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John 6:16-21,
When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, 17 got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. 18 The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. 19 When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were frightened. 20 But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” 21 Then they were glad to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going.
One of the tensions we feel in preaching the Gospel of John is how to get the right balance in explaining the narrative strategy of John and then also showing the practical reality of who Jesus is. We need to look at the text, to see what’s going on, and we also need to look through the text to see the Person it’s showing us.
In other words, Bible study by itself will not change your life; it’s encountering Jesus that will change your life — and encountering Jesus comes by giving attention to the Bible. The book is God’s gift to us to show us Christ. We learned this in Chapter 5, verse 39 when Jesus told the Jewish leaders,
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.”
So see they had the Bible but missed Jesus — that’s possible! That can happen! But we don’t want to do that. We want to see Jesus through the Bible!
That’s a theological, affectional commitment of our church. And it’s relevant for this sermon, because our passage this morning is really important to the narrative strategy of the Gospel of John.
Chapter 5, verse 1, all the way through Chapter 8, verse 11, is a section in this Gospel that features the confession of the identity of Jesus. That’s the theme. Who Jesus is as God the Son comes to the forefront in this section, and the direct center of this section is our passage today, Chapter 6, verses 16–21.
And as you might expect, the center-point of this section is also the highest point where John gets his message across the clearest. Jesus’s authority over the sea (which is what’s happening here) is one of the most definitive declarations of Jesus’s identity in all of his earthly ministry. And I want us to be able to see this in the text as straightforwardly as John is telling us.
So we’re going to look at this story this morning in its three natural parts: Setting, Conflict, and Resolution. Those are the three movements going on here, and we’ll start first with the setting.
Movement 1: the Setting
Here it is: the disciples are in the dark and alone.
Verse 16 tells us what happened after the feeding of the five thousand. Remember from last week that Jesus withdrew from the crowd. They wanted to force him to be king, in defiance of this Father’s will, and so Jesus got out of there. And now in verse 16 it’s evening. Jesus’s disciples went down to the sea, got in a boat, and started sailing across the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum. John is just telling us step by step what they’re doing. But in verse 17 John reminds us of two important details.
Everybody look at verse 17 and get ready. I want you to see this. Everybody find verse 17. In the second sentence of verse 17, John writes,
“It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.”
Now why is this a reminder?
Well, it’s because we already know both of these things: In verse 15 John told us that Jesus withdrew by himself (he’s not with his disciples), and in verse 16 John told us it was evening.
This means the reason he mentions these things again in verse 17 must be because they’re important.
So as readers, we need to keep these two things in mind. The disciples are in the dark and they’re alone. That’s the setting.
Movement 2: the Conflict
Here it is: the disciples are frightened.
Now verse 19 tells us point-blank that the disciples were frightened. This is easy to see. The bigger question, though, is why they’re frightened. Go to verse 18 for a minute…
Verse 18 says that the sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. Apparently, according to people who know these things, the Sea of Galilee is infamous for storms. It’s something to do with the geology and weather — because the sea is surrounded by hills, and there’s unpredictable wind patterns and temperature changes — storms happen a lot here, and this one happened fast. But it would have been something the disciples were used to, and in fact, according to verse 19 they made significant headway in the storm: they rowed about three or four miles out into the sea, in the storm.
Now I don’t know if any of you have ever been three or four miles out in the Sea of Galilee — I’ve never been there — but I have been deep-sea fishing one time off the coast of North Carolina, and it wasn’t long before we got far enough out in the ocean to be completely surrounded by just water in every direction, and I mean completely surrounded by water as in you feel vulnerable ... and I mean you feel vulnerable as in you don’t expect to see a person walking up to you.
And I was there in broad daylight. The disciples are here in the dark, in a storm. And verse 19 says they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near their boat, and then John tells us “they were frightened.”
We might think, based upon how this story is going — dark, alone, storm — we might think that it’s the sight of a figure walking on the water that scared them. When we read this account in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark that’s the impression we get.
Both Matthew and Mark say that when the disciples saw Jesus they thought he was a ghost! And that was enough to scare them. But John doesn’t say that. John says explicitly that the disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea. And since John names Jesus this way he implies that the disciples recognized Jesus.
And I think that is actually why the disciples were frightened.
See, in John’s account, they were frightened not because of the setting, and not because they were startled by a figure walking on the sea, but they were frightened precisely because they knew it was Jesus walking on the sea toward them.
They knew what this meant! They knew it meant that Jesus is God and that they were now in the presence of God, and so the disciples do what we see basically every person in the Bible do when they encounter the presence of God: they’re afraid!
I think there’s another Moses-wink going on here. (Remember the Moses-winks from last week? They are the several littles clues in Chapter 6 that allude back to Moses, and this is another one.) What’s going on here is called a theophany. That word means God-appearing. It’s when God appears to a person — they encounter the presence of God. And in the Old Testament, the most famous theophany involved Moses. …
Moses and the burning bush. Now it’s interesting that in that theophany, when Moses first sees the burning bush, he’s not afraid, he’s intrigued. He sees it and says I’m gonna check this out. And that’s when God spoke to him from out of the bush. God said take off your sandals because you’re standing on holy ground, and then God said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And immediately then, after Moses knew who he was talking to, we read, Exodus 3:6,
“And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”
Moses was afraid after he recognized the encounter to be an encounter with God, and I think that’s the same thing happening here. The disciples are not afraid of the unknown, they’re afraid of the known!
They know Genesis 1:2, that it was the Spirit of God who hovered over the face of the waters. They know Job 9:8 that it is God who “alone stretched out the heavens and trampled [upon] the waves of the sea.”
They know that only God can do what Jesus is doing here and therefore Jesus is God, and that’s why they were frightened! Because no longer are they just dealing with the Prophet who is like Moses (and greater than Moses), but they are in the presence of the God of Moses.
Everything changes here. It gets flipped around. Jesus is not in the place of Moses anymore, but he is showing himself in the place of God and the disciples are in the place of Moses. They are biblically afraid, like Moses was. They’re frightened.
That’s the conflict in this story. It’s standard, expected, and essential … anytime mere mortals encounter the glory of Yahweh. … But now the resolution.
Movement 3: Resolution
Here it is: Jesus speaks.
This is verse 20. (This is still kinda like the burning bush, but it’s even better because of how it ends.) Everybody look at verse 20. This is what Jesus said to the disciples as they were afraid. He said:
“It is I; do not be afraid.”
Now the second part of what Jesus says is a command (do not be afraid), but before the command is a declaration, and some of you might recognize it, but it’s not super clear in our English translations. Most English translations put Jesus’s first words here as “It is I” (because that’s how we talk in English). But in the original Greek this is just two words.
Everybody track with me here, okay? I want you to get this: the two Greek words are egō eimi — which, literally goes like this: egō means “I” and eimi is the verb “to be” — it means is or am.
So put the two words together! egō eimi. What is Jesus saying here?! Do you see it?
In this theophany, as Jesus is appearing to his disciples, showing himself to be God by his very action over the sea, and as they’re frightened in his presence, he then speaks and he says I AM!
So no wonder this story is the center-point and the highest point of this section in the Gospel of John. The identity of Jesus cannot be more in your face than this! Jesus Christ is God.
Jesus shows this, Jesus says this, and then he says, “Do not be afraid.”
And that’s the real resolution.
It’s that God reveals himself and he says this — it’s that God himself who created everything, who has authority over the seas, he is standing in front of the disciples in human flesh like theirs and he says You don’t have to fear.
Why not? Why shouldn’t they be afraid? Shouldn’t we all be afraid if we are literally meeting our Maker in the middle of a storm? Jesus is their Maker and Judge — on what basis does he tell them not to fear?
Well, I think it’s because of what Jesus has already told them in Chapter 3, verse 17, that
“God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
One day Jesus will come in judgment, but not right now, not in this story and not today. Because for now Jesus is on a rescue mission! Jesus has come as their Savior and as our Savior. That’s what he says! He is not the “I AM here to condemn you.” He is the “I AM here to save you.”
He is the I AM with you!
I AM for you! Don’t be afraid.
And this is where, if we step back a little and look at this entire story as a whole, it becomes an illustration of conversion …
This story is actually our story … this is everyone’s story who trusts in Jesus.
Let me go back and show you …
The Picture of Conversion
Remember the setting, the disciples were in the dark and alone.
That word “darkness” is important to John. He uses it a lot:
He starts this Gospel, in Chapter 1, verse 5, by saying that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
In Chapter 3, verse 19 John tells us that Jesus is the light come into this world but people love darkness rather than the light because their works are evil.
In his first letter, 1 John 1:5, John says, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
So for John, darkness is a bad thing. Darkness is anti-God. It’s a metaphor for lostness. And so it’s interesting that John tells us that the disciples are in the dark here, and to make matters worse, Jesus is not with them. Again, John repeats both of these things in verse 17.
The disciples are in the dark and without God, and we’ve been there before haven’t we? … I’ve been there …
Now, look, I grew up going to church — we were a three-times-a-week churchgoing family — but I remember being lost. And it was weird because I was so close to the light that I knew the right things to say, but I was so much in the dark that I knew I really wanted a hundred other things more than I wanted Jesus.
Which means I wasn’t good at either part. I was like a friend who shared this with me recently: he said he was sinner and a saint and lousy at both. That was me: I was no good at following Jesus, and I was no good at running from him. That’s lostness, man.
What happened?
He showed up. He came for me. He confronted me in a kind of storm, a fork in the road, and I knew who I was dealing with. Jesus is God, just like the Bible says. Everything I heard about Jesus is true. He has the authority. He has the power. My life is in his hands. And somewhere in that whirlwind he pointed me to his cross.
I can’t be good enough. I can’t earn his love. But he loves me anyway. By his grace, he died on the cross to save me. He came to save me where I was. And I don’t have to be afraid.
And guess what?
When Jesus showed up like that I was glad to take him in my boat!
That’s verse 21 here! Once the disciples hear Jesus speak and he tells them they don’t have to fear because he is the I AM (here to save you), they’re like Get him in the boat! And that’s us too, right!?
When we meet Jesus, when he shows up and we know who he is, and we take him at his word, we are all in with him.
He is worthy of nothing less than our everything.
And that’s what it means to trust him. He’s our only hope and we want him in our boat, in our lives, and we’ll go wherever he goes, we’ll do whatever he says. He’s our God.
And maybe you’re here this morning and you’ve come to recognize Jesus as who he is and you’re wondering about the next step. The next step is to ask him to save you. It could be a simple prayer like this,
Jesus, I can’t save myself and I’m done trying.
You died on the cross for me and rose from the dead.
You are God, save me.
I’m inviting you to trust in Jesus Christ today. And for those of us who have, let’s be glad he’s in our boat!
Let’s pray:
Lord Jesus, you are God. You are great and you are good and we delight in you. Thank you for coming here. Thank you for showing us who you are. Thank you for saving us! We praise you! With everything we are, with everything we’ve got, we praise you! We praise you! Amen.
