Posted August 4, 2025

After the trip I took to Israel and the West Bank, people asked me, “Walking where Jesus walked, didn’t you just feel overwhelmed by his presence?” My answer was, “Frankly, no, I didn’t.” For many Jesus-followers, being overwhelmed by the presence of Jesus in the Holy Land is precisely their experience.

But not me. Maybe it was the cognitive dissonance of realizing in very concrete ways that in spite of what you see on television and the internet, the images of the Holy Land in your head are the product of Bible stories 2000 years old. Then you arrive in Tel Aviv, flying over gleaming high rises and multi-lane freeways, looking for all the world like you’re arriving in San Diego. Or, in Jerusalem, driving past shopping malls with Givenchy and Dior and street corners with Starbucks and KFC. Or the holy sites themselves, Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem, the Garden of Gethsemane, Golgotha where he was crucified, now surrounded by houses and apartments. Or, maybe, that the approach to the place on the Jordan River where tradition tells us Jesus was baptized is lined on either side by land mines and guarded by Israeli soldiers in towers with automatic weapons.

There was one place and time I was nearly overwhelmed by the presence of Jesus: on the Sea of Galilee where he walked on water and, on its shores, called his first disciples and fed thousands of people with two fish and five loaves.

In study bibles you’ll frequently encounter a note that the geography of the Sea of Galilee and the surrounding hills is such that in an instant the weather can change from sunny and calm to stormy and rough.

It’s true. One afternoon, I took a boat ride across the Sea (which is really more of a big lake) just as Jesus himself took many times during his ministry. As we began, it wassunny and calm but about the time we were half-way across, the sun suddenly disappeared, dark clouds rolled in, a cool breeze arose and began to blow across the water, and it started to rain. In that moment, in the breeze and gentle rain I felt Jesus as surely as if he’d been in the boat as he was with his disciples, asleep on a cushion (Mark 4:35-41).

It was a very simplemoment and I found myself thinking how our expectations of God can be grandiose and overblown, a God present in Big Things in Big Ways in Big Places, the working out of salvation more akin to a Super Bowl half time show played out amidst glitz and glitter than the birth of a child found laying in a trough which moments before had been the cow’s supper dish.

We forget the lesson of Elijah, fleeing for his life and expecting that when God caught up with him, would speak to him in a Super Bowl kind of way and, sure enough, Big Things in Big Ways did happen: a wind so strong it splits mountains all around him, an earthquake, a fire. Yet God was in none of them. It was in the utter nothingness which followed that Elijah finds God, from the silence God speaks.

We forget, too, the lesson of David and Goliath. A boy, armed with a slingshot, fights a giant armed to the teeth, yet God uses a human being as unexceptional as you could find to take down an enemy of God’s people, reminding us that it is precisely through such unexceptional human beings that God often works.

All of which, perhaps, is precisely the point. We tend to expect God in the exceptional when, so often, it is in the unexceptional that God is found. Not in skyscrapers and shopping malls and holy places threatening to be overwhelmed by development but in cool breezes across the middle of a lake.

It is certainly true that the story Mark tells of Jesus calming the storm is dramatic. A sudden storm with waves so violent they’re swamping the boat, the disciples terrified they’re all about to be drowned, and Jesus, calmly napping on a pillow, who wakes up and with one word saves them.

Yet, as the story begins, Mark inserts a very curious phrase…four words about Jesus: just as he was. This seems like a very odd thing for Mark to say. Maybe the four words are shorthand for a conversation between Jesus and, say, Peter. “We’re going to cross the lake now,” Peter says to Jesus. “Are you gonna go dressed like that? Do you want to change clothes, maybe?” To which Jesus says, as he fluffs the cushion, “No, I’m fine. Wake me when we get to the other side.” So they set out with Jesus just as he was. Or maybe it’s a reference to the fact that earlier in the chapter, when Jesus begins to teach, Mark tells us the crowd was so large Jesus climbed in a boat anchored on the shore and taught from there so when they set out later to cross the lake, Jesus, already in the boat, didn’t have to move. He could go just as he was.

Or do those four curious words—just as he was—mean something altogether more important.

Jesus, save for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem the last week of his life, never arrived anywhere with fanfare, didn’t sleep in five star hotels nor eat in five star restaurants, never packed ballrooms where multi-millionaires paid $1000 a plate to hear him speak, never traveled the dusty roads of Palestine in a bus with a king-sized bed, push-out kitchen, and satellite television. Jesus sat bobbing in an old boat stinking of fish, teaching in parables. People may have come for the half time show of demons cast out and the dead raised back to life but what they got was stories about seeds and birds and trees that left them glancing at one another, wondering what in the world is this guy on about? Jesus, it turned out, appeared about as unexceptional as they come, which is why people often took offense at him. “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” they asked. “Where does he get off talking this way to us?”

There’s a lesson in this, I think. We live in a culture where big, flashy, and expensive is good, and bigger, flashier, more expensive is better…where worship is performance, smoke, light shows, and music loud enough to make the bones in your chest vibrate…where people believe that God would like them to be multi-millionaires living in mansions and driving Lamborghinis. God might desire those things for God’s people, yet it’s far more likely, I think, that what creation most needs is to be reminded of the lesson of Elijah and of David and of stinking boats and stories about seeds and birds and trees. Reminded that an exceptional God is most often found in unexceptional places—including the brokenness inside us all.

Watching what has been unfolding in Gaza and Israel these past months, I’ve found myself wishing that Jesus, just as he was, could arise amidst the destruction and the suffering as he did in the boat on the Sea of Galilee and command, “Peace! Be still!” And the bombing would stop and the shooting would stop and the killing would stop, and the children wouldn’t be starving.

And a world which often seems only to want to watch it all unfold would say, “Who then is this, that the bullets and the bombs obey him?”

Until then, you and I, however unexceptional and unflashy we may be, should look and listen for a God who is everywhere—even amidst the death and destruction in Gaza and Israel—and do what we can to both pray for and bring about compassion and love and peace. And remain ever-mindful yet again that we are all God’s children