesus is the God of the Old Testament, who fed the people in the wilderness,
he also has the power to treat the sea as though it is dry land,
as he made it so Israel could cross the Red Sea and escape Pharaoh.
The sea was no barrier to Jesus, just as it was no barrier to the God of Moses,
because Jesus is not just super-human he is the God of Moses.
Why didn’t the disciples grasp the significance of what Jesus had already done?
Mark tells us it was because their hearts were hard.
Even those who had invested everything in following Jesus,
seemed unable to grasp who he really was.
The truth was just so amazing, so out there, so hard for them to take on board.
When it came to understanding who Jesus was,
they were out of their depth, they were all at sea.
But the story continues, the disciples stick with Jesus,
and bit by bit they come to understand who he really is.
You may be struggling to truly grasp the centrality of Jesus,
few people understand straight away.
But, if you keep coming to church, meeting with other Christians,
praying and reading the Bible,
then in the end God will enable your heart to be softened,
and your mind to understand who Jesus really is,
and in him you will find true connection with God.
Why did Jesus make the disciples go off without him?
Why? Rejected crown…
So, to the final, ‘why’.
Why did Jesus make the disciples go off without him?
After all they end up quite helpless without him there with them.
Notice that he did so before dismissing the crowd.
He wanted to separate them from the crowd,
then to move the crowd on.
In John’s gospel, we are told that the crowd wanted to make Jesus king,
and that would not be surprising after seeing him do such an amazing miracle.
Here was someone who seemed super-human,
surely he could act as our political leader and solve all our political problems?
The disciples might easily have gone along with this idea,
even later on it seems to be the kind of thing they are hoping for.
Without the full understanding of Jesus’ divinity,
it is easy to try and use Jesus’ superhuman powers,
to fit into your agenda.
Do you come to Jesus in order to make you feel better or improve your mental health,
do you come to Jesus, because you think it will make you richer,
do you, as some do, try and use Jesus to bolster your political cause?
When we see Jesus as just super-human we enlist him for our cause.
When we come to understand that he is the Almighty God,
we realise that he has come to enlist us to his cause.
Even Jesus, realised the pressure on him to fit into people’s expectations.
So, Jesus does not ride the wave of his success,
he does not play to the crowd.
He dismisses the crowd
and goes up the mountain by himself to pray,
to commune with God,
to embrace his divine nature and divine purpose.
When we find ourselves, excited by our success or pressurised by those around us to fit into their agendas,
we need to make prayer a priority.
Like Jesus, we need to turn again to God in prayer,
in order to re-orient ourselves and seek his direction
and his purpose for our lives.
How do we view Jesus? Superhuman or God with us?
If we see him as superhuman, then we just view him as a better version of ourselves:
a good man,
a great teacher,
a miracle maker.
These are all admirable characteristics, just as Usain Bolt, Laura Kenny and Mark Phelps have admirable characteristics. We may admire him, even want to learn from his teaching. But ultimately he is just another man,
we have no reason to follow him instead of other great human teachers, religious or otherwise.
But, when our hearts are no longer hardened, when we come to realise that Jesus is not just superhuman, but the God who created the universe, come to live among us,
then we see that his life, his teaching, his death and resurrection are not just good stories, but the transformational moment in human history.
We see that a relationship with him has the power to utterly transform our very existence.
Then even if like the disciples,
life feels like a hard slog and that we aren’t going anywhere,
we can discover that Jesus is still with us,
and as the Divine God, we can be confident that the future is in his hands.
we can hear his words to us:
“Take courage! I am! Do not be afraid!”
St. George's Church Ramsgate 