ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Bishop Basil of Amphipolis: sermon 13 August 2006
Church of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation, Oxford

Matthew 14: 22-34

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we heard the story of how Christ walked on the water to reach his disciples. This is story has become so much a part of our culture that it can even be used in popular humour. But the story itself requires serious analysis. Because the question is not, as you might imagine, ‘How can he do it?’ The question is, ‘Why can we not do it?’ Why can we not walk on water? This is the issue from a Christian perspective. We know that Christ is the model for all human beings, and so we have to ask ourselves: ‘Why can we not walk on water?’

In other words, this is a serious anthropological and theological issue.

The way to approach this question, it seems to me – and there are many ways – is through the symbolism of the story itself. The boat carrying the disciples is being tossed by the sea. The wind is strong, boisterous – you can imagine the scene. But this is an image with which we are all familiar. Everyone here has probably heard the Sixth Ode of the Canon which is sung at the Panikhida: ‘Beholding the sea of life, surging with the flood of temptations….’ The imagery of the Canon actually takes us back to this story, reminding us of the disciples’ experience. And the story should remind us of the canon. The sea that is being tossed by the storm is the sea of life itself. We are all buffeted by life. We are pulled this way and that by wind and storm. Sometimes we can hardly stand upright. Often we feel that we are about to sink. All of this is just too familiar.

But what about Christ? If we try to imagine how Christ walks on the water, I think every one of us would imagine him walking smoothly and calmly. In other words, he is not walking on the water. He is walking somewhere below the water, below the level of the waves. If he were walking on the water he would be going up and down like the waves. But he is moving smoothly. How can that be?

His feet are actually below the surface. In some unseen world he is walking quietly, smoothly - beneath the whitecaps and the breakers - and he is walking on something firm. Now we know that even in the ordinary, perceptible world, the water below the surface of the ocean is in fact still. So Christ is not walking on the surface of things – he moves in the depths. Is this simply a product of our imagination – our imagination as we conceive it today?

Hardly. The world itself as created by God has depth. It has an invisible deep structure that cannot be perceived by our ordinary senses. We confess this every time we celebrate the Liturgy and sing the Creed: ‘I believe in one God … maker of all things visible and invisible….’

In the cosmology of the Fathers the invisible world actually has more weight and more ‘substance’ than the visible world. In the psalm which we sing or read at every celebration of Vespers we say that God ‘has laid the foundations of the earth that it should never move at any time’ (Ps 103 (104):5). These ‘foundations of the earth’ are in fact the invisible realm of creation. Creation certainly does move at the surface of things, but in its depths it is firm and cannot be moved.

So from this we should conclude that it is we ourselves who let ourselves be buffeted by surface phenomena. If we were in touch with the depths – the depths created by God, depths related directly to the Word of God and through him to the Father - we would not be shaken as we are.

What has happened is that we have, in our own lives, positioned ourselves wrongly vis-à-vis creation. We attend to the surface of things. We attend to what we can see and perceive, while we really should be attending to the depths.

How can we change? Christ offers us the pattern. He offers us the pattern in his own life and it is by following this – by following his commandments, by linking ourselves to Christ in a personal relationship – that we can find our feet, that we can begin to walk with him, in his strength, on a path that he has walked before us.

Here the human person is the key. For the second Person of the Trinity – the God-man Christ – has navigated this storm before us. And having done this, he offers us an opportunity through faith in him, through the Church – our sacramental life, through Confession, through all that we do in church – he offers us an opportunity to join ourselves with him and to recreate in our lives a ‘mode of being’ that is a synthesis of the human and the divine. In doing so we will reposition ourselves vis-à-vis God and vis-à-vis the created world.

Through Christ we can begin to find our feet in the depths. We can begin to walk through the water – that storm of life. And we can begin to walk unshaken by that storm, as he walked through the storm on the. Amen.