“What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
“When icicles hang by the wall,/ And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,/ And Tom bears logs into the hall,/ and milk comes frozen home in pail,/ When blood is nipped and ways be foul” … “When all aloud the wind doth blow,/ And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,/ And birds sit brooding in the snow,/ And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,/ When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,/ Then nightly sings the staring owl,/ Tu-who/ Tu-whit, Tu-who – a merry note,/ While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” Ah, winter, at least as Shakespeare envisions it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a wee bit threatening but mostly manageable, even “a merry note”.
How do we think about winter? Is it something that we dread and fear? Something from which we seek to flee, seeking out some warmer clime, fleeing the bitter cold as if fleeing from discomfort if not from death itself? Or is winter, as another poet, William Cowper puts it, the “king of intimate delights”? Certainly, the season and experience of winter varies from place to place, from culture to culture, and even from age to age. “Winter in Venice”, Adam Gopnik observes, “is very different from winter in Whitehorse”, or, for that matter, Windsor! It is “a truth”, as Alden Nowlan, the Canadian poet from Stanley, just down the road from Windsor, puts it in a poem entitled “January Night”, “that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” Winter has to be respected.
But how we think about winter is part of a larger question about how we think about nature and how we think about the created order. In other words, it belongs to how we think about God and about creation and redemption. This Gospel story speaks directly to those ideas and extends them into the world of our hearts and minds as well. There is a storm at sea and all seems lost. Jesus is with them, asleep. He seems indifferent to the fearful fatalism of the men. They awaken him: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” It isn’t a request for anything to be done; only a wake-up call to our imminent death and destruction in the storm.
We know only too well about the winter storms of nature. There are, too, the winter storms of our hearts and souls, the winter storms of our discontent and unease. How do we face such things? Jesus is with us in the winter storms and that makes all the difference. So the Gospel would teach us. How?
Because we are recalled to the world as God’s world. We are recalled to the truth of the Creator and to the idea of creation itself. It is God’s world and it exists for his will and purpose and not simply for ours. Creation is not only spoken into being which signifies that it exists for and by the uttered thought of God; it is also said to be good; indeed very good. Winter, too, is part of the created order. Somehow it is good. Our challenge with respect to winter is the same as our challenge about every other aspect of the world. To take delight in what God creates and redeems. To take delight in what ultimately exists, as we do, for no other purpose than for the praise of God. One of the canticles drawn from the apocryphal text, The Song of the Three Young Men, better known in our Prayer Book as the Benedicite, Omnia Opera, reminds us of this important aspect of our relation to the world as God’s creation.
Ananias, Azarias and Misael, also known as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, to use their Persian names, are thrown into a burning fiery furnace because they refused to repudiate the worship of God and worship King Nebuchadnezzar. Yet, instead of being consumed in the flames, they are seen with one who looks “like the Son of Man” and they are heard singing the great litany of nature’s praise of God. All the works of the Lord “bless the Lord” and “praise him and magnify him for ever”, including the winter and the summer, the frost and the cold, the ice and the snow. It is a wonderful perspective and one that we do well to remember in the winter of our lives, whether individually or collectively.
It is also concentrated here for us in this Gospel story. Jesus is awakened in the ship to join the company of the fearful. But instead, he arises to rebuke the wind and says to the sea, “peace, be still.” “The wind ceased and there was a great calm.” “Why are ye so fearful?” Jesus asks, “Have ye no faith?” The story is, of course, an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity and his presence with us. It is not that there are no storms but knowing the love of God for us and his presence with us in Jesus Christ is the counter to the storms of the winter as well as to the winter storms of our hearts. The Master cares. Ironically, as it may seem, his words awaken a greater fear in the sailors; the fear that is awe and wonder, awe and wonder at the one who is in our midst. “What manner of man is this”, they ask, “that even the wind and the sea obey him.” The fear that is delight.
The winter is part of God’s creation. God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ reminds us that the world and so the winter, too, exists for God’s will and purpose. Therein we find our good and the truth of our humanity. Our challenge is to learn to take delight in all that God has made and redeemed. Winter, too, belongs to our delight in the Lord God of all creation who seeks the peace and calm of our hearts even in the midst of the winter storms of our fearful and bitter hearts. This is what Epiphany would teach us not just in spite of winter storms but by means of them. To be awakened to awe and wonder at the God of Creation redeemed counters our fears and brings us delight, a delight in God.
“What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany IV, 2012