Trevor Laurence
In each of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus gets into a boat with his disciples and falls asleep mid-sail. When a great storm arises on the sea and the waves begin battering their vessel, the disciples wake the Lord with their cries. Jesus rebukes the wind and the water, the storm submits and recedes into calm, and the disciples marvel, wondering to one another who this man before them really is who commands the obedience of even wind and sea.
We are, of course, to follow the disciples in asking with awe about the identity of Jesus. And at the most fundamental level, the inescapable answer to the question is that he is God. Jesus’ calming of the storm (Matt 8:23–27; Mark 4:35–41; Luke 8:22–25) is an affirmation of the divinity of Christ, his cosmic lordship over nature and all reality. He rebukes the wind and commands the raging sea, clearly demonstrating his authority over the wild forces of creation. Surely the one who does these things must be God among us.
Many interpreters observe the Gospel writers’ narratival identification of Jesus with God, concluding that the text presents Christ’s sovereignty and divinity in his control of creation, and move on to the next account.1 But this conclusion is only the beginning. As with so many episodes in the Gospels and in Scripture more generally, the first association is an invitation to listen more closely, an open door through which to enter expectantly, and pressing deeper into the text’s resonances with the rest of Scripture rewards with a new appreciation for the Bible’s coherent beauty, for the writers’ communicative artistry, for Jesus’ superabundant significance. There is more to this account than a generic revelation of supernatural power. There is more to Jesus’ stilling of the storm than the naked affirmation that he is God.
Echoes of Exile
The Gospel writers weave into their narrative echoes of the Old Testament to say more than what they explicitly say. Most resonant among these intertextual evocations is Psalm 107.2 The first few verses of the psalm signal that it is a prayerful, thanksgiving-filled celebration of God’s deliverance of his covenant people from exile:
[1] Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,for his steadfast love endures forever!
[2] Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,
whom he has redeemed from trouble
[3] and gathered in from the lands,
from the east and from the west,
from the north and from the south.
The community that had lived in captivity among the nations, who had watched and experienced and mourned the destruction of the temple and the disintegration of the kingdom as the people of God were taken from their home in God’s presence and brought under foreign rule, have been liberated and planted once again in the land where God has promised to dwell in royal holiness among his treasured possession (and note how this affirmation immediately follows the petition of Ps 106:47–48). The psalm describes God’s delivering action with four images of rescue:3 filling and sheltering hungry wanderers (vv. 4–9), shattering the shackles of prisoners in affliction (vv. 10–16), healing fools harmed by their own sin (vv. 17–22), and—significantly—calming the waters for sailors battered by a storm:
[23] Some went down to the sea in ships,doing business on the great waters;
[24] they saw the deeds of the LORD,
his wondrous works in the deep.
[25] For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,
which lifted up the waves of the sea.
[26] They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;
their courage melted away in their evil plight;
[27] they reeled and staggered like drunken men
and were at their wits’ end.
[28] Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
[29] He made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.
[30] Then they were glad that the waters were quiet,
and he brought them to their desired haven.
[31] Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of man!
[32] Let them extol him in the congregation of the people,
and praise him in the assembly of the elders.
God’s people, tossed about on the stormy sea of the raging nations, are delivered from exile and brought back into the land when the Lord hears their cries and hushes the waves. With the tune of Psalm 107 still ringing in our ears, with the psalm at the fore of our interpretive imagination, we are able to hear the Gospel accounts of Christ’s calming of the storm in a new way. Consider Matthew 8:
[23] And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. [24] And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. [25] And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” [26] And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. [27] And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”
The parallels are striking: departing in boat and ships (πλοῖον, Matt 8:23; LXX Ps 107[106]:23), the onset of a raging storm, fear and trouble and distress, crying out to the Lord, hushed seas and calmed winds, marveling at Jesus (θαυμάζω, Matt 8:27) and thanking the covenant Lord for his marvelous (θαυμάσιος, LXX Ps 107[106]:31) works. The question the disciples ask, and which Matthew directs at us—What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?—transparently demands that we answer, “God.” But more specifically, it demands that we answer, “The God of Psalm 107.”
Jesus’ calming of the storm is an enacted psalm, a dramatic and embodied performance of Israel’s Scriptures. And with it, he reveals himself as the God who delivers his people from exile, who frees from captivity and restores the fractured kingdom and reconstitutes Israel under her true and promised Davidic king in the presence of God. Because even though God in the Old Testament brought his people from exile back into their land, in a very real sense, their exile never ended. They remained under the rule of the nations. The rebuilt temple was a shadow of the glorious house of God anticipated by the prophets. Israel awaited the royal heir who would unite their divisions, usher in peace, grant them rest, and heal the world.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in their own ways, signal at the very beginnings of their Gospel accounts that with the arrival of Jesus, God is finally effecting the rescue from exile. Matthew’s genealogy of Christ thematically ties Jesus to the deportation to Babylon alongside Abraham and David because the seed of Abraham is the Davidic Messiah is God’s answer to Israel’s captivity. Mark’s Gospel opens with a quote from Isaiah 40:3—an oracle of comfort proclaiming the coming of God to bring exiles home. Luke records Mary’s prayer that, in the advent of the Son of God and David, God “has filled the hungry with good things” (1:53), echoing the deliverance song of Ps 107:9: “For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”
When Jesus stills the storm, he underscores the message the Evangelists have been subtly, but unmistakably, communicating from the start. The winter of exile is ending. The eternal spring of God’s reign has arrived.
Echoes of other psalms filter into the Evangelists’ narrations of this event, compounding the thematic associations generated by Ps 107. In Ps 89:9–10, God’s power to still the raging sea is linked to his crushing of Egypt in the exodus and is recounted as part of a larger prayer for relief from the nations. Psalm 65:7 names God as the savior “who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves, the tumult of the peoples” because the tumultuous peoples are the roaring seas. The disciples’ attempts to wake up the Lord and their question of whether he cares that they are perishing (brought out most clearly in Mark 4:38) recalls the cry of Ps 44:23–24 when Israel has been scattered among the nations:
[23] Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!
[24] Why do you hide your face?
Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?
God’s “rebuke” of the waters is associated with creation in Ps 104:7 and with the new creational event of the exodus in Pss 18:15; 106:9, when God’s rebuke of the sea brought Israel out of captivity so that he could plant them on his holy sanctuary mountain and reign as their king (Exod 15:17–18). And similar imagery is taken up by Isaiah in his prophecy in Isa 17:12–14 that the Lord will rebuke the nations that thunder like the thundering of the sea, a rebuke that curiously takes place—just like Mark’s account of Jesus’ rebuke (Mark 4:35)—at evening:
[12] Ah, the thunder of many peoples;they thunder like the thundering of the sea!
Ah, the roar of nations;
they roar like the roaring of mighty waters!
[13] The nations roar like the roaring of many waters,
but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far away,
chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind
and whirling dust before the storm.
[14] At evening time, behold, terror!
Before morning, they are no more!
This is the portion of those who loot us,
and the lot of those who plunder us.
Like the God who stills the sea to release his people from their bondage to the roaring nations, Jesus stills the sea as a performative annunciation that he is the Lord effecting the exodus from exile that will finally, definitively, irreversibly triumph over the enemies of his people and restore Israel to true freedom in the ruling presence of God.
Something Greater than Jonah Is Here
There is, however, one more significant Old Testament overture in this allusively-dense narrative. The accounts of Jesus calming the storm mirror in many respects the events of Jonah 1:4–6.4 A ship on the sea, a mighty tempest, passengers crying out for divine deliverance, a protagonist asleep amid the action and wakened to give aid.
Jesus is framed as a new Jonah, but it is not immediately clear what significance this might hold. When Jesus rebukes the waves, it becomes evident that he is not like Jonah at all, who must be tossed into the sea to still the storm. Jesus speaks and calms the waters—he is Jonah’s God! Perhaps this arresting twist, this unexpected jolt away from the familiar Jonah narrative, this affirmation Jesus’ divine identity, is all that is intended.
But I don’t think so. Once again, pressing into the details yields treasure, a startling thematic integrity that complements and deepens the message latent in the other Old Testament allusions in this passage.
Jonah is more than an obstinate prophet who does not want to speak a message. He is an obstinate prophet whose life is a message, an embodied warning to Israel about the fate that awaits her should she continue to forsake her calling. Jonah is a living parable of Israel’s future exile and the hope of rescue.5
Israel rebels against God and rejects her role as a light to the nations. Caught in the raging of the nations, she is cast into the sea of the peoples, thrust into exile. Assyria swallows her up, affording a measure of protection even as Israel is captive. But all is not lost. If she will repent and cry out for salvation from the watery grave of her exile in the sea, in God’s faithfulness, the Israel who was vomited (קִיא, Lev 18:25, 28; 20:22) out of the land will be vomited (קִיא, Jon 2:10) back into the land to fulfill her calling and welcome the nations to God. This is the message of Jonah’s descent into the deep and restoration to dry land, his death and resurrection.
In his account of the stilling of the storm, Matthew initially sets up the comparison between Jesus and Jonah. The preliminary typology of Matt 8:23–27 is, however, expanded in Matt 12:39–41, where Jesus responds to the Jewish leaders’ desire for a sign:
[39] But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. [40] For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. [41] The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
Jonah’s embodiment of Israel’s exile will come to a culmination in Jesus. Jonah was swallowed by the fish as a portent to God’s people of the exile that would fall upon their impenitent rebellion. Jesus will be swallowed by the earth in death not as a harbinger of doom to Israel but as a saving substitute for Israel, taking their exile upon himself. He will be tossed into the raging sea of the nations to save his companions when he is handed over to Rome. He will experience the curse of exile when he is taken outside the gate, flooded in the waters of judgment, buried in the belly of Sheol. He will be spit back out into the land of the living when he is raised from death in resurrection. He will bring the good news to the ends of the earth, eliciting the repentance of the Gentiles, receiving the tribute of the nations.
For all the associations with Jonah, Jesus is never thrown into the sea in Matt 8. But, as Matt 12 makes clear, he will be before all is said and done. “Something greater than Jonah is here.”
A Strange and Wondrous Harmony
When these various intertextual evocations are all brought together, a strange and wondrous harmony emerges. Jesus will release his people from their exile by going into exile in their place. Jesus will still the storm like the God of Ps 107 by being tossed into the sea like Jonah. He will return from his exile in vindication, victory, and life and bring his followers home with him, restoring the captives of Israel and winning the worship of the nations, liberating his people from the oppression of foreign rule (Col 2:15), making them into a temple-kingdom where God reigns and resides, a temple-kingdom that will inherit the earth.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute.
Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
- E.g., the treatments of I. Howard Marshall, Commentary on Luke, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1978), 332–5; D. A. Carson, Matthew, in vol. 8 of EBC (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 214–6.[↩]
- R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 334 rightly notes that Matt 8:23–27 exhibits “a specially clear echo of the storm scene in Ps 107:23–30.” Other interpreters note the connection alongside references to the portrait of God in other psalms, but the significance of the allusions—what the intertextual associations might be communicating about Jesus—has been left underexplored.[↩]
- Cf. Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150, TOTC 16 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1975, repr. 2008), 417–8; John Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 3: Psalms 90–150, BCOTWP (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 247–8.[↩]
- So France, The Gospel of Matthew, 336. Contra the skepticism of Marshall, Commentary on Luke, 333; Carson, Matthew, 214.[↩]
- See esp. Peter J. Leithart, A House for My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2000), 184–6; James B. Jordan, “No. 91: In the Fish; or, the Church as Tomb,” Biblical Horizons 91 (Jan 1997), http://www.biblicalhorizons.com/biblical-horizons/no-91-in-the-fish-or-the-church-as-tomb/.[↩]