Do You Not Care That We Are Drowning

The disciples' cry in Mark 4:38 is not a theological question. It is a scream. Teacher, do you not care if we drown? It is worth stopping on, because it is the question underneath a great many doubts that believers carry and rarely say out loud. Not, does God exist. Not, is the Bible true. But, does he care, and if he cares, why is he asleep?

Let us give the objection its strongest form before answering it. A Christian prays for a child who is ill, and the child does not recover. A believer does everything right, works honestly, gives generously, and is laid off in a downturn while a colleague who cut corners keeps his job. A faithful wife prays for a marriage for twenty years and watches it end anyway. The water is rising, the boat is filling, and the one who is supposed to be in charge appears to be asleep. Telling such a person that God is sovereign does not help; it makes the problem sharper. If he could stop it and did not, the question is not whether he is powerful but whether he cares. And a God who is powerful but indifferent is, in the experience of the one drowning, worse than no God at all. That is the objection, and it is not a foolish one. The disciples who raised it had left everything to follow Jesus.

Now look carefully at how the episode answers it. The first thing to notice is that Jesus does not rebuke them for asking. He rebukes the wind. The complaint is heard, and the storm is stilled, and only then does he ask them why they were afraid. The order matters. God's response to the accusation that he does not care is, first, to act. The whole of Scripture follows this pattern. Israel cries out in Egypt and God hears. The psalmists accuse God of sleeping and hiding his face, and the accusations are preserved in the book of worship, not censored. Psalm 44:23-24 asks God directly why he sleeps and why he hides his face. The Bible does not pretend the question is illegitimate. It puts the question in our mouths.

The second thing to notice is that Jesus was in the boat. The disciples' fear was reasonable given the waves, and unreasonable given the passenger. Their error was not in feeling the danger but in interpreting his sleep as absence. He was there, subject to the same wind and water they were. This is the heart of the Christian answer to the question of whether God cares. It is not an argument. It is a person. The God of the Bible did not observe human suffering from a dry shore. He got into the boat. And the boat went, in the end, to a cross, where the question of whether God cares was answered in blood rather than words. Whatever else may be said about the storm you are in, it cannot be said that God has kept himself out of the water.

The third thing is harder, and honesty requires saying it. Jesus stilled that storm. He does not still every storm. Some believers drown, in the plain sense; the church has a long roll of martyrs, and a longer one of ordinary people who prayed and were not spared. The episode in Mark 4 is not a promise that the wind will always stop. It is a demonstration of who is in the boat, so that when the wind does not stop, the disciples will know what they were never told: that he is Lord over the sea whether or not he chooses to calm it. Later in Mark these same men will watch him go to his death, and no wind will stop. Yet the resurrection will show that even that storm was under his authority. The pattern is not, he always rescues. The pattern is, he is always Lord, and his rescue may come on the far side of the water.

So what can be said to the person asking whether God cares? Several honest things. Your question is biblical; ask it to his face, as the disciples did, rather than turning away and asking it to the wall. He is not asleep in the sense you fear; he is in the storm with you, and he has been through worse. He may still the wind, and you should ask him to. He may not, and if he does not, that is not the answer to the question of whether he cares. The answer to that question was given once, on a hill outside Jerusalem, and it does not change with the weather.

And then the last thing, which the disciples discovered when the sea went flat. They were terrified, more afraid after the calm than during the storm, because the one in the boat with them turned out to be far greater than they had understood. Doubt of the kind that asks whether God cares is often, underneath, a doubt about how big he is. The end of this episode is not comfort but awe. Who is this? The reader of Mark is meant to keep that question open until the end of the book, and then to answer it on their knees. The waves are real. So is he. And of the two, he is the one who lasts.