'So when they had rowed about five-and-twenty or thirty furlongs, they
see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they
were afraid. 20. But He said unto them, It is I; be not afraid.'—JOHN
vi. 19,20.
There are none of our Lord's parables recorded in this Gospel, but all
the miracles which it narrates are parables. Moral and religious truth
is communicated by the outward event, as in the parable it is
communicated by the story. The mere visible fact becomes more than
semi-transparent. The analogy between the spiritual and the natural
world which men instinctively apprehend, of which the poet and the
orator and the religious teacher have always made abundant use, and
which it has sometimes been attempted, unsuccessfully as I think, to
elevate to the rank of a scientific truth, underlies the whole series
of these miracles. It is the principal if not the only key to the
meaning of this one before us.
The symbolism which regards life under the guise of a voyage, and its
troubles and difficulties under the metaphor of storm and tempest, is
especially natural to nations that take kindly to the water, like us
Englishmen. I do not know that there is any instance, either in the Old
or in the New Testament, of the use of that to us very familiar
metaphor; but the emblem of the sea as the symbol of trouble, unrest,
rebellious power, is very familiar to the writers of the Old Testament.
And the picture of the divine path as in the waters, and of the divine
prerogative as being to 'tread upon the heights of the sea,' as Job has
it, is by no means unknown. So the natural symbolism, and the Old
Testament use of the expressions, blend together, as I think, in
suggesting the one point of view from which this miracle is to be
regarded.
It is found in two of the other Evangelists, and the condensed account
of it which we have in this Gospel, by its omission of Peter's walking
on the water, and of some other smaller but graphic details that the
other Evangelists give us, serves to sharpen the symbolical meaning of
the whole story, and to bring that as its great purpose and
signification into prominence.
We shall, I think, then, best gain the lessons intended to be drawn if
we simply follow the points of the narrative in their order as they
stand here.