Last Friday night’s Zoe group meeting we were discussing some assigned scripture readings and what particular method of scripture meditation each of us used during the individual readings that seemed to work well for us.  While this group sounds very serious, it is filled with light-hearted (and sometimes slightly crass) humor and insights.  It makes for a very earthy, very authentic community of God-seekers; not hiding who we are and letting each other speak from one’s heart.

It just so happened that one of the group participants, Mylinda, began to stifle a laugh at the response she had from one of the readings (which happened to be Mark 6:45-52) which tells of Jesus walking on the water during the storm while the disciples were struggling to keep their little boat afloat.  She explained, “I creatively visualize what I am reading as part of my meditation on scripture and I find that the Bible is just full of funny stuff.  As I was reading this, I could just see the disciples straining with the oars, grunting and working their tails off to keep that boat going.  And then,” she begins to guffaw, “here comes Jesus, do-de-do-de-do, on the water and it says ‘he intended to pass them by.’”  She erupted into fits of hysterical laughter again at this, at which all of us in the group were suddenly struck by the absurdity of that mental image Mylinda painted for us, since all of us seemed to have not noticed that verse before.

A crazyass storm, the disciples scared that they might all sink and drown, and here comes Jesus, just calmly walkin’ across the lake in their view and was going to keep going right on past ‘em as if he didn’t notice they were screaming and working very hard to keep their boat afloat.  Just… silliness… it seemed like a scene from a Monty Python movie. 

Despite the other “very spiritual sounding” explanations that were later discussed for Jesus “intending to pass them by,” such as he was waiting for them to call on him for help or something, we all continued to snort and chuckle over that dry British humour moment in the Bible for a while afterward.