Mark 6:48

Mark 6:48

Mysterious Passages of Life.

I. The mysterious passages of life are as truly meant for us as when on that melancholy night Jesus decidedly and deliberately left His disciples till "the fourth watch," till the very verge of daybreak, to labour alone with the rough waves, and to weary themselves in rowing in that stormy sea; while a Divine love seemed as if it took advantage of that cruel hour for the more they strove the more helpless they grew. I do not say that this is life; but I say that every life, at all times, is hard work, and I say that every life has those special passages. They may be, and they are, in their intensity, a parenthesis, but still they are; and while they last they seem very long. It is then that we forget the smooth waters, and the favouring gale, and the sunny wave, and the happy converse, and the ever-lessening distance; and we see nothing but the swellings of our difficulties, and the dying-out of the specks of our ever-departing hope.

II. It is no little thing to have an object steadily in view, to know that that object is right, to labour for it intently, to sigh for it deeply, to pray for it wrestlingly; and yet, despite all the efforts, and all the sighs, and all the prayers, never to near it, but to see it going farther and farther away into the distance from us. And if that object be some high and holy thing, which seems not only for our spiritual good, a very necessity for our souls, but for God's own glory, yet to toil and toil and weary ourselves upon labours that are nothing worth, is an exercise of faith that becomes extreme. The word of comfort is this, Jesus sees you. Darkness and distance shut out Him from you; but they never shut out you from Him. To be in His eye is life and safety. To please that eye is the one pure joy of human existence.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 4th series, p. 187.

The Contrary Currents of Life.

The winds always seem contrary to those who have any high and earnest purpose in life. The stirring of a high and godly purpose is like swinging round with the head to the current. Thenceforth every moment must be an effort, every thought a prayer; or the stream will be sweeping you farther and farther from the longed-for shore.

I. We are able when thinking over this great matter, a life-course and its issues, to remind ourselves of the great life-course to which the winds were ever contrary, which something seemed always to sweep back from its end. Without question, life is a hard matter to the earnest, the night is dark, and the toil hard. Often the main support of faith is to look steadily to Him to whom the night was darker, the toil harder, and Who is seated now a radiant Conqueror at the right hand of the throne of God.

II. Let us look at the broad fact of the contrariness of the currents of life. With some there is a life-long struggle to fulfil the duty of some uncongenial calling, which yields no fair field of activity to the powers which they are conscious of stirring within. They never, in fact, can get fairly entered for the race in which they might have no small chance of winning the prize. There are others who are crossed in their dearest hope; life is one long, sad regret. There are others with a weak and crippled body enshrining a spirit of noblest faculty; with intense ardour pent up within. And most of us find that something is always rising up to cross us; life is never long without some menace or check.

III. Consider the reason and the rightness of this contrariness of the currents of life. It is to keep us always under strain. God sets things against us to teach us to set ourselves against things, that we may master them, and remain their masters for evermore.

IV. The Master is watching how the lesson prospers. Not from on high; not from a safe shore; but there in the midst of the storm He is watching, nay is walking, drawing nigh, in the very crisis of the danger and the strain. The Master, who holds all things in His hand, shares through the night the toil and strain of His pilgrims, and He rules all for their salvation and the world's.

J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon, p. 353.

In this text we have:

I. An interesting illustration of the effect of rapid transitions in outward circumstances upon internal religious experience. That day had been a great day to those disciples. In the morning they had returned from their extensive preaching tour, and begun to tell Jesus of their extraordinary success. The enthusiasm was overwhelming and intense, and the fervour of their souls must have kindled to the highest reach. As they joined in with Jesus in the exhausting labours His zeal led Him to undertake, they were quickened to exertions which really wore out their strength in the delight which they awakened. Out here on the chill water the disciples had no cheering alleviation of their work whatsoever; comfortless, wet to the skin with spray, cut to the bone by the raw spring wind, can we wonder that they speedily became fatigued, disgusted, petulant?

II. We see here the close and somewhat humiliating connection between wistful souls and weary bodies which always has to be recognised. Those skilled fishermen evidently had a hard time of it. They needed to put forth the most violent and persistent efforts in order to keep the small boat from being dashed to pieces before the hurricane. And, of course, they became positively tired out, and their faith had something like a melancholy failure.

III. We see that mere frames of desolate feeling give by no means a release from the pressure of diligent duty. That these disciples were impatient, or even unbelieving, offers us no reason to suppose they were so foolish as to imagine they might lay their oars in the bottom of the boat and let everything drift. Their duty and their need was to continue to do for themselves precisely what they knew Christ would wish, and what they remembered He had commanded.

IV. Jesus Christ, even in darkness, knows who has need of Him. "He saw them toiling," so we read, and then we reflect how little reason these men had for being melancholy. Glancing again back over the waves, we see Jesus on His knees for a while, praying, no doubt, for them as well as for others, and anon rising up to begin the peerless walk upon the waters which has made that night historic for the ages. Our vicissitudes toss only ourselves, and overturn only our pride, and that not perilously. Jesus' care remains steady.

V. We see that Jesus Christ sometimes delays His coming to believers till He is sure of a welcome. "He would have passed by them," so we read again, What can this mean? When walking on the waves He did arrive at the boat-side, did He propose to give those forlorn men the go-by? No; He did it only to call into exercise the longing love which He knew they felt for Him, and so to get their earnest invitation to come into the vessel.

C. S. Robinson, Sermons on Neglected Texts, p. 152.

References: Mark 6:48 . W. M. Statham, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 193; W. H. Jellie, Ibid., vol. vii., p. 216; Church of England Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 193; Homilist, new series, vol. v., p. 154.Mark 6:52 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi., No. 1218.