Beholding Jesus

Jesus Calms the Sea

This passage stuns me every time that I read it. It is perplexing because Jesus commanded the wind and the waves to be still. He disciplined them just like a parent would discipline a disobedient child. I think it’s fascinating to picture this scene because there are so many movies about being on a boat during a huge storm and so it’s easy to picture. But the difference between the movies and the scene 2000 years ago is the quality and make of the boat. It has to be a sturdy boat, but it can’t be very big. Picturing some of the waves being huge and just a small boat with frantic and scared disciples in it while Jesus is sleeping peacefully is almost funny because Jesus has to know what is going on. I almost can picture Jesus being awake but pretending to sleep… like peeking at the reactions of His disciples with one eye then closing it real quick when they look at Him.

If I would have been a disciple, I think I would have probably been scared, seasick, frantic, wet, cold, miserable, desperate for help and tired. Also I probably would have been expecting to drown if help wasn’t found. A question that I have about this story is I wonder how long Jesus had been with His disciples before this storm happened. They didn’t seem to have much faith in Him because when they woke Him up, it seems like it was their last resort. Kind of like, “Oh well I suppose Jesus could probably help us… why isn’t He awake? JESUS don’t you care about us?!” When Jesus woke up, He rebuked the weather and sea, and then He rebuked the disciples for not having enough faith.

I think everyone has gone through a season where they did not have a lot of faith in God to work things out in the midst of a storm that we are going through. I think of this, and wonder how many times Jesus would have rebuked me if I had been one of His disciples…  I feel like my faith would not have been so firm and my convictions not as strong. It makes me really stop to think about the kind of faith that His close friends had in Him and it makes me want to have that same faith. How great the faith of His disciples must have been to keep following Him regardless of what people said about them.

After Jesus stopped the storm, what would the disciples have felt like? I think maybe a little foolish, maybe their physical bodies felt like they had just finished running a race and their hearts were beating fast and hard. Also, they were probably in awe of the power of Jesus, and amazed, scared, curious, timid, intrigued, relieved and questions were probably filling their head about the authority that He had over the weather and the sea.

Something that I was wondering was if there were any other boats on the water at the time of this storm. It seems like there would have been some witnesses at least to how quickly the storm stopped.

The Gerasene Demoniac

The first thing that I thought of in this section was the disciple’s reactions. What would it have felt like to have this demon possessed man running and screaming at Jesus right when He stepped out of the boat? My initial thoughts are that it would be scary and kind of strange. They might be thinking, what does He want with Jesus? Or something like get that freak out of here, that man is disgusting, dirty, smelly and scary. But Jesus’ response seems very calm in contrast with what the disciples were probably thinking. Because Jesus took pity on the possessed man and He already knew the problem and the solution. To see Jesus talking to the demons in this man must have been so off their grid that they didn’t know what was going on at first. I think it was the first time that they had seen anything like this, so it was quite an introduction into that part of Jesus’ ministry and His personality.

What did it look like to see these demonic spirits leave this man and enter into the pigs? Did the man scream and they flew out of His mouth like a dramatic movie scene? Or did they just kind of disappear out of the man and go into the pigs? The man with all the demon spirits in him must have been changed instantly. His countenance must have been a lot lighter and the burden must have been physically lifted and very visually noticeable.  How scared the people tending the pigs must have felt when they saw the pigs become possessed because of these spirits. What would it have looked like to see the pigs all run into the water and die? It sounds very sad for the pigs and I wonder why the spirits didn’t just stay in the pigs and not let them run into water because they obviously died there. Or were the pigs just really frightened by the demons that they ran uncontrollably and ended up just stampeding into the nearest lake… Either way, I think this is just a very odd situation for everyone involved, except for maybe Jesus.

I think that the guy who was set free from legion must have been very thankful because this is a very big burden that was lifted out of his life. I wonder how old this man was. How many years were wasted because of these demonic spirits? I think this is a great testimony of how Jesus is faithful even to the ones that society has given up on. He works in amazing ways in the “least” of us (which is really all of us). I wonder what the man’s family thought when He came home normal. How weird, yet joyous would that have been for them to see him back to normal after all those years of being under control of so many demons.