Ghost in the machine
If you ever feel like reading a bit of the Bible, try the Gospel of Mark. It was written for a Roman audience, who loved a rollicking, ripping yarn. So it’s a mass-market paperback, full of action and adventure. And thankfully, it’s short!
I just read this bit: ‘But when they saw him walking on the sea, they supposed that it was a ghost, and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke with them and said to them, ‘Take courage; it is I, do not be afraid.’ Then he got into the boat with them…’ See what I mean? There’s even this spooky little story.
But those first disciples were mistaken in regarding Jesus as a spectre of some kind. If you follow Christ, you don’t follow a disembodied spirit from a Spielberg movie. You follow someone who’s much more than that. The key phrase here is, ‘he got into the boat with them’. He didn’t float past, expressing some woolly ideal. He joined his mates in the boat. And everything was alright.
Christ can bring some playful chaos to our ordered, compartmentalised minds. So if he’s not a ghostly apparition, drifting across misty seas, what is he? If he’s not a phantom figure, he must be something else. Something beyond definition. Something human – but wonderfully so.
