The Wrong Story Entirely
a couple more thoughts on fear for my very good looking subscribers
The Jesus Pillow
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus and his disciples left with some other boats to go to the far side of the Galilean sea…there was a great storm and they were afraid and to top it all off Jesus was being sorta useless. I mean, in the middle of the storm he was napping . . .on a cushion. (For you Bible nerds: this story appears in varying forms in all 4 of the gospels, but God bless him, Mark is the only one of his fellow gospel writers who mentions that there was a pillow involved) Anyhow, the disciples are freaking out thinking they are going to die. They look at their situation and see that the cast isn’t acting how they are supposed to and the script isn’t unfolding the way they think it should if Jesus really loved them. So they wake him up and say, “don’t you care we are perishing?”.
The disciples had some feelings about their situation, which is totally understandable – If I were in a sketchy first-century boat, water up to my ankles, thunder cracking overhead, and Jesus was just snuggled up with his little boat-pillow? Yeah. I’d be like, Jesus why don’t you care that we are, you know…dying here?
The issue isn’t that they found a scary storm to be scary, the issue is that the disciples assume that since Jesus isn't acting the way he “should” that Jesus therefore doesn’t care that they are in peril. Which is a little thing we call: projection.
Projection is how fear finds its business partner: resentment
I mean, Jesus never actually left them, he just didn’t act the way they thought he should in a crisis.
More often than not I am afraid because I think I am not going to get something I want or because I think that something I have will be taken away. Fear shrinks me down into the starring role in a tiny, self-centered story where I’m both the hero and the narrator. And in that story, every storm is about me.
