Do you know how it feels to be pressed on every side?
Paul certainly did (see 2 Corinthians 1:8 and 4:8).
And so did Jesus.
At the beginning of Matthew 8, we find him mobbed by “great multitudes”; but it’s perhaps informative that although crowds of people pressed him on every side, the only one to really “touch” him was a solitary leper, crying out from a socially-acceptable distance, well beyond the edge of the throng.
In verse 5, we find Jesus retreating to Capernaum, and seeking brief respite from his public ministry in the privacy of Peter’s home…
But en route: a centurion, “beseeching him”…
Awaiting him at the house: Peter’s mother-in-law, lying “sick of a fever”…
And by evening, word of his whereabouts begins to reach the crowds; and again they come.
And again, upon himself, he “takes their infirmities” and “bares their sicknesses” (verse 17)…
And again, he is forced to move on.
As Jesus prepares to board a boat bound for the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, an earnest young scribe comes breathlessly pledging to follow him anywhere – to the ends of the earth if need be! And is that a trace of irony in Jesus’ response, or am I perhaps just projecting my own feelings onto him?
“Follow me anywhere, would you? And yet, truly, I alone, in all of creation, have nowhere I can go. Truly, I alone have nowhere to lay my head.”
So, in verse 24 we find him huddled in the bottom of the boat, and sleeping the sleep of the bone-weary. Did he know what awaited him on the other shore, I wonder? – Pigs, and tombs, and demons, and indignant locals, requesting him to kindly stay away.
And then, as though even nature itself was determined not to give the poor guy a break, as though even God himself was against him…
8:24 …behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves…
Do you know how it feels to be pressed on every side?
Jesus certainly did.
And the question that always seems to spring so readily to mind is… why? I don’t ask God for any special favours, or any special treatment, but if he can’t bring himself to help me, couldn’t he at least stop putting extra obstacles in my way!?
Why? It’s hard to find an answer when you’re hunkered down in the bottom of your boat. But the answer Paul found is recorded in his second letter to the Corinthians…
1:8 For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life:1:9 But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead:
Humanly, Jesus was utterly spent, “poured out like water” (Psalm 22:14), exhausted enough to sleep through a howling gale, and then barely bat an eyelid as the waves crashed over the sides of the ship and the cold seawater sloshed all around his soggy, makeshift bed.
But it wasn’t human frailty that “arose” from the bottom of the boat. It wasn’t human weakness that “rebuked” the winds and the sea. It was impossible for the incessant turmoil of human life to bring forth such a “great calm” (Matthew 8:26).
In Jesus was something “un-crushable”, inexhaustible, indomitable. Beyond and above his frail human flesh was something rock-solid and unshakable. As though his humanity was just the tip of a gigantic iceberg, the visible pinnacle of a towering mountain of divine strength.
Do you know how it feels to be pressed on every side?
In Christ, you are a “partaker” of the same “divine nature” that dwelt within him (2 Peter 1:4). Perhaps, as Paul says, it’s time to stop trusting in yourself; perhaps it’s time to let those things that press, press through the brittle crust of your humanity, so that you can start plumbing the unfathomable depths of God – those hidden depths of divine “life, and health, and peace”, which were there all along, did you but know it, lying just beneath the surface.
