When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. — Matthew 14:32
Waiting is the hardest work of hope. ~ Lewis Smedes
Waiting patiently is not a strong suit in American society.
A
woman’s car stalls in traffic. She looks in vain under the hood to
identify the cause, while the driver behind her leans relentlessly on
his horn. Finally she has had enough. She walks back to his car and
offers sweetly, “I don’t know what the matter is with my car. But if you
want to go look under the hood, I’ll be glad to stay here and honk for
you.”
We are not a patient people. We tend to be in a
horn-honking, microwaving, Fed-Ex mailing, fast-food eating,
express-lane shopping hurry. People don’t like to wait in traffic, on
the phone, in the store, or at the post office.
Robert Levine, in a
wonderful book called A Geography of Time, suggests the creation of a
new unit of time called the honko-second — “the time between when the
light changes and the person behind you honks his horn.” He claims it is
the smallest measure of time known to science.
Most of us do not
like waiting very much, so we like the fact that Matthew shows Jesus to
be the Lord of urgent action. Three times in just a few sentences
Matthew uses the word immediately — always of Jesus: Jesus made the
disciples get into a boat and go on ahead of Him “immediately.”
When the
disciples thought they were seeing a ghost and cried out in fear, Jesus
answered them “immediately.” When Peter began to sink and cried out for
help, Jesus “immediately” reached out his hand and caught him.
Jesus’
actions are swift, discerning, and decisive. He doesn’t waste a
honko-second. And yet, this is also a story about waiting. Matthew tells
us that Jesus comes to the disciples “during the fourth watch of the
night.”
The Romans divided the night into four shifts: 6:00–9:00;
9:00-midnight; midnight–3:00; and 3:00–6:00. So Jesus came to the
disciples sometime after 3 o’clock. But they had been in the boat since
before sundown the previous day. Why the long delay? If I were one of
the disciples, I think I would prefer Jesus to show up at the same time
or even slightly ahead of the storm. I’d like Him there in a
honko-second.
But Matthew has good reasons for noting the time. A.
E. J. Rawlinson notes that early Christians suffering their own storm
of persecution may have taken great comfort in this delay:
Faint
hearts may even have begun to wonder whether the Lord Himself had not
abandoned them to their fate, or to doubt the reality of Christ. They
are to learn from this story that they are not forsaken, that the Lord
watches over them unseen… [that] the Living One, Master of wind and
waves, will surely come quickly for their salvation, even though it be
in the “fourth watch of the night.”
Matthew wanted his readers to learn to wait.
Another
moment of waiting involves Peter’s decision to leave the boat. He
cannot do this on the strength of his own impulse; he must ask Jesus’
permission first, then wait for an answer — for the light to turn green.
I wonder if another type of waiting was involved for Peter. What do you
suppose his very first steps on the water looked like? I expect that
Jesus was an accomplished water-walker. But for Peter, I wonder if there
wasn’t a learning curve involved. Maybe, like the Bill Murray character
in the movie What About Bob?, he had to start with baby steps.
Learning to walk always requires patience.
It
was not until the whole episode was over that the disciples got what
they wanted — “the wind died down.” Why couldn’t Jesus have made the
wind die down “immediately” — as soon as He saw the disciples’ fear? It
would have made Peter’s walk easier. But apparently Jesus felt they
would gain something by waiting.
Consider the activity that Peter and the other disciples had to engage in right up to the very end: waiting.
Let’s
say you decide to get out of the boat. You trust God. You take a step
of faith — you courageously choose to leave a comfortable job to devote
yourself to God’s calling; you will use a gift you believe God has given
you even though you are scared to death; you will take relational risks
even though you hate rejection; you will go back to school even though
people tell you it makes no sense financially; you decide to trust God
and get out of the boat. What happens next?
Well, maybe you will
experience a tremendous, nonstop rush of excitement. Maybe there will be
an immediate confirmation of your decision — circumstances will click,
every risk will pay off, your efforts will be crowned with success, your
spiritual life will thrive, your faith will double, and your friends
will marvel, all in the space of a honko-second. Maybe. But not always.
For good reasons, God does not always move at our frantic pace. We are
too often double espresso followers of a decaf Sovereign.
Some
forms of waiting — on expressways and in doctor’s offices — are fairly
trivial in the overall scheme of things. But there are more serious and
difficult kinds of waiting:
-The waiting of a single person who hopes God might have marriage in store but is beginning to despair
-The waiting of a childless couple who desperately want to start a family
-The waiting of Nelson Mandela as he sits in a prison cell for
twenty-seven years and wonders if he will ever be free or if his country
will ever know justice
-The waiting of someone who longs to have work that is meaningful and significant and yet cannot seem to find it
-The waiting of a deeply depressed person for a morning when she will wake up wanting to live
-The waiting of a child who feels awkward and clumsy and longs for the day when he gets picked first on the playground
-The waiting of persons of color for the day when everyone’s children
will be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character”
-The waiting of an elderly senior citizen in a nursing home — alone, seriously ill, just waiting to die
Every one of us, at some junctures of our lives, will have to learn to wait.
Waiting
may be the hardest single thing we are called to do. So it is
frustrating when we turn to the Bible and find that God Himself, who is
all-powerful and all-wise, keeps saying to his people, Wait.
Be
still before the LORD, and wait patiently for Him… Wait for the LORD,
and keep to His way, and He will exalt you to inherit the land.
God
comes to Abraham when he is seventy-five and tells him he is going to
be a father, the ancestor of a great nation. How long was it before that
promise was fulfilled? Twenty-four years. Abraham had to wait.
God
told the Israelites that they would leave their slavery in Egypt and
become a nation. But the people had to wait four hundred years.
God told Moses he would lead the people to the Promised Land. But they had to wait forty years in the wilderness.
In
the Bible, waiting is so closely associated with faith that sometimes
the two words are used interchangeably. The great promise of the Old
Testament was that a Messiah would come. But Israel had to wait —
generation after generation, century after century. And when the Messiah
came, He was recognized only by those who had their eyes fixed on his
coming — like Simeon. He was an old man who “was righteous and devout.
He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was
upon him.”
But even the arrival of Jesus did not mean that the
waiting was over. Jesus lived, taught, was crucified, was resurrected,
and was about to ascend when His friends asked Him, “Lord, will you
restore the kingdom now?” That is, “Can we stop waiting?”
And Jesus had one more command:
Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised.
And the Holy Spirit came — but that still did not mean that the time of waiting was over.
Paul wrote,
We
ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly
while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we
were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what
is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with
patience.
Forty-three times in the Old Testament alone, the people are commanded,
Wait. Wait on the LORD.
The last words in the Bible are about waiting:
The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’
It
may not seem like it, but in light of eternity, it is soon. Hang on.
“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” All right, we’ll hang on. But come! We’re
waiting for You.
Why? Why does God make us wait? If He can do anything, why doesn’t He bring us relief and help and answers now?
At
least in part, to paraphrase Ben Patterson, what God does in us while
we wait is as important as what it is we are waiting for.
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