Subduing the Chaos: Recovering Ourselves in Expectation

by Jez Carr

Note: This is the final article in a series of three Lenten reflections examining imagery of storms and water in the Bible. The first article situated how our struggles fit within the Christian worldview. The second article looked at how we understand Jesus within this imagery. Here, the series concludes with what it means to live this out within the life of faith.

Over three reflections, we’re looking at the biblical imagery around watery chaos—storms, floods, waves, and so on—and exploring how it helps us withstand the storms of life. In the first reflection, “You Are Not Alone: Storms in Faithful Christian Experience,” we looked at how pervasive the imagery is, and how feeling “overwhelmed” (note the watery connotations) fits hand in glove with the story of God. The watery darkness of our fears relates to the very fabric of this broken world. We looked at how the Bible draws on ancient Near Eastern imaginative associations to paint this imagery as the enemy of life, the nemesis of humanity, and the thing we failed to subdue right back at the start. We asked (repeatedly) where God is in the midst of our experiences, recognizing that when we do so, we join a chorus of the Bible’s own authors. My hope is that you find comfort in this deep resonance with those who direct our faith.

In the second reflection, “Jesus, Storm of Storms,” we looked at how Jesus succeeded where humanity failed. Through his life, death, and resurrection, he shows himself to be the Storm God par excellence, coming to rescue us from all that assails us. My hope is that you find hope in Christ, the one who delivers us out of the flood.

However, while the cross is an event in the past, and Jesus is, in a sense, victorious already, we also know that the end of the story is very much in the future. We still live in a world battling the storms of life. Where does this all land in terms of how we live in the chaos, within us and around us? How then shall we live? How do followers of Jesus embody this future in which the storms are gone forever? Well, we fight the chaos, in his name. Let me draw out three ways we can do that (I don’t love alliterations, but sometimes they’re hard to resist . . .): in stillness, in solidity, and in our human calling to subdue.

Stillness

Being still is the most interior way we fight the chaos. It is about a quiet posture of heart, rather than a lack of activity. We’ve looked at a few instances of the command “Be still!” In the exodus story (see Reflection 1), when the Israelites were trapped between the sea and their pursuers, they let the chaos into their hearts. Moses reassures them: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exod. 14:14 [NIV]). In the story of Jesus stilling the storm (see Reflection 2), we saw something similar happening with the disciples when Jesus asks them, “Why are you so afraid?”

What we fix our eyes on gets inside us. The chaos seeps in when we focus on it, when we lose sight of Yahweh as the one who stands over the chaos, the one who charges on the clouds to our rescue. The underlying Greek and Hebrew words for “Be still!” vary, but most of the associations are around silence—the silence of awe at God’s majesty, and peace at God’s sovereignty.

The poet in Psalm 46 compares human conflict to cosmic chaos advancing across the world (“ . . . though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging . . .” [Ps. 46:2-3]). Somehow in the midst of it, the poet hears the command to be different: “Be still, (How?) . . . and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:11). God is the one who makes wars cease, who will be exalted over all nations and their squabbles. And the image through which he is drawn to stillness? It’s a river: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God”(Ps. 46:4). This river goes on to be the final image of God’s world at peace, at the end of Revelation.

In the world of the Bible, rivers could be agents of death or life. When they flooded (as they often did in spring), they could be deathly, the very definition of chaos, bursting the limits placed on them and raging across the land destroying all in their path. But when they receded, they left fertile ground that was ripe for new life. (I’ve often wondered if this is part of the original imaginative associations around baptism.) And when rivers were within their boundaries (as when God fixed the boundaries of the waters in Genesis 1), they were the epitome of life, watering an otherwise parched land, making the city glad. When David the shepherd king celebrated God’s shepherdly care, David imagined God leading his sheep from the dangerous wilderness to “quiet waters” where we are refreshed in our souls (Ps. 23:2).

So stillness is about where we settle our focus. For the slaves of the exodus, it was either the sea and army, or the God who has shown himself greater than them in the plagues. For the disciples in the overwhelmed boat, it was either the terrifying storm or the peaceful presence of Jesus. For Peter walking on the water, it was either the impending waves or the Christ who walks upon them. God invites us to settle our focus, not on the raging storms of our present, but on the quiet waters of God’s certain future. This is a posture that requires daily attention, as our focus slips again and again.

Solidity

One of the challenges of finding stillness in the presence of the storm is that it often feels too late. In God’s grace, it’s never too late for him to step in. That said, the encouragement here is to build up our foundations in preparation for the flood before it comes, rather than in the middle of it.

Those who have walked through river currents know that the only way not to be swept away is by placing your feet somewhere solid. In Psalm 69, as the waters come up to the poet’s neck, he panics because there is no foothold (Ps. 69:1-2). I know that feeling—of feeling like there is nothing to stop the slide toward catastrophe. When the psalms talk about God as a rock, there are two main imaginative associations: a cave in which we might hide from the storm (such as Psalm 71:3: “you are my rock and my fortress.”) or something firm beneath our feet (such as Psalm 40:2: “he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.”). This is partly why the feeling of God’s absence is so traumatic—when I don’t experience him as a rock, it seems like he has forgotten his very identity. (Psalm 42:9: “I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’”)

Jesus warns that storms and floods will be a part of this life—they will “beat against [your] house” (Matt. 7:25). Those whose houses survive are those who have built them on the rock-solid foundation of Jesus’ teaching, as he has outlined in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7). What does that look like? It is about living in a way that shows we are invested first and foremost in God’s restored kingdom to come—following the ways of that land, trusting in the goodness of its king and not being distracted by the stuff of the world. It is about storing up for ourselves treasures in heaven that cannot be swept away (Matt. 6:20), so that we won’t be anxious about all the things that can, whether those be earthly comforts or social status.

In Ephesians, Paul uses similar imagery for Christian community. He playfully intertwines the image of the magnificent temples around Ephesus with the image of the Body of Christ, which is being built as solidly as those temples. If we are not to be “thrown this way and that on a stormy sea, blown about by every gust of teaching” (4:14 [Tom Wright’s paraphrase]), then we need to be bound together, built solidly on Christ, the Scriptures (2:20), and the glorious love story they tell (3:17). In fact, this is what God is building us into as we each play our part (4:11-12); it is a masterpiece (2:10), and so it should be—God himself has decided to live there (2:21-22).

I guess it’s not rocket science: If we are to grow strong enough to withstand the storm, we need to plant ourselves in the reality of Jesus, developing the habits and practices of his life and participating in the community of his people.

Subduing

This is the most “exterior” part of how we respond to the storms that wreak havoc across our world. And it brings us back to the very start of the story: Bringing life-giving order is the call God placed on humanity right back in Genesis 1. Just as God subdued the chaos into order and filled that ordered world with life, so we image God by obeying his command to fill and subdue (Gen. 1:28). This is the essence of what it means to be human. It is also the essence of humanity’s failings (Gen. 3—see Reflection 1) and is core to the fullness of life that Christ recovers for us. In the overall narrative of Scripture, the path of our calling may have been darker than we knew at the beginning, but the destination is the same, and all the more glorious for it—the total subduing of the chaos.

Ironically, there is a fine line between chaos and misunderstood order. (Having worked in free jazz, I know this to be true, and have, I admit, used this ambiguity to my advantage on occasion.) God’s ordering of the chaos may start in simple, binary divisions of water, sky, and land, but it fills with life and grows vastly more complex. It’s not chaos; it’s extreme order. Humanity, as his image bearers, are invited into the same process. One (Adam) becomes two (Eve), becomes a family, a city, a nation, and so on. Human society may have let the chaos back in, but society itself, with all its complexities, is inherently an intended part of God’s good creation. It’s just sometimes hard to tell where societal complexity stops and watery chaos begins.

So this means that we each need to search out our role. That is part of “fill and subdue.” And we all subdue the chaos in different ways—carpenters bring order to wood, parents and teachers to children’s development, musicians to sound waves, accountants to finances, psychologists to minds. Artists and scientists, in different ways, bring order to our experience and understanding of the world. Even doing a jigsaw puzzle taps into this primordial calling. (A step too far? Maybe!) All this is more intuitive for some than others—surveying the state of my desk, I see how my life tends towards deathly chaos—but all that we do can be framed in terms of sculpting an ordered society that images God in fighting the storms that confront the world.

Riding with the Storm of Storms

A few weeks ago, we started this series of reflections by asking why God can feel so absent when we’re overwhelmed with life’s struggles. Where does he go, and what does that feeling mean? We resisted an answer for a long time, dwelling instead on how such experiences, and the very act of questioning God’s role in them, root us deep in the story of God and of his people. We looked at how the Bible uses imagery of “watery chaos” to express and explore all this—imagery that pervades the whole story from start to finish. In the midst of those struggles, we are not alone—we are joined by the first heroes of faith.

Then we turned our attention to Jesus—the one through whom God answers our cries in the most emphatic terms, the Christ who commands the waters, stills the storm, and asks us not to be afraid. As we approach the Easter weekend, we see Christ entering into the ultimate battle and coming out victorious, conquering all that assails his people. No matter how much it feels like we are drowning, the Rescuer is coming, and it will all, in the most important sense, be okay.

Finally we have explored how we live healthy lives framed by these realities—fixing our eyes on the peace of Christ, so that it enters our very souls; fixing our feet on the rock of Christ, so that we stand firm in the flood; fixing our hands on the call of Christ, to recover our original shared vocation to subdue the chaos, as we wait for him to come on the clouds one last time. Then we will finally be at peace in the city of God, set by the quiet waters of the river of life.

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Jez Carr divides his time between leading the Hutchmoot UK team and pastoring a small Anglican church in Seer Green (a village in Buckinghamshire, UK). He has held a variety of roles in music (mainly jazz) and mission, and has graduate degrees in theology from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the University of Oxford.

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