Not till the last watch of the night does He come, when they have
long struggled, and the boat is out in the very middle of the lake,
and the storm is fiercest. We may learn from this the delays of His
love. Because He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus, He stayed still,
in strange inaction, for two days, after their message. Because He
loved Peter and the praying band, He let him lie in prison till the
last hour of the last watch of the last night before his intended
execution, and then delivered him with a leisureliness (making him
put on article after article of dress) which tells of conscious
omnipotence. Heaven's clock goes at a different rate from our little
timepieces. God's day is a thousand years, and the longest tarrying
is but 'a little while.' When He has come, we find that it is 'right
early,' though before He came He seemed to us to delay. He comes
across the waves. Their restless and yielding crests are smoothed
and made solid by the touch of His foot. 'He walketh on the sea as
on a pavement' (Septuagint version of Job ix. 8). It is a revelation
of divine power. It is one of the very few miracles affecting
Christ's own person, and may perhaps be regarded as being, like the
Transfiguration, a casual gleam of latent glory breaking through the
body of His humiliation, and so, in some sense, prophetic. But it is
also symbolic. He ever uses tumults and unrest as a means of
advancing His purposes. The stormy sea is the recognised Old
Testament emblem of antagonism to the divine rule; and just as He
walked on the billows, so does He reach His end by the very
opposition to it, 'girding Himself' with the wrath of men, and
making it to praise Him. In this sense, too, His 'paths are in the
great waters.' In another aspect, we have here the symbol of
Christ's using our difficulties and trials as the means of His
loving approach to us. He comes, giving a deeper and more blessed
sense of His presence by means of our sorrows, than in calm sunny
weather. It is generally over a stormy sea that He comes to us, and
golden treasures are thrown on our shores after a tempest.