He Is Our Peace (Matthew 8:18-9:1)
He Is Our Peace
First Sunday of Lent
February 22, 2026
By: Pastor Mike Conner
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In these three scenes, Matthew describes Jesus’ first journey back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. As a writer, Matthew gives us a clue that we should hold them together in our reflection, seeing them as a unified journey. “Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side [of the sea],” says chapter 8 verse 18. A few paragraphs later comes chapter nine verse 1: “And after getting into a boat he crossed the sea [again] and came to his own town.” From the region of Galilee to the region of the Gadarenes and back again. And in between those narrative bookends, a lot of drama unfolds—storms at sea, demon-possessed men in graveyards, pigs racing off cliffs to fall to their death.
This is the first open-water journey described by Matthew. Throughout the whole Bible, water is both a symbol and a literal means of creation and re-creation. We might think of Genesis chapter 1, when God separates the waters below from the waters above in the creation of the earth. We might think of Noah’s great flood, or the Israelites’ freedom march through the Red Sea, or the many prophetic visions of fresh springs bubbling up in the dry desert as signs of salvation. In water, old realities are dissolved and new realities are born.
Jesus’ journey across the Sea reveals new things about who he is and what it means to walk the road with him. He leads members of the crowd outside their comfort zones, not only onto the great lake known for its unpredictable tempests, but also into a region where people of strange customs worship other gods. And it is precisely because this journey is unsettling that the growth the disciples experience is deep and profound. When we go where we’ve never gone before, we tend to be more receptive to new insights about God, the world, and ourselves.
Jesus’ order “to go to the other side” sparks conversations with two of his followers. The first, an overly enthusiastic scribe, pledges to follow Jesus anywhere. Jesus responds with a word of sobering caution: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (8:20). After this, a disciple comes and asks Jesus to delay the journey across the sea so that he can return home and attend to a need in his family. Jesus, perhaps not to our liking, responds, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Jesus slows the first man down. Jesus hurries the second man up. He knows exactly how to work with each one of us, no matter what the pitfalls in our personalities might be. And that is a mark of spiritual maturity, being able to receive and counsel others right where they are, not as we think they ought to be.
The story continues: “And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him” (8:23). Those who board the boat after him are—or become—his disciples. Remember, at this point in Matthew we don’t yet have the twelve chosen apostles. We have the crowds who come to hear him speak and receive his healing, and we have people called “disciples” who’ve started to travel with him from place to place in a more committed sense, as students. The boundary between these two groups is rather fluid at this moment in Jesus’ ministry. At any time, someone from the crowd might become a disciple, and a disciple might fade back into the crowd. That is, until this moment, when shoving off from familiar shores forms a real threshold. Who will get in and go? Who will follow? It’s a moment of decision, and disciples are forged in moments of decision.
Once they are out on the sea, a storm blows in and threatens to sink their boat. Jesus sleeps, so the others wake him up and cry out for help. He asks why they have so little faith, why they are so afraid. Then he gets up and rebukes the storm and it ceases. There is language play in the original Greek that is lost in the NRSV’s translation. Matthew describes the tempest as a seismos megas, “a great storm,” and the peace that follows Jesus’ rebuke of it he calls a galēnē megalē , “a great calm.” (We’ll come back to that “great storm / great calm” piece later.) The people in the boat are stunned: “What sort of man is this?” they ask each other.
The boat scrapes ashore in Gadarene. They have landed near a local graveyard. And out of that graveyard two demon-possessed men, fierce and violent, come running. They confront Jesus, asking him what he wants to do with them. With a word Jesus casts the demons out of the men, and the evils spirits enter a nearby herd of pigs, sending the animals into a frenzy that ends when they fall from cliffs into the water. The pig herders run into town to tell about the men, now free from their demons, and the pigs, now drowned in the sea. Everyone seems less impressed by that miracle of healing and more disturbed by the fact that their local economy was disrupted. They ask Jesus to leave at once, which he does. He sails back across the sea to Capernaum.
I believe that this journey “to the other side” and back again is here to shift our definition of security, to redefine peace—what it is and where we find it. God’s people have never been promised wealth, social influence, cultural popularity, or political power. God’s people have never been promised stasis, equilibrium, or an absence of suffering as a reward for their faith. But we are tempted to seek security and peace through these means, through resisting change or gathering material assets.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (8:20). Yes, but what does it mean that the one who said this about himself then lays his little head down in the boat and sleeps through the storm? The man who said there wouldn’t be a place for him to rest immediately finds rest in the most unlikely situation!
Starting all the way back with Abraham in the Book of Genesis, the biblical writers emphasize departure and change and the journey as deeply characteristic of faith. God came to Abraham and said, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1). Abraham faith boils down to his willingness to respond to a promise and to be led by a faithful God, even though he does not know where he will end up or how he will get there. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” says the Book of Hebrews. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb 11:1, 8).
Our security is found in the one who calls us. Our peace is found in the person of Christ. This is why Jesus calls the disciples “you of little faith.” Faith is trust, trust in the presence and provision of the God who accompanies us in all things, who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. They didn’t trust that, because he was with them in that boat, they would be okay. They might be tossed and shaken, soaked through and worried, but they would not be overcome. True peace is not found by staying behind on the safe beaches of Galilee. True peace is not to be identified with smooth waters. “The peace that surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7) comes from trusting God to go with us everywhere that God has called us to go.
Following Jesus means embracing the departures and crossings—both internal and external—that God initiates, sometimes directly with a word and sometimes through the shifting tides of our circumstances. Following Christ means releasing our grip on ourselves or on the way things have supposedly always been. It means setting out to grow and change into the persons and the community that God intends for us to be.
This new definition of security is absolutely essential for what follows—in the story and in our ow lives—because Jesus has come so that he might take us to the graveyards of the world. Jesus has been sent to seek and save the lost, to encounter those in every time and place who have no place to lay their heads: refugees and houseless neighbors, the hungry and the sick, the incarcerated and undocumented, those troubled in mind and spirit who have no rest for their souls. He’s can’t wait for the disciple who wants to delay the journey in order to bury his father when there are two men over “on the other side” desperate to be brought back to life right now.
Jesus is all about reaching the unreachable, all about undoing the powers of death. And here I mean death as a force that reaches into life and grips us. Death as addiction, death as systemic injustice, death as the failure of the community to care for its most difficult or vulnerable members. Perhaps those who have no place to lay their heads have had some failures in life; without question, they have been failed—and many times over!
When we follow Jesus, the one who has no place to lay his head, we will be led to encounter others who have no place to lay their heads, those outcasts with whom he establishes divine solidarity. And when we work with him, through the power of his Holy Spirit, to announce the kingdom of light and life in those spaces of death, we will be asked to leave! We will become people who have, so to speak, no place to lay our heads. The powers that are invested in the status quo, that are held in the grip of the past and the present, they won’t like the fact that helping people escape the tombs sends the pigs off the cliff, shakes up the local economy, demonstrates their own failure, their own acquiescence to death. Institutional religions, Home Owners Associations, city councils, state and federal policy-makers—they usually won’t like it!
But the disciples endured the storm on the sea for the sake of those two men in the Gadarene graveyard.
And Jesus endured rejection in that place for the sake of those two men.
If we are going to follow a God who endures the humiliation of having no place to lay his head, if we are going to become little-Christ’s who have no place to lay our heads, if we are going to love those who have no place to lay their heads—then we must learn to receive the gift of his peace, his “great calm” anywhere and everywhere, to experience that peace in him, with him, through him.
This is the work. Jesus is in the business of turning the great storms of life—both within us (signified by demon possession) and without (signified by the storm)—into great calm. The great calm is not a possession, not a set of circumstances, not a masterful spiritual achievement, but a simple fact of trust. We trust the one who gives orders to cross into the unknown, we trust the one with us in the storm, we trust the one who reaches out to touch the wounds and wounded ones of the world.
I’ll conclude with a few more verses from Hebrews that celebrate the essence of faith:
“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” (11:13-16)
May we claim the person of Christ as our peace, carrying the cross of his rejection, so that we might see the dead brought back to life, the written off written back in to the great story of God’s love.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.