"Tender, luminous and demanding Jesus"

“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Mark 4. 35 - 41

A fellow pilgrim shared this poem with me, and it is too perfect not to post today as we read the storm passage from Mark.

Don't miss the magnificent description of Jesus, the only Son of God "a thousand times more frightening that the killer storm."

Maybe by Mary Oliver

Sweet Jesus, talking his melancholy madness, stood up in the boat and the sea lay down, silky and sorry. So everybody was saved that night. But you know how it is when something different crosses the threshold -- the uncles mutter together, the women walk away, the young brother begins to sharpen his knife. Nobody knows what the soul is. It comes and goes like the wind over the water -- sometimes, for days, you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon, after the multitude was fed, one or two of them felt the soul slip forth like a tremor of pure sunlight before exhaustion, that wants to swallow everything, gripped their bones and left them miserable and sleepy, as they are now, forgetting how the wind tore at the sails before he rose and talked to it -- tender and luminous and demanding as he always was -- a thousand times more frightening than the killer storm.