Something Jen and I have done with our children since the beginning of their school careers, is to sit down with their mid-year and end-year report cards, and get them to read it aloud so we could together celebrate the good parts, but also pay special attention to the areas of improvement suggested by their goodly teachers. From here we’d encourage some sort of holiday plan for them to give themselves corrective strategies towards improvement, and of course the beauties take these to heart by doing a little bit, not much, everyday over the holidays. Certainly we’ve especially seen Jai improve where he’s not so distracted at home.

At the end of one term Noa’s English teacher encouraged her to be more opinionated in her writings, exploring more inferences, cuz at this point in time Noa is a great facts writer, destined to write appliance instruction manuals for she has not yet been able to extended, nor had the courage to broaden her insights, which in all fairness comes from living through life’s exponential experiences.

In this instance my fatherly advice began with; “no prods babe”, and included the well worn phrase: “more reading”, but surprising simultaneously knee-jerked four Hebrew words I had forgotten was still hovering inside my blood-brain barrier.

P’SHAT

REMEZ

DARASH

SOD

P.R.D.S., with a silent ‘Oh’. Dad are you speaking in tongues? Came the question. Knowing for certain I have not been endowed with that particular gift, I proceeded to explain the meaning of each word, which not only helps squeeze out every bit of juice from any bit of information, sentence, phrase, paragraph or narrative, but also assists in testing wether something is necessarily true or not. In so doing I was confident that Noa would garner more insights from good writing, which she’d be able to pour into her own great writing, as well as assist her in richer conversations, stimulated by more probing questions.

P’shat, Remez, Darash and Sod are four Hebrew words representing four levels of classical interpretation the Jewish Rabbis have been using for centuries to wring, wrench and wrestle the scriptures as if it were a secret moonshine still in the bayou. Why do we engage in spiritual archaeology? So that the Divine, the Holy, that other intriguing dimension can be uncovered. Digging into the light ultimately helps us to live not only fuller and better lives, but also deeper.

So while I was exegesising the four exegesis tools to Noa, I grabbed the first sentence that sprang to mind to use as an example of the four possible ways we can view this sentence by dissection. In a similar way a pair of three dimensional spectacles would work to upsize your view, I asked her to imagine four different sets of spectacles with which to view this single improvisional phrase…

“Jesus walked on water.”

Here goes.

P’SHAT

Contrary to what it might sound like – the past tense of P’shit – ‘P’shat’ means ‘surface’ or ‘straight’, which is the literal, direct, simple or plain meaning of a piece of text, and in this instance Jesus swung his legs over the side of the boat, sandals and all dropped down onto a liquid without sinking, and strolled out over the undulating waves unlike some of us after a good night at the pub. Taking that particular sentence at face value, and knowing the distance apart in water molecules compared with the far denser collection of molecules in a man, should leave you with the axiom of awe that this was no ordinary spectacle, but a miracle.

And we’re away. The great thing about scrutiny is that it stimulates a whole stream of interesting questions starting with the most obvious, why was it a miracle? Well because apart from the fact that no other human in the entire history of man had ever done that before, Jesus somehow circumvented the laws of nature, and if we crafted a quick question we cannot help but ask; did He oppose the law of gravity or did the law bow down to its Maker?

P’shit, we’d better move on.

REMEZ

Knock knock, who’s there? Remez. Remez who? Remezookeeper. Does your lameness know no bounds Stevie? The meaning of the word Remez is ‘hints’, which ruminates the deep allegorical and symbolic meaning beyond the literal. Jesus walked on water. Put on the Remez spectacle and we observe a few things, most obvious that His walk was a foreshadowing of our parallel spiritual walk, often referred to in scripture as a walk of faith, and in a real practical sense we have far more interesting journeys when we don’t just rely on our observable parallax of five senses in order to do stuff. Faith walks are famously bolder, tremendously confident, perhaps even fearless because of the indestructible hope no less demonstrated in this particular incident.

Jesus called himself ‘the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6), not as secularity demands ‘the life, the truth and way’, nor as atheism insists on the observable; ‘the truth first, then only will be do the way and the life’, or as some eastern religions purport in ‘the truth, whatever that may be for you, then the way will open and the life will be given’ is putting the cart before the horse so to speak, which is why we are told to journey, believing in Christ first, walking as He is walking, then the truth will illuminate and ‘personify’ – something that is missed my many – and eternal life will be given.

The way, the truth and the life.

In.

That.

Order.

If there was an emphasis to be placed on one word in the phrase “Jesus walks on water”, then Remez places it on the name ‘Jesus’. The importance of belief placed in a divine individual as opposed to a divine way, cannot be overstated, because that is where an intimate relationship lies. “The Word was made flesh”. One cannot have the same comparable intimacy, and therefore commitment, with a methodology.

Where was I?

DARASH

Darash means to ‘inquire’ or ‘seek’ what could possibly be the cause of ‘dat rash’? (More memorable lameness to help the memory). Darash looks for similar occurrences to Jesus walking on water. Students of scripture such as myself get a kick out of joining dots in other parts of the Word, as if God has prepared this massive puzzle for us to piece together, and it is one of the primary reasons I worship Him, because everything I touch has a finite depth, except the people of God and most especially the Lord Himself have depths deeper than the Mariana trench. Seeking other bits of verification is important in testing the phrase for its truth.

So where else did someone other than Jesus walk on water?

Well nowhere really, which makes His Son rather unique in many respects, but if we now place the emphasis on the word ‘water’, then we see some interesting parallel occurrences in other parts scripture as the Bible interprets itself, which in this case frequently refers to humanity as a ‘sea’. (Job 41, Daniel 7:2, Rev 17:1) Therefore we can interpret Christ walking on water as Him demonstrating His authority as King of Kings by being above the sea, above the nations, above His followers and above creation as the supreme Ruler and Judge of Man, and so the emphasis shifts from ‘water’ to ‘on’, signalling the proper relationship. If Christ came before the Israelites were led out of Egypt they would have perhaps walked out on the Red Sea as opposed to through it.

If your appetite allows you then of course Darash looks for verification outside of scripture too. While Aristotle insisted that the basis for a state and its statesmen was friendship and trust, Machiavelli challenged that assertion in his book ‘The Prince’, purpoting that fear and a system of coercion (law) was necessary for its leaders to embrace, until Jesus came along and demonstrated both, showing His awesome power by one of many such acts as someone to be feared, and yet He held out his hand by way of invitation to a friendship of trust.

In his book ‘the Zealot’, Aslan Reza sheds some light on the title given to Christ – ‘Son of Man’. Though Machiavelli disagreed with Aristotle on the foundational principles of leadership, they did agree that to determine how people ‘ought’ to be governed, we needed the examples of historical trials. Jesus was not called ‘the originator of Man’, even though He was, nor the ‘finisher of Man’, though He claimed to be that too, but the ‘Son of Man’. He came ‘after’ Man as a solution to the habitual destructive patterns Mankind was leaving in its wake. It does not take a genius to see and know that Man has no capacity to rescue himself, which is why Christ came as the Mazerunner, not at the beginning of creation as Saviour, but after a robust series of historical ad nauseam human trials, to provide us the death cure which is His blood.

How much do we adore the Son of Man.

So finally…

SOD

Sod means ‘secret’ or ‘mystery’, the esoteric and mystical meaning which comes through inspiration or revelation. It is at this last point I’ve seen many a shirking brother and sister surfer turn back from dropping down into the barrel of a wave with a ‘sod it, I ain’t going down there’, and perhaps for very good reason, for mental illness is pervasive, if not immediately detectable.

Truth be told, having the courage to divulge a secret or mystery revealed to you, is absolutely dependent on the inhabiting Holy Spirit of God, together with a bit of a track record, which bolsters the discernment to those who are receiving. We should be more receptive to the Sod in others, because Jesus encouraged the principle of childlike faith more than the steely doubt so beautifully pontificated by the pharasaical skeptics of His day. Faith in Him yes, but do we not see Him live in others?

But there is another way, an even better practical method to employ ‘Sod’ rather than relying on a bolting beast, muse or lightning strike.

Revelation often comes from matching and aligning events already happening in our lives. More than the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon – where the same event is repeated in what we call synchronicity – it is the ability to hear, see and weave together sometimes the most innocuous, incongruous occurrences and conversations along a particular theme that resonates during a portion of time, paying attention to our peaks and troughs as if part of a singular sound wave. Together with our aforementioned Spiritual Guide, when we meditate so successfully, we acknowledge the Lord of our lives, and what a good Shepherd He is, regardless of whether we go through distressing death valleys or languish in green pastures.

What then is the secret, mystical meaning of Jesus walking on water? Well, if I followed the above advice, I would have to loom what is happening in my life right now as I read that phrase, write this piece, and share its expansion with our beautiful daughter, which makes the whole experience personal to me, as it would you, should you read the same thing and apply it to your own life experiences. It has to be personal for it to be written on the tables of your heart.

Here, which is no surprise for the travelling pilgrim, the emphasis falls on the verb, ‘walked’. Jesus walks, He journeys, He doesn’t stand still but is on His way somewhere, meeting us along the way He extends his hand to us because He not only wants to help us up, like He did Peter when he began to sink, but also because He is wanting to transfer His authority, over to us.

So here goes.

The mystical, personal meaning is this; Both Noa and I are at this time receiving advice. Noa from her teacher, desiring her to be more courageous in her opinions on various topics; from me providing her four Hebrew words from my chest of treasure; me receiving advice from a business woman I greatly admire, I hear her motherly voice; ‘rise above Stephen, rise above that man who is troubling you’; and from my Saviour when He furnished me at a moment’s notice with this particular phrase as if to say; ‘walk on water Stevie, rise above, do not be so affected by those who hate you, rise above so that your tempter and accuser can look up at the soles of your feet, rise above, you have my hand and I have yours.’

P’shat is sight, Remez is foresight, Darash is hindsight, and Sod is insight, which gets you deeper, because it is in the deep, past all the obliterated sin that swirls in dissipating fragments around our core, where sits enthroned before us, we the ‘sea of glass’, transparent, shiny, new and spotless, Him who loves us most in this universe.