When we left Jesus that evening, we were almost delirious with joy.  Imagine feeding 5,000 men, plus women and children, and with just five loaves and two fish!

We had already seen water turned into wine, lepers cleansed, a dead girl raised to life and hundreds of other miracles, but the scale of this miracle almost defied belief.  If we hadn’t seen the whole process, and eaten the food ourselves, I doubt that any of us could have believed it.  But we had tasted it, and I had even looked at the bread to see what it looked like.  Each of the pieces I saw had the varying surfaces of dark and lighter browns that come from cooking on a griddle – a griddle that I knew these miraculous loaves had never touched!

And the fish too.  Two small fish became enough to feed thousands.  When Jesus does a miracle, he really does it thoroughly.  Most of that fish we ate never swam in Galilee, but I couldn’t tell the difference between the parts that had and those which were the work of Jesus.  As a fisherman, I’m rather used to looking at fish, and all the pieces seemed to have bones in the right places, and scales as well.  We had often provided the fish for Jesus’ meals and been very happy to do so.  But now we had seen that he could make fish himself, which still amazes me.  He certainly didn’t need me to catch him any fish.

Anyway, we twelve got into the boat at Jesus’ insistence.  He would dismiss the crowd, he said, and he did too, though I’m not sure how.  Even as we sailed away from the shore, the crowd that had refused to leave him alone all day were meekly walking away to their homes.  That is true authority.

The delirious joy didn’t last for very long, though, because the journey quickly became hard work.  The wind was against us and the waves grew as darkness fell.  We worked hard with sails and oars, but when the wind is against you, it can be quicker to walk.

That night, it was quicker.  It was not long before dawn, but still completely dark when we suddenly saw something.  The wind was strong and the waves it whipped up were making it difficult to use the oars very well.  One moment your oar would be deep in the surging black water and the next you would be scattering a phosphorescent shower of spray as the boat rolled in the waves.  We definitely didn’t hear anything.  The noise of wind and wave was much too great.  We saw something – but what was it?  At first we thought it might be another boat with its sails draped around the mast, but it was moving faster than we were and seemed much smaller than our own boat.

In the inky blackness of a stormy night on Galilee, while the wind-whipped waves continued to obscure any view we might have had on a  calm night, it didn’t take long before someone hit on an explanation: “It’s a ghost!”

Alright, it was a silly suggestion, but it is amazing just how long your beliefs take to overcome your reactions.  Knowing when you have time to think is one thing, but I still have some silly reactions when I don’t take the time to think.  I’m still ashamed of what I did with that sword when Jesus was arrested, giving the high priests the opportunity to criticise Jesus as leading a rebellion.  My reactions learn slowly.

Anyway, we agreed it must be a ghost and were all shouting in fear, but as we did so, immediately the ghost spoke and then it wasn’t a ghost at all.  It was Jesus, and he told us to stop being afraid.  Well, I wasn’t so sure.  Jesus had always come with us in the boat, hadn’t he?  I used to think it was one of the few things that he really needed us for, which was nice to know since he could do just about everything else.  So I asked the ghost, “Lord, if it is you, tell me to come to you, walking on the water.”  It seemed like a good idea, at the time.  However, like many of my good ideas, it seemed to come unstuck.  Jesus said, “Come.”  Just one word, called out over the wind and floating back to me in the pitch black.  What now?  Had I really heard that word?  And was it proof that it was Jesus?  What to do?

Well, really, what would you do?  Of course, if you knew it was Jesus, you would do what he said, wouldn’t you?  But did I know?

Nobody else was looking all that eager to step out into the blackness, so it was up to me, and that was how I found certainty.  For a moment, a few precious moments, my faith was warm within me and my doubts were driven out.  I knew that voice, even heard faintly across the roiling water, above the whining wind of a storm at sea.  Jesus had said, “Come.”  Climbing carefully down out of the boat, I found my footing on the heaving waves and  started to walk.  It took some concentration and for an instant I was worried that I might fall over, and wondered whether I might hurt myself on the water.  And that’s where it all went badly wrong.  Hurt myself on the water?  Ridiculous!  It was much more likely that I would drown in it with this wind tearing at my clothes and the waves rearing up over my head.  I looked around – too far from the boat to go back; too far from Jesus to lean on his strength.

I will never forget the terror that enveloped me then, nor the feeling of sinking.  The water sort of gradually “broke” underneath me; melted somehow – a bit like my faith was melting away.  I tried to just ignore it and keep walking, but that didn’t help.  Suddenly, all support was gone and I was falling, falling freely down into the terrifying water that seemed to open its mouth to take me, and I shouted out into the darkness and wind, “Lord!  Save me!”  I knew Jesus was too far away to reach me, but who else could I turn to?  And Jesus was there.  Immediately.  His hand reached out and held me.  It’s hard to explain exactly, but somehow, he helped me to climb up out of the water again, and stand there with him.  My clothes were still wet, and they tangled around my legs as we walked, carefully, back to the boat.  But now the water had congealed again and would bear my weight.  Please don’t ask me to explain how this worked.  Again I had this fleeting feeling of having to walk carefully lest I trip or slip and hurt myself, but this time, with Jesus there, the disastrous failure of faith didn’t follow.  Held up by Jesus’ faith, we walked back to the boat together and climbed in.

How do you fight a battle against doubt?  How – when the doubts are so real and the faith is so fleeting and insubstantial?  The wind-whipped spray torn from the tips of the heaving black seas had been slapping against my face.  That was real.  Standing on water?  Walking on water?  That was only a hope.  And my hope was overridden by my experience of life.

I had found that in the heat of the moment, I could not stop my doubts.  All the practical powers of my mind and body conspired to drag me down to what my experience told me was “real”.  One moment I had been walking on water, and the next doubt had triumphed.  What had changed?

Faith is not hard to rebuild once you have time to think.  I spent a lot of time thinking about faith over the next few days.  As a result, when many of his followers left Jesus after his hard sayings about eating his body and drinking his blood[1], and he asked us twelve if we would leave too, I was ready with an answer.  “Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the holy one of God.”[2]

It was never hard to have faith in Jesus’ power: he did miracles all the time.  The real test of our faith in him was to believe that he was the son of God.  My failure of faith on that dark, windswept night as the real wind and the real waves triumphed over my fragile confidence had helped me to see this more clearly, and to find a little more of the true faith.

And I also wondered – if I ever saw Jesus again across the water, would I walk to meet him?[3]

[1] John 6:60-66
[2] John 6:68-69
[3] See John 21:4-8