Mark 4:35-5:43 -Jesus Christ, The Lord of All.

Now, the first of these boat miracles is at the end of Mark chapter 4, verses 35 to 41.

And it's actually spent entirely in the boat when Jesus calmed a storm.

Now, we've seen healing miracles already.

We've actually seen Jesus interacting and driving out demons from people already.

But this is the first of the nature miracles, which will demonstrate his power and authority over creation itself.

And we pick up the narrative at the end of the time when he was teaching the parables, and now he gets in the boat with his disciples to cross and leave and to remove himself from the crowds.

And after they've set off from the shore, the crisis moment arrives, a great windstorm, which causes waves that start breaking over and filling up the boat, and the disciples go into panic.

Now, as part of my own extensive maritime experience, I did recently go out on a fishing charter trip with John and the boys and even Melody came along to do some deep sea fishing.

Thankfully, it was actually an uncharacteristically beautiful day on the ocean.

But I remember there, even there in the calm, when you sit there and watch, like the swells of the ocean are actually quite significant.

And there is definitely this feeling like if the circumstances change and I'm on this little fishing charter boat, things could get quite scary pretty quickly.

And for the disciples, the conditions clearly did just that.

But while the disciples start to panic, right, we're told in verse 38 that Jesus was in the stern.

He was asleep on the cushion.

I love the little details that Mark inserts here.

The fact that Jesus is asleep ultimately reminds us of his humanity.

He's doing something that all humans do because he's as fully human as he is fully divine, right? But it also points us to some interesting ways in which there are some parallels here to the Jonah narrative.

In Jonah, there's a storm that arises and it causes the sailors to panic.

In Jonah, he's also found sleeping underneath when the sailors are jumping up and down, distressed by the situation.

In Jonah, he's woken up, just like Jesus woken up.

And you get the sense that these events are in part portraying Jesus as the greater Jonah, the greater prophet.

But there are important distinctions as well, though, because the sleeping of Jonah indicated that he was somewhat oblivious to what was going on around him.

But in this case, the scenario is very different.

The fact that Jesus is sleeping is not about him being oblivious to the storm.

It's demonstrating his complete and perfect trust in his father.