Soften the calluses on your mind

Jesus loved children and he taught that we too should have faith like a child. As a child, anything is possible. When we grow up, we learn things like “You can’t fly by flapping your arms while holding feathers, no matter how many feathers you hold or how hard you flap.” What we call growing up is really more like growing down.

There are all sorts of things one learns are not possible. We grow down in some ways as we drop any notion of some things being possible. Learning all the things that simply can’t be is a way of hardening over to some ways of thinking.

Jesus referred to this as hardness of heart (for example, Mark 3:5 and 6:52). The expression is worth a closer look. In Jewish thought, the heart was not the seat of emotions as it is with us today. Jewish thought described the heart as the place of understanding, the source of thought and reflection. Furthermore, the word hardened more literally means to become callused. Rather than having no emotion, Jesus speaks of people whose minds have become callused as having a hard heart.

These folks were not born with thick skulls. Those thick heads developed over time through closing their minds off to the things of God. So often, people could not understand who Jesus is because they are trying to sort Jesus into their preexisting categories. Jesus does not conform to any preexistent category for humans, because he is Immanuel—God with us. Jesus is the unique God-man. There is no other category for him. Jesus wanted to break through his followers’ callused hearts and minds to give them hearts of flesh instead of stone.

We can fall in to the same trap of the first disciples. A central teaching of Christianity is that Jesus is both God and Man and yet many persons in the pew can’t get their minds around this concept. Wasn’t Jesus really just a really good man, perhaps a little better connected to God than most of us?

That may be your idea of Jesus, but it doesn’t fit Jesus own words. Jesus referred to himself saying “I Am.” This was a way of self-referral so blasphemous, that one could be put to death by Jewish law just for uttering those words. That is unless, perhaps, the person saying I Am was standing on a blustery sea when saying the words.

Jesus did just that. On the night after he fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, Jesus remained behind to pray as his disciples went ahead across the lake. During that night, the disciples strained against the wind, having trouble piloting the boat in such rough seas. What would usually have been a two-hour row across the lake is turning into an all-nighter. The Greek New Testament literally says they are “tortured in their rowing.”

The disciples are in no real danger. Jesus is not saving their lives, but breaking open their minds to see more clearly who he is. This encounter on the Sea is an “aha” moment when the disciples are given a chance to understand that Jesus really is God become man.

Straining to row into the wind, the disciples see a robed figure out on the waves. They assume it is a ghost. The water was featured in all the old myths of the Ancient Near East as a place of chaos. Out on the sea at night, a superstitious first century Palestinian would have been fearfully on the lookout for an evil spirit out looking to kill and destroy. The disciples then see what they want to see—a ghost—and they scream out, shaken by terror.

It is just then that the Epiphany comes, the moment when Jesus identifies himself saying, “Take heart, it is I; Do not be afraid.” I prefer to translate Jesus’ self-identification more literally, “Be of good courage. I Am. Stop fearing.” The I Am in the midst of Jesus statement is very significant. This is the same identification found in the Greek translation of the Old Testament when God reveals himself in the burning bush to Moses as “I Am that I Am.”

Jesus who can calmly walk across the sea into a strong headwind now makes the obvious fact more plain. I can be out here on the water precisely because “I Am.” To underline the point, Jesus steps into the boat and the wind dies.

Are you straining against the wind, tortured in your rowing, in some area of your life? Is there some way in which you feel like you are out on the sea and God has abandoned you to the wind and waves? It may be time to open up your mind. Stop closing off possibilities of how God can act in your life. Have the faith to see that God may yet be walking in to your situation in some unexpected way.

I am not writing to non-believers now. There are certainly many rational ways in which we can write about our faith. When I suggest we soften the calluses on our minds to make room for God to act, I don’t do so suggesting that Christians need to be soft-headed folks who can’t make a rational defense for the faith that is in us. Instead, I am writing to those who have gotten past those reason-based objections to faith. You have experienced God in your life.

But like the first disciples who also knew Jesus, but still had hard hearts, you might need to recapture a child-like faith that God will not leave you lost on the sea. The I Am is with you on every wind driven sea you encounter in your life. Do not be afraid to soften the calluses over your mind and believe.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland, Georgia.)

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