De Profundis

In the beginning, before the earth was divided up by geographers and kings, and was still formless and void, there was darkness over the face of the Deep. Before the seven seas were conquered, this Deep stood at the center and was ringed by the civilizations which comprised the known world: the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Babylonians. And those whose lands bordered other seas, Nubia, Sheba, Persia, Gaul, these were the far-flung ends of the world, strange exotic realms. The center of the ancient world was the Deep. A vast and terrifying expanse of water, inhabited by a dragon named Leviathan and the gods only knew what else.

            
Those who had the courage to traverse out of the sight of land, and who had the luck or skill to return, made fortunes for themselves and for their kings. But many set out to bring back their fortunes and instead washed up on some distant shore bloated and unrecognizable or sank with their ships to take their rest at the bottom of everything.

           
The word mediterranean means “in the middle of land” though one might poetically interpret it to mean “at the center of the world”. The Mediterranean Sea is  2.5 million square kilometers and is bordered by three continents. It has an average depth of about 1500 meters and at its deepest point is over 5000 meters deep. By contrast the combined average depth of the earths oceans is almost 4000 meters, and at its deepest is nearly 11000 meters deep. So in oceanographic terms the Mediterranean is just one among many comparatively shallow peripheries of the broader mass of water that covers most of the planet. But for those civilizations that rose and fell over the course of several millennia, both bound together and separated by its watery expanse, the Mediterranean was the Deep.

___________________            

One of the more famous Bible stories, one that everyone in the West seems to just intuitively know, regardless of whether they have ever attended Sunday School or sat through a church service, is the story of Jesus Christ walking on water. The sea on which Jesus walked was not the Mediterranean, by any reasonable definition it was not even a sea at all. The Sea of Galilee is in truth a lake; freshwater, covering less that 200 square kilometers, and only 43 meters deep at its extremity. Even in terms of lakes it is not all that impressive in size, and from the vantage point of any number of its surrounding hills can be easily encompassed in a single panoramic photograph. It is most certainly not the Deep.

           
But it is here that one of the most powerful object lessons in history was given. The disciples, as they were making their way across this lake, the lake on which many of them had made their livelihoods as fishermen, saw a figure striding across the water towards them, and they became very afraid, unsure of what this meant.

___________________

In the end it doesn’t much matter how deep the water is, once it is over your head. When I was eleven, my brother almost drowned in water that was only 5 meters or so deep. The siblings of his friend Jeremy don’t get to use that blessed word ‘almost’ when they recount the story. So the fear of drowning has loomed large in my mind since childhood. Most of us know the sensation well enough, that fear is primal enough that the Psalmist can immediately grip our imaginations with the line, “Save me, O Lord, for the waters have come up to my neck!”

Even before my brother’s accident I can remember as a child, playing in a friend’s pool, walking out to the point of the drop-off between the deep- and shallow-ends, and slipping, the water covering my head. In one sense I was in no great danger, my parents were watching us play, and even then I was a strong swimmer, it was not even a second later that a scissor kick brought me back to the surface and safety. But as I felt the solid bottom drop out from beneath me, and the Deep open up beneath my feet, the feeling in my gut was that of a body preparing to do battle with death. I gasped in the sunlight, suddenly glad to be alive, and spent the rest of the day in the shallows.

___________________

The Jews were not a sea-faring people, they made no great ships and were not sailors. To the Jews the sea was utter chaos without opportunity. The Phoenicians and Philistines might ply those waters, but not them. So when Jonah wanted to flee to Tarshish he had to hire pagans who worshipped other gods to carry him across the waves. Even Solomon in all his splendor relied on Hiram King of Sidon to handle his shipping needs. But their own fears notwithstanding, the Jews believed that their God was still God over the waves. He had set their boundaries in Creation. He had parted the Red Sea. And according to the prophet Isaiah would one day pierce the dragon Leviathan with a sword. So it is, that in John’s grand vision of the end of time when all of creation is renewed, there is no more sea because the sea and all its chaos has been ultimately and finally defeated. The Deep beneath replaced with the Deep above. And mankind no longer goes down to Sheol, only ever further up and further in, into the presence of God.

So it was that when Jesus strode out across the small waves, of a small lake, in a small country, on the edge of the Deep, he wasn’t just performing an interesting trick or a startling illusion. And the disciples weren’t amused the way we would be amused to see an illusionist do some similar action that seems to defy the rules of the world as we know it. No, Christ was walking out across elemental Chaos, he was putting the formless void underneath his feet, he was dancing on the back of the dragon Leviathan without fear. That the disciples found this troubling should not surprise us. Jesus walked across that small lake, called for Peter to come and join him on the waves, in order to show his disciples that the time was at hand. The Deep was ready to be conquered.

___________________

Yesterday I saw a picture. A picture that could only have come from the Deep. A little boy named Aylan Kurdi; red shirt, blue shorts, Velcro shoes, lying face down on the edge of the sea; drowned in the Deep, devoured by Leviathan. He, along with his brother and mother died while trying to make it a few dozen kilometers across a corner of the Mediterranean Sea to Turkey to escape the violence engulfing Syria. His father, Abdullah, watched his wife and children die in the waves and was powerless to save them. Abdullah alone survived to become one of those many thousands of desperate human beings who are officially being labeled ‘migrants’, because were we to allow them to be called refugees we would have an obligation to offer them asylum.

I have a son around Aylan’s age. He is, as most toddlers are, by turns infuriating and delightful. As Jeremy Clarkson once humorously said of toddlers (comparing them, if I remember correctly, to a Maserati), my son is a source of almost infinite frustration, but if you tried to hurt him or take him away from me I wouldn’t hesitate to visit whatever destruction I could upon you. So when I saw some other father’s son lying at the edge of the surf, his life consumed by the Deep, I could not help seeing my own son. Could not help imagining the desperation that gripped his father’s heart to risk such a passage. Could not help imagining the anguish he is feeling this very moment, the sleep that flees him, the tears, the utter despair.

In truth Leviathan doesn’t lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean, the dragon coils in the Deep of the human heart. It whispers the insidious lie that this is someone else’s problem. It sets our minds to counting up the cost of what accepting these desperate souls onto our communities and homes would be. It plants a germ of fear that maybe there are agents of terror hidden amidst the innocents, people who would seek to bring the fires of Syria and Iraq to our own city centers.

The Mediterranean is, in our day, one of many shallow peripheries of the great oceans of a world. But the world it once bound and separated is three continents, and dozens of nations, each with their own invisible walls. The Mediterranean is a barrier only when we want it to be. Every day it is crisscrossed by the yachts of the wealthy inhabitants of Monaco and the container ships that carry the wealth of nations around the globe. It is only the necessity of powerlessness that makes its passage dangerous. The Mediterranean is only the Deep once more because the rich and comfortable have decided to use it as moat.

But that dragon is already defeated. Jesus stands with his heel on its head and he calls us to join him. And it is time for the Church to once again step out of the comfort of the boat, to stride across the waves of the Deep, to plant our heels firmly on the throat of our fears, and to reach down into the waves and pull the desperate and drowning out of the jaws of Leviathan.