“Because it is difficult to unite [fear and love] in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”[i] This is how Niccolò Machiavelli instructs princes on how they should establish their reputation so that they can govern effectively. Fear is a basic human experience that allows us to respond to danger and take appropriate precautions so that our survival is ensured. If we face serious threats, we are usually going to do whatever we can to minimize negative consequences, whether that means running away, hiding, or obeying certain rules and laws. These threats usually come from people or things that are more powerful than we are, whether powerful rulers, wild animals, forces of nature, dreadful diseases, or whatever other situation that we have no control over. Machiavelli’s advice is for rulers to exploit feelings of fear to control their subjects.
Fear as a negative emotion is one of the many consequences of the reign of death since sin entered this world. After eating the forbidden fruit, we read of the primary emotion that Adam and Eve felt in response to their sin being discovered: fear. When God asks Adam, “Where are you?” he replies saying he hid because he was afraid (Gen. 3:8–10). Knowing they had disobeyed God’s commands, Adam and Eve were afraid of what God might do to them. This fear, which is rooted in doubt about God’s true character, has been part of our world ever since. In Jesus’s ministry, He was actively working to dispel these doubts and to demonstrate God’s character and the true nature of his kingdom. But people often reacted to Jesus in fear. Was this response appropriate? Who was Jesus really? What did He reveal about God and His kingdom? The disciples and the readers of the Gospel of Mark have been gathering clues about Jesus’s identity as the Son of God. The miracles we read about in Mark 4:35–5:43 are precisely meant to reveal who Jesus really is and, in doing so, to address some of humanity’s deepest fears.
The Power of Fear and Death
The context in which Jesus performed His miracles is evidence of the broken and fallen world we live in, filled with suffering and death, leading to feelings of fear and desperation. The disciples are helplessly afraid of dying in the middle of a storm (4:37–40). The Gadarene demoniac lives among the tombs, his life so deformed and defaced by the evil powers that took control of him that he has been reduced to an unrecognizably wild, animal-like state. His uncontrollable strength causes fear among the villagers, leading to his isolation from society after they had tried and failed to secure him with chains (5:2–5). The woman who had been bleeding for 12 years is also an outcast because of her perpetual impurity. Her bleeding disease meant that she lived every day with the reminder of her “decaying mortality,” leading to ongoing physical, psychological, and social suffering (5:25–26).[ii] And finally, the death of Jairus’ daughter and the desperation of a father who had lost his young child too soon resonates with everyone who has gone through the tragic experience of losing a loved one (5:22–23, 35–36). All these people, representing different groups within society, are suffering deeply, and their fear and desperation lead them to the feet of Jesus.
The miracles Jesus performs show that He is more powerful than these evil forces. He calms the storm and delivers the disciples from the danger of death at sea (4:39–40). He authoritatively expels the demons and restores the intelligence and humanity of the Gadarene man, giving him a purpose and a mission in life (5:15, 18–20). He gives the ailing woman back her health, something no physician had been able to do for her over the course of 12 years (5:29–34). And he brings the little girl back to life, returning her to her family (5:40–42). These miracles hint at the answer to the disciples’ question, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (4:41). Here was a man from the little local town of Nazareth, whose father and mother were known in the region (6:1–6), but clearly, he was greater and more powerful than anyone they knew. Who was this man? How was he able to perform these miracles (6:2)? What else was he capable of doing? No wonder people responded to his miracles with fear (4:41; 5:15–17, 33).
Jesus Himself never gave people a reason to be afraid. On the contrary, in every one of these stories, Jesus demonstrates incredible love and kindness toward the people He meets.
Now, it is important to note that we find different kinds of fear in the Gospel of Mark.[iii] Sometimes fear means the negative feeling of dread over negative consequences in terrifying situations, such as when the disciples were afraid of dying in the storm or when Jairus was afraid of losing his daughter. Sometimes fear can mean reverential awe of an amazing display of divine power, such as when the disciples witness Jesus calming the storm. This reverential awe can lead to the proper response of worship and submission to God (cf. Eccl. 12:13; Prov. 1:7; Rev. 12:7), or it can lead people to feel uneasy and to close themselves off to God, such as when the Gadarene villagers are afraid of Jesus’s power and ask him to leave their town. The focus of this reflection, however, is on the negative feeling of fear, which is a natural human reaction, and what these stories in Mark teach us about how Jesus worked with people who were afraid.
Displays of Love
Jesus Himself never gave people a reason to be afraid. On the contrary, in every one of these stories, Jesus demonstrates incredible love and kindness toward the people He meets. He treats every one of them as the valuable children of God that they are. He provides for their needs, clothing them and feeding them. He restores in them their sense of humanity and fills homes with laughter instead of mourning. He brings peace, order, intelligence, purpose, healing, hope, and life to individuals, families, and communities. This healing love is at the very essence of who Jesus is. Whatever power He yields, he demonstrates that He is only willing to use it for the good of humankind, with people’s best interest at heart, seeking to restore and bring life to a broken world.
Important is also the fact that these miracles were performed as a result of Jesus’s connection to the Father:
When Jesus was awakened to meet the storm, He was in perfect peace. There was no trace of fear in word or look, for no fear was in His heart. But He rested not in the possession of almighty power. It was not as the “Master of earth and sea and sky” that He reposed in quiet. That power He had laid down, and He says, “I can of Mine own self do nothing.” John 5:30. He trusted in the Father’s might. It was in faith—faith in God’s love and care—that Jesus rested, and the power of that word which stilled the storm was the power of God.[iv]
Jesus’s power came from His faithful submission to a God of love. Love is, in its essence, other-focused, self-giving, patient, and kind (cf. 1 Cor 13). With God’s love as the source of his power, the mighty acts performed by Jesus were not for His own advantage (cf. Matt 4:1–4; Mark 15:29–32) nor meant to elicit compliance out of fear, but to exemplify God’s character of love and what it means to rest and trust in that love.
In addition, these miracles demonstrate that in His great love for us, God was actively working to fulfill his promise that He would one day make things right in the world (Gen 3:15). All throughout Scripture we are assured again and again of God’s faithfulness to His promises (1 Kings 8:56; Ps 105:8; Heb 10:23; 2 Pet 3:9). In demonstrating His authority over the forces of evil, in restoring health and life and humanity, Jesus was providing clear evidence that God in His great love for us is using His power to restore all things to His original purpose according to his promises. Through Jesus’s ministry, therefore, we learn that God’s kingdom does not rely on displays of power and reactions of fear. Rather, Jesus reveals God’s character of love and faithfulness for all to see.
Faith over Fear
It is important to notice in the text that Jesus frequently calls on those He meets to have faith and not fear. In Mark 4:40, Jesus clearly links the feeling of fear with a lack of faith, asking, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” Similarly, this connection is seen when the woman, now healed from her illness, trembles from fear when Jesus draws attention to what had just happened. To highlight her faith and dispel her fears, He says to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well, go in peace, and be healed of your disease” (5:34). Likewise, He exhorts Jairus to have faith over fear after receiving news of his daughter’s death, saying, “Do not fear, only believe” (5:36). Faith is nothing more than belief that God has the power to fulfill his promises (Rom. 4:18–21) and trust that His promises flow out of his great love for us (Rom. 5:8; Eph 2:4–7). Both belief in God’s power and trust in His love must go hand in hand for genuine faith. The Gadarene people witnessed Jesus’s power in expelling the demons from a man no one had been able to tame up until this point, but their fear of His power prevented them from acknowledging His character of love. They “had before them the living evidence of Christ’s power and mercy. They saw the men who had been restored to reason; but they were so fearful of endangering their earthly interests that He who had vanquished the prince of darkness before their eyes was treated as an intruder.”[v] Time and the personal testimony of one whose life had been transformed by Jesus’s love was needed for them to gain a deeper understanding of who He really was.[vi]
True faith is more than belief in God’s power; it is based on a personal knowledge of Christ and His character of love. Even demons acknowledge and tremble at the power of God (Mark 5:7; cf. 1:24; 3:11; Acts 19:13–16; James 2:19). “It is not enough to believe about Christ; we must believe in Him. The only faith that will benefit us is that which embraces Him as a personal Saviour; which appropriates His merits to ourselves.”[vii] Like a child who thinks his father is the strongest person in the world, who knows just how much his father loves him, and therefore is able to confidently jump into his father’s arms, so we are called to truly know Christ and build a deep relationship of trust in Him. There is nothing to fear if we know that the one in the boat with us loves us and cares for us more than we could ever imagine.
Conclusion
The same things that caused people to fear in Jesus’ time cause us to fear today. The fear of death, the fear of supernatural powers we cannot control, the fear of dreadful diseases, the fear of losing loved ones, all of those are fears we can relate to. But there are also other kinds of fears that permeate our world, such as the fear of a new job, the fear of feeling alone, or the fear of making the wrong life decision. Whatever it is that you are afraid of, know that Jesus cares about you just as much as He cared about those He ministered to. The same God who had the power to perform those miracles has the power to work in your life today. It may be that not all of the storms are stilled and not all of the diseases cured, but we are promised the same peace and rest in God that allowed Jesus to sleep in the boat amidst the storm. We can find that peace in the knowledge of His love and care for us, a love so great that God sent His only Son to the world to save us and one day make things right again, just as He had promised. Machiavelli was right when he said that love and fear cannot co-exist. But it is love that is the essence of God’s kingdom, not fear. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). And just as in the miraculous stories we read about, He asks us to respond to that love, not with fear, but with faith and trust in Him.
[i] Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, The Prince and Leviathan, Or, Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed. Mortimer J. Adler, Philip W. Goetz, and Nelle Fuller, trans. W. K. Marriott, 2nd ed., vol. 21 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990), 24.
[ii] David E. Garland, Mark, NIVAC (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 220.
[iii] See David E. Garland, A Theology of Mark’s Gospel: Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, Biblical Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 553–55.
[iv] Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1898), 336.
[v] Ibid, 339.
[vi] The missionary work of the Gadarene demoniac in the region of the Decapolis (Mark 5:20) likely helped prepare the way for Jesus’ return to that region later in Mark 7:31–8:9.
[vii] Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1898), 337