THREE things are called “great” on this Gospel: the storm, the calm, and the fear of the disciples. One has been ironed out in some translations, which find the disciples’ fear embarrassing. Instead, they are saying that they were “stuffed with great awe” (NRSV) or “overcome with awe” (NJB). The NIV is truer to the Greek: “They were terrified.” So is the AV: “They feared exceedingly.”
There are many things in scripture that are alien to modern taste and mores. Acknowledging fear within the presence of God shouldn’t be considered one of them. For one thing, we will pile up quotations showing that “the fear of the Lord” is a positive, not a negative, thing: as an illustration, “the start of wisdom” (Psalm 110.10; Job 38.38). In Proverbs 19.23, fear and security are sure tightly together: “The fear of the LORD is life indeed; stuffed with it one rests secure and suffers no harm.”
At every confirmation service, we’re taught (from Isaiah 11.2) that “fear of the Lord” is considered one of the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit.
Having “fear of the Lord” doesn’t necessarily mean being afraid of him within the sense of feeling terror or trepidation. People who’ve transgressed and fear the Lord, like Adam (Genesis 3.10), do indeed feel terror. But there isn’t a reason that terror needs to be felt by the righteous. And terms comparable to “awe” or “reverence” (a well-liked fudge by translators) are also off-target; for they’re really ways of constructing the identical emotional response — fear — sound more palatable. They don’t nail the important thing concept present in Deuteronomy and other Old Testament/Hebrew Bible texts: that fearing the Lord is synonymous with keeping his laws.
“The fear of the Lord” has two elements to it. First, it’s an acknowledgement that his power is real. Second, that acknowledgement shades into the one reasonable response: “fear of the Lord” becomes a virtual synonym for “worship of the Lord”. And this worship excludes the worship of other gods.
Mark doesn’t use the regular word for fear, phobos, to explain how the disciples were feeling when the storm threatened to sink the boat and drown all of them. He keeps it for the emotion that comes upon them after they’ve been rescued by Jesus’s word of power. Nor does Mark use the language of fear when Jesus asks them why they reacted as they did: the English, “Why are you afraid?”, is translating a Greek word, deilos, which implies something more like “cowardly”.
As well because the three things which can be called “great” on this Gospel, there are also three direct questions. The first is simple: “Teacher, do you not care that we’re perishing?” Jesus’s swift response proves that he cares. The last, “Who then is that this, that even the wind and the ocean obey him?” is a Christological one; for the disciples have perceived his motion and his power as divine (that is Jesus’s first nature miracle in Mark), and, within the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, control of natural phenomena comparable to storms is a divine characteristic: “You rule the raging of the ocean; when its waves rise, you continue to them” (Psalm 89.9).
In displays of the Lord’s power, natural phenomena will be personified, suggesting that a clash between competing divinities is going down. Hence, Jesus tells the storm here to “Be quiet! Shut up!”
The disciples’ natural response to the revelation of this power is, first, an emotion — they (literally) “feared a terrific fear”. Next, they enquire into the reality behind the experience: “Who then is that this, that even the wind and the ocean obey him?” So, when Mark says that their response to Jesus’s query is fear, he shouldn’t be suggesting that they’re weak, but that they’re clever.
Now now we have one other brick so as to add to the wall of facts build up right into a divine identity for Jesus. We usually are not yet equipped to pin down the fullness of that divine identity, or its power, but its existence has been put beyond doubt. One small word in Greek, oupo, confirms the image of an edifice being constructed, or a jigsaw puzzle being added to. Some translators omit it. Others translate it as “still”. I prefer to translate oupo as “not yet”. Jesus is saying: “Have you not got faith yet?”, which confirms that it could possibly be a cumulative process, in addition to a revelation from on high.
