‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ Mark, ch.4

You might gather from this story that Jesus is only a fair-weather messiah — notably absent in the midst of the storm.

Some have taken this story to mean that life is easy for ‘good’ Christians — for those sufficiently ‘blessed’ to be able to call on their Lord in their time of greatest need. And, like the boys in the boat, they call on the Lord not to sit with them through the storm, but to make the storm go away altogether. Such is the power wielded by ‘good’ Christians — the power to make the world into something it is not.

But note what follows upon the calm waters of the sea. Not a celebration of the disciples’ faithful petition but a shaming of their faithless fear — ‘why are you afraid? have you still no faith?’

What Jesus wants for us isn’t an easy life, but a faithful life — a life in which even in the midst of our greatest doubts and disappointments and fears and frustrations we find the gumption to believe, not in ourselves, but in God and God’s promise to be with us through thick and thin, in good times and bad.

That’s how God is and that’s how God wants us to be with each other — not promising to ‘fix’ everything (and running away when we see that we can’t), but promising to walk with each other through death and into life.

This is the basis of Christian com-passion, or ’suffering with.’  And its power lies not in taking others’ suffering away, but in taking a portion of others’ suffering upon ourselves.

Our greatest witness to the faith that is in us, then, isn’t to keep life at arms length, but to embrace it and to bless it — in good times and bad.