Queen Elsa Was Right

We oversimplify the Gospel.

I often find that we do this with us to Scripture as a whole. Part of that is us trying to make the Bible something that it never intended to be. We want to create a short, easy to follow narrative that remove some of the richness that is present in the words of the Ancients. I’m not here to establish that the Gospel is unattainable, but rather that the beauty lies in complexity. 

To illustrate us, I want to point to recent news that has been circulating around. Do you that there are hearings in Congress about unexplained objects in our oceans? The illusion is not new species that have yet to be discovered such as the discovery of the angular fish a while back. (If you’ve seen any of these fish, you know that they look like aliens). Some are theorizing that it is extraterrestrial life that has been here for a while! I’m not really the expert to speak on this, but it’s interesting all the same. The ocean is a wild place.

It is not lost on me that the fear of the unknown seems to be intrinsically involved in nature of humanity. Yes, Columbus sailed across the blue in 1492 while the whole rest of the world thought that you would fall off the edge of the Earth. Some people would quote scriptures, recognizing the understanding of The Earth having ends we can fall off of. This is not just something that was thought to be true from centuries ago, where we can point to the ignorance of people. This is also true in regards to certain biblical understandings of the formation of the world. When the author of Genesis was penning the formation of the Earth, he remarks it as formless and like void. He mentioned that the spirit of God hovered over these formless waters. Let us remember that one of the most frightful monsters known to biblical authors was the leviathan, a creature that dwells under the water. The lore of this monster was so intense and had such cultural implications that the game Pokémon decided to use it as a demonstration of an unknown, one-of-a-kind,  legendary Pokémon, Kyrogre. (Though some believe that Gyarados was the original intent for a leviathan look-alike).

This fear of the unknown is something that rings loud in the houses of anyone with a toddler obsessed with the movie Frozen. Elsa, the queen of Arendelle, with incredible ice magic shouts about her fear of going into the unknown (queue my daughter loudly singing the lyrics incorrectly here), struggling whether to engage with what is calling her into a space where she lack experience or staying put where she is in her own comfort. And she would be right to be scared! There is not a single client I have sat with that does not have some apprehension when it comes to what is unknown.

Water, therefore, has implications in biblical illustrations showcasing more than just a literal vast space, but rather demonstrates the subconscious parts of humanity, expressing the fear of what yet has been grasps in our consciousness. When we oversimplify the Bible, we only allow water to be one-dimensional instead of representing the wide, mysterious, and frankly, scary world that it reveals.

I state all of this to say, the story of Peter walking on water is not just about having faith but recognizing that Jesus can overcome and stands on top, of the things that we are scared of, the things that have us worried, and the things that we get to grasp. And in that He says to us do not be afraid.