2 Before Lent

Sermon Preached by the Revd Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

Rembrandt, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, until 1990

“Master, Master, we are perishing!”

A dramatic gospel reading deserves a dramatic illustration. Jesus is in a boat with his disciples. They have put out to cross to the other side of the lake. Jesus is exhausted and falls asleep. A gale sweeps down on the lake. The boat fills with water. Everyone is in danger of being drowned. The disciples wake Jesus up with the words “Master, Master, we are perishing!”  Jesus wakes up and rebukes the wind and the raging waves. There is peace.

To help us get inside this story I am inviting us to reflect on this painting, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, by the Dutch master, Rembrandt. I hope everyone has a copy of this, and it’s also up on the website alongside the livestream link, so if you are following online you can click on the link on the YouTube page to see it.

Rembrandt painted this in 1633 when he was 27. He was entering on his prolific golden period. He had just moved to Amsterdam, was accepting commissions to paint the great and the good of the city and was out to prove his credentials as a sacred as well as a secular artist. He painted this story as much to prove his skill in handling a seascape as to demonstrate his knowledge of the Bible. So he poured all his ability as a painter into rendering this storm, details of boat, mast, sails and rigging as accurate and provocative as clouds, waves, spray and wind. But he is also faithful to the details of the story. You can see that all the twelve disciples are in the boat. Jesus is in the stern. And you can imagine that Jesus has just been awoken by their cry “Master, Master, we are perishing!”

Now this is a famous painting. It is in fact Rembrandt’s only seascape. But it hasn’t been seen for over 30 years. At the risk of digressing, I must tell you that it was bought in the late l9th century by the American heiress and philanthropist, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and incorporated into her celebrated museum in Boston, Massachusetts. There it remained, a jewel of the collection for 100 years. But in the early hours of 18th March 1990, thieves broke into this museum. They stole thirteen works of art, including The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. This has gone down in history as the most valuable art heist ever, worth some $800m, and these paintings have never been recovered. Empty frames in the museum remain as a memorial to the losses, and huge rewards for their recovery are unclaimed. So much for The Storm on the Sea of Galilee – it has been more a storm in the Boston city police department and in the FBI. However, I find this painting’s notorious history gives it extra allure.

But back to Rembrandt’s art. Looking at the painting, two features are immediately apparent. The first is the extraordinary angle he has chosen to paint the boat. The second is his use of light and darkness.

A sailing friend of mine to whom I showed this painting exclaimed that, if she had been in the boat, she would definitely have clamoured to wake Jesus up. It is a flat-bottomed boat, we can assume, and it is heeling about 30 degrees off perpendicular, just at the point of no return. One more gust of wind and it will capsize. No wonder, she remarked, that the disciple in the bow of the boat is struggling to lower the sail. But most of the disciples, including Jesus, are in the wrong place. They should be on the port side leaning off on the edge of the boat with their backs to the wind. As it is, with so much of their combined weight in the stern, there is no hope for the boat. Jesus, sitting down in the stern is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He will be the first to drown. No wonder that they cry “Master, Master, we are perishing!” Rembrandt’s astonishing skill in painting the stricken vessel so graphically on the point of foundering, has also described a strange theological truth, which is that our salvation through Jesus Christ comes not from where we expect it, but apparently from the wrong place. Yet this is the place from which he will rebuke the wind and the raging waves.

Then the second feature is Rembrandt’s handling of light and darkness. Bright light shining from the left-hand side of the painting has thrown the right-hand side into deep shadow, so much so that you can hardly see Jesus. This painting technique is known as chiaroscuro. Rembrandt was a master at this. He knows that the drama of the event can be enhanced, in the manner of stage lighting, by exaggerating the brightness on one side and the shadow on the other. But there is quite a lot of artistic licence here. If you think of it, the gusts of wind blowing from the left-hand side would naturally be blowing out of a dark cloud, not apparently out of sunshine, and so the shadow side of the boat, where Jesus is asleep, would not naturally have been as dark as this.

But Rembrandt has deliberately built up the contrast of light and dark to make a point: that this storm is huge, it is terrifying and it is irreversible. In doing so he has described another theological truth. Jesus is the light which shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. By placing Jesus in the darkest part of the painting, Rembrandt has reminded us that our salvation comes not from a bright, light place; not from the sunshine; but from the darkness. If you would find Jesus, look for him in the shadows.

So much for the artistic skill of this painting and the theological truths it brings out. What of its meaning? This vulnerable boat is carrying Jesus and his twelve chosen disciples across the lake. When the storm puts the boat at risk and they cry “Master, Master, we are perishing!” they know that what is at risk is not only their lives but Jesus’s whole project to proclaim the Kingdom of God. This little boat contains, if you like, the infant Church.

So, in painting each of the twelve disciples, Rembrandt has described the different personalities of that infant community. In the bow we have the activist wrestling with the sail. I think he is the churchwarden. In the stern, the skipper of the boat is trying to control the rudder – a born leader, he is surely the vicar. Then we have the contemplative sitting apparently doing nothing, and we have the one who has given up hope, being sick over the side. And of course we have the intercessor, the one close to Jesus who is waking him up and shouting at him. We might like to think ourselves into this terrifying scene and wondering where we would find ourselves. Can we see our self-portrait there? Rembrandt certainly did. The disciple wearing a blue jacket looking straight out in our direction is a self-portrait of Rembrandt himself.

But the scene prompts us to think of other boats and other storms. Think of trafficked refugees and asylum-seekers struggling in flimsy dinghies across the channel. What kind of salvation can they expect? Think of the boat as the human race struggling against the pandemic; or as our very civilization facing the challenge of climate change. Or to make it more personal, do we think of the boat as describing our own lives? Are we afflicted by an inner storm, with winds of anxiety or disappointment or sorrow?

In all these ideas prompted by a picture of the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, we can do no more and no less than cry out with the disciples “Master, Master, we are perishing!”  In the story, the Lord wakes up and rebukes the wind and the raging waves. “Peace”, he says, “Be still”. They cease and there is calm. Then he says “Where is your faith?”

Let me use the painting for one final thought. The dark clouds on the Sea of Galilee anticipate the dark clouds which surrounded the cross of Calvary. But whereas Jesus rebuked the wind and the raging waves on Galilee and all was calm, on the cross of Calvary this did not happen. On the cross, Jesus was vanquished. There was no calm and no peace. On Calvary it was as though the boat did capsize, drowning him and all his disciples. And we his followers, by our baptism, follow him into death below the waves. But God raised him. And God raises us. After his resurrection, Jesus’s first words are “Peace be with you”. These precious words renew our faith that he is breathing peace into our troubled lives.