The Sea of Galilee is known for violent, sudden storms funneled down from the surrounding hills. Several of the disciples were professional Galilean fishermen who had spent their lives on that water. When they said “we are perishing,” they were not being dramatic; they were reading a storm they knew how to read. And in the stern, asleep on a cushion, was Jesus — the most vivid image in any Gospel of God resting in the middle of chaos. He speaks two words to the sea. The sea obeys.

From the writers we read together

C.S. Lewis

Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar, author of Mere Christianity (1898-1963)

Lewis understood storms from the inside. He wrote “The Problem of Pain” before his wife Joy died, and “A Grief Observed” after — two books that show what it looks like when faith meets first the theory of suffering and then the storm itself. His observation in The Screwtape Letters about courage as the form of every virtue was not abstract. He knew that every other virtue — honesty, patience, love, trust — must eventually pass through a moment when it would be easier to abandon it. That is the testing point. Deilos is what happens when courage fails.

The disciples had already seen Jesus heal, exorcise, and preach with authority. In the storm they forgot all of it. Lewis would say that is not unusual or contemptible; it is the default of the human heart under immediate pressure. The question “have you still no faith?” is gentle, in the way questions are gentle — it reopens something that has been closed by fear. After the storm, in the great calm, the disciples asked one another: “Who then is this?” (Mark 4:41). The storm did not destroy their faith; it clarified the question their faith was supposed to answer.