The Lake of Gennesareth as Narrative Threshold in the Gospels and the Mystical Tradition
Jean Khoury
Summary: The crossings of the Sea of Galilee in the Gospels constitute one of the most structurally significant and theologically dense symbolic complexes of the New Testament. This article argues that the lake of Gennesareth functions not as geographical backdrop but as a theological space, a narrative threshold through which the disciple must pass in order to enter a deeper mode of relation to Christ. Drawing on Johannine scholarship, patristic exegesis, and the mystical theology of Carmel (particularly St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux), the article traces the symbolic layers of the crossing: the geography of the lake, the storm and the night, the sleeping Christ, the typological echoes of the Exodus and the Jordan, the structure of John 6 as a composite theological unit, and the decisive parallel with the Fourth Mansions in Teresian contemplative theology. Special attention is given to the symbolic meaning of the two shores: the first as the site of literal or immediate reception of Christ’s teaching and miracles; the second as union with Christ in the mode of the res itself. The crossing, undertaken in darkness, storm, and the apparent absence of God, is identified as the structural image of the passage into the supernatural dimension of Christian life, corresponding to the mystical night as described by St. John of the Cross and to the beginning of infused prayer in St Teresa. The article concludes that the Sea of Galilee is not one symbol among others in the Gospel but a controlled narrative architecture of initiation: from sign-reception to participatory union, from following Christ to abiding in him.
Introduction
Among the various geographical spaces that structure the Gospel narratives, the Lake of Gennesareth — the Sea of Galilee — occupies a place of singular theological importance. Yet this importance has not always received the systematic attention it deserves in spiritual theology. The lake tends to be read as the site of the Sermon on the Mount and of individual miracles: the calming of the storm, the walking on the water, the multiplication of the loaves on the nearby shore. What is less frequently examined is the cumulative symbolic logic that these episodes generate when read together and the particular structural significance that the “crossing” imposes as a recurring Gospel motif.
This article proposes to read the crossings of the Sea of Galilee as a unified theological complex, a narrative architecture of passage that functions simultaneously at the historical, typological, and mystical levels. The lake is not simply the setting for certain events; it is the medium through which a decisive theological transition is enacted. In John 6, this transition is placed with great precision at the fourth sign of the Gospel, a position that corresponds, as I shall argue, to the beginning of the specifically supernatural dimension of the spiritual journey, in close structural parallel with what St. Teresa of Ávila identifies as the threshold of the Fourth Mansions: “Here begins the supernatural.” (St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 4M1,1)
The article proceeds through several stages. It begins with the physical reality of the lake — its geography, its storms, its visibility — in order to establish what the symbol is grounded in. It then traces the symbolic layers of the crossing in the Synoptic Gospels before focusing on the Johannine elaboration in John 6. It examines the typological relation to the Exodus and the crossing of the Jordan. It considers the patristic reception of the image and the mystical tradition’s deepening of it. Finally, it proposes a reading of the two shores as theological markers: the first shore as the site of immediate and still-literalising reception of revelation; the second shore as union with Christ as the res of Christian existence. The crossing between them — in darkness, storm, and the apparent silence of God — is identified as the structural image of passage into the mystical life.
I. The Physical Lake and the Symbolic Ground
1. The Geography of Gennesareth
The Lake of Gennesareth has not significantly changed in its geographical dimensions since the time of Jesus. It measures approximately twenty-one kilometres from north to south and twelve kilometres at its widest point from east to west. Its level has fluctuated considerably across the centuries due to water management and climate, but its shape and physical character remain essentially those of the first century. One important implication follows immediately: from many points along one shore, the opposite shore is visible. The lake is not a horizon into the unknown. A fisherman in Galilee would have crossed it regularly and would have known the other side well.
This fact strengthens rather than weakens the symbolic force of the crossing. The disciples are not being sent into an invisible void. The other shore can be seen from far. What they cannot control is the passage. The destination is known; the journey is not. This distinction between the visibility of the goal and the obscurity of the path is structurally crucial for reading the lake episodes as images of the life of faith.
2. The Storm: A Theological Geography
The storms of the Sea of Galilee are not legendary or embellished in the Gospel accounts. The lake lies approximately two hundred and ten metres below sea level, surrounded on several sides by hills. Cold air descending rapidly from those heights encounters warm air over the water, producing sudden and violent winds. Ancient fishermen feared this phenomenon. It could arise with little warning and overwhelm a boat quickly. In Mark 4:37, the storm reflects a physical reality that would have been familiar and feared: “a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling”.
What is theologically significant is precisely this natural character of the storm. The symbol is not arbitrary; it is grounded in the actual experience of those who lived on those shores. The lake is a place where the unpredictable and the dangerous are endemic. When the Gospel places the disciples on it at night, in a storm, with Christ absent or sleeping, it is not constructing an artificial drama. It is disclosing the theological meaning of a situation that the disciples already knew from experience. Geography becomes parable: what the lake already is, the Gospel reveals as what Christian existence always is.
II. The Synoptic Crossings: A Pattern of Revelation
1. “Let Us Cross to the Other Side”: Mark 4:35–41
The first major crossing episode appears in Matthew 8:23–27, with parallels in Mark 4:35–41 and Luke 8:22–25. The structural details are important. Jesus himself initiates the crossing: “Let us cross over to the other side.” The disciples are therefore not disobeying or wandering; they are precisely where Jesus has directed them. The obedience to Christ’s command is what places them in the storm. This is a point of considerable spiritual importance: the storm is not a consequence of failure but the environment of faithfulness.
Jesus is asleep in the stern. The disciples, experienced fishermen, are unable to manage the situation. They wake him: “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” He rebukes the wind and says to the sea: “Peace! Be still!” And the episode ends with the disciples’ question: “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?”
The crossing therefore follows a revelatory pattern: command to cross → entry into storm → apparent divine absence → cry of the disciples → divine intervention → deeper knowledge of Christ. The crossing is not merely transit; it is the occasion and medium of a Christological disclosure. The disciples do not cross and then learn who Jesus is. They learn who he is precisely in the crossing.
2. The Walking on the Water: Matthew 14:22–33
The second major crossing episode deepens the pattern. After the multiplication of the loaves, Jesus compels his disciples to enter the boat (“hēnagkasen” in Matthew 14:22, a verb carrying coercive force) and cross while he dismisses the crowd. He then withdraws to pray alone on the mountain. During the fourth watch of the night (the deepest darkness, between three and six in the morning) he comes to them walking on the sea.
Night, deep water, and the form of Christ approaching across what is uncontrollable: the convergence is unmistakable. In biblical tradition, the sea is the domain of chaos, the space that resists divine order. When Christ walks on it, he manifests lordship over the domain of the ungovernable. The disciples are “terrified”, supposing him to be a ghost. His self-identification (“It is I; do not be afraid”) uses the language of divine self-disclosure (“Egō eimi”) and recalls the divine name revealed to Moses.
Peter’s attempt to walk on the water and his sinking when he looks at the waves (“seeing the wind”, Matthew 14:30) has been read throughout the mystical tradition as the image of the soul that begins to live by supernatural faith but returns to relying on natural perception. The remedy is not to return to the boat (not to regress to a prior mode of security) but to restore the gaze directed to Christ.
Importantly, in John’s parallel account (John 6:16–21), when Jesus enters the boat the disciples find themselves immediately at the other shore. Many of the Fathers saw in this compression an image of the soul: without Christ, the crossing is labour and storm; when Christ is received, the journey reaches its term.
III. John 6: The Fourth Sign and the Threshold of the Supernatural
1. The Johannine Sign-Structure
The Gospel of John is structured around a sequence of signs that progressively deepen the revelation of Jesus and demand an increasingly total response from the disciple. Scholars have identified a six-sign framework, though the boundaries between signs and the counting of units vary. What is clear is that the signs do not merely demonstrate Jesus’ power; each functions as a theo-logical statement that provokes purification, interpretation, crisis, and decision. The sign is not complete until it has generated its crisis and its purification. The six signs prepare us to face the biggest sign, i.e. the Cross, where God’s love (glory) for us is revealed.
The first sign (water into wine at Cana, John 2) initiates faith through the transformation of natural joy and purification; it also give the entire structure of the signs and of the Gospel. The second (healing of the royal official’s son, John 4) calls forth faith in the word of Jesus without visible confirmation. The third (healing of the paralysed man, John 5) addresses the deeper incapacity of the human will and its liberation through divine command. The fourth sign — the multiplication of the loaves followed by the crossing of the sea (John 6) — constitutes a pivot in the sequence. It is where the revelation crosses a qualitative threshold.
The fifth is the healing of the blind man from birth, the sixth is the resurrection of Lazarus.
2. The Composite Structure of John 6
John 6 is not a simple miracle story followed by a discourse. It is a carefully constructed theological unit in which sign, crossing, discourse, and rupture are interlocked. The multiplication of the loaves is followed immediately, in the same chapter, by the crossing of the lake at night. The Bread of Life discourse then follows. The chapter ends with the departure of many disciples. These elements are not juxtaposed accidentally; they form a single movement of revelation and response.
The structural sequence is as follows: Jesus feeds the multitude (John 6:1–15). The crowd, instead of receiving this as a sign pointing beyond itself, wishes to make him king by force (John 6:15). Jesus withdraws. The disciples enter the boat and cross the lake at night in a storm. Jesus comes to them walking on the water. They arrive at the other shore. The Bread of Life discourse begins.
The crowd that stays on the first shore represents a relationship to Jesus that remains at the level of his benefits: the bread he gives, the power he manifests, the earthly kingdom he might establish. The disciples are compelled to cross before the meaning of the bread can be disclosed to them. The crossing is therefore not peripheral to the Bread of Life discourse; it is its condition of intelligibility. One must pass through the night of the sea before one can hear what the bread truly is.
3. The Bread of the Kingdom: Word, Faith, Flesh
In the Bread of Life discourse (John 6:22–58), the revelation proceeds through three moments. The first is the earthly bread, which the crowd is still seeking (John 6:26). The second is the “bread from heaven”, which Jesus identifies with himself as the one sent by the Father: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger” (John 6:35); this teaching implies the necessity of faith and of the Word of God. The third, and most scandalous, is the flesh and blood of Jesus himself as true food and true drink (John 6:55).
John’s choice of vocabulary is deliberate. He does not write “body” (sōma), the word used in the Eucharistic institution narratives of the Synoptics. He writes “flesh” (sarx), the same word used in the Prologue: “The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14). The Eucharistic food is not something other than the making of us his dwelling place (John 14:21.23); it is the transformative indwelling offered as nourishment. The food of the Kingdom is not what Christ gives but Christ himself in the mode of total self-gift. “Dwell in me as I dwell in you” (John 15:4)
This is the teaching that the disciples can only receive after the crossing. The shore of the earthly meal and the earthly messianic hope must be left behind before the ear can open to “my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:55).
Read:
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4. Rupture and the Sifting of Discipleship
The chapter ends with an extraordinary scene of division. Many disciples say: “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (John 6:60). Jesus does not moderate the teaching. He does not offer a symbolic or purely metaphorical interpretation to ease the difficulty. He allows the departure: “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him” (John 6:66).
The crossing functions, in John’s theological architecture, as a sifting mechanism. Those who could not cross into the new mode of discipleship, those who required Jesus to remain within the horizon of earthly benefit and political messianism, cannot remain at the level of the Bread of Life revelation. What the sea does physically — compel an irreversible passage — the discourse does spiritually.
Peter’s response becomes the fundamental confession and guiding line for all those who undertake the crossing (a crossing that takes time, from sign 4 to sign 6): “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). This is not the voice of triumphant certainty, but the confession of the one who has entered the journey and discovers that there is no other way forward except Jesus, the Way, and his words. It is the cry of the one who is passing through darkness and who has realised that returning to the former shore is no longer possible. The crossing can only be completed by leaning entirely on the Word of Jesus. His word becomes the ground beneath one’s feet when everything else is shaken.
IV. Typological Depth: Exodus, Jordan, and the Lake
1. The Exodus: Purification of the Sense
The crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus 14 is the founding biblical archetype of passage through waters from captivity to freedom. God drives the sea back; Israel passes on dry land; the army of Pharaoh is swallowed by the returning waters. The Fathers and the mystical tradition have long read this passage typologically as the purification of the soul from attachment to the “Egypt” of disordered desire and creaturely bondage. In the Carmelite tradition, this corresponds closely to the first phase of the spiritual life: the active night of the sense, the soul’s renunciation of the Egypt of its disordered attachments and its setting out toward God.
The structural elements of the Exodus crossing are important: the waters are an obstacle that only God can overcome; Israel does not cross by its own power but by divine intervention; the passage is once-and-for-all, a definitive severance from the prior mode of existence.
2. The Jordan: Purification of the Spirit
The crossing of the Jordan in Joshua 3 is qualitatively different from the Exodus. Here the waters do not represent escape from bondage but entrance into inheritance. The Ark of the Covenant (Mary) is carried into the waters; when the priests’ feet touch the Jordan, the waters are cut off and Israel crosses on dry ground. The Promised Land — the res of the covenant promise (union) — lies on the other side.
Mystically, this crossing corresponds to a deeper level of purification. The soul has left Egypt (disordered sense attachment) but must now pass through the Jordan of a still deeper self-reliance: the spiritual structures of the ego that persist even after sensory purification. In the language of St John of the Cross, this is the night of the spirit — the second and deeper dark night, in which even spiritual consolations, supports, and one’s own ways of knowing God are taken away.
3. The Lake of Gennesareth: A New Mode of Passage
The Lake crossings in the Gospel are a new kind of passage, not simply a repetition of Exodus or Jordan typology. Several features distinguish them. First, in both the Exodus and the Jordan, God or his representative stands apart from the waters and commands them. Moses stretches out his staff; Joshua carries the Ark into the water’s edge. In the Gospel, Jesus is inside the boat with the disciples. He is not standing on the shore commanding the waters from outside; he sleeps at the stern. The divine presence is interior to the crossing itself.
Second, in the Exodus and Jordan crossings, the passage is on dry land. The waters part. In the Gospel, the disciples must cross through the water, in a storm, at night. The passage is not protected from the danger; it passes through it.
Third, the destination in the Gospel crossings is not a geographical land but a person. “The other shore” in John 6 is the shore from which the Bread of Life discourse is heard, where the total claim of Christ upon the disciple is disclosed. It is not inheritance of a territory but participation in the life of the Son. The bread in its three forms (John 6: Faith, Word of God, Flesh and Blood) is what allows and supports the crossing, like the manna supported the crossing until the people of God arrived in the Promised Land.
The three crossings therefore map onto three levels of the spiritual journey: the Exodus as purification of the sense, the Jordan as purification of the spirit, and the Lake as the passage into the specifically supernatural mode of union with Christ — what Teresa calls the beginning of the infused life. The lake is not the deepest crossing in the sense of the most severe; it is the crossing that initiates a new mode of existence altogether.
V. The Patristic Reception
1. Augustine: The Church in the World
St Augustine’s reading of the sea-crossing episodes is primarily ecclesiological. For him, the boat is the Church, the sea is the world in its instability and bitterness, and the storm is the trials and persecutions through which the Church passes in history. In his Sermon 63, he offers a formulation that has become a locus classicus: “The Lord sleeps in you when your faith sleeps.” The problem the disciples face is not the storm; it is the failure of faith that makes the storm unbearable. Christ is present in the boat; the disciples forget that he is there.
Augustine’s reading is directed toward the congregation: when God seems silent or absent, when the world presses in with hostility, the question is not whether Christ is present but whether faith is awake. The storm is the normal condition of the Church in the world; the response is not the absence of difficulty but the wakefulness of faith.
2. Chrysostom: The Pedagogical Storm
St John Chrysostom approaches the crossing from a different angle. For him, the storm is permitted by Christ precisely for the formation of the disciples. In his Homilies on Matthew he insists: “He permits the tempest to arise, that He might teach them to endure, and that they might know His power.” The storm is not a failure of divine protection; it is the environment chosen by divine wisdom for the formation of a deeper faith.
Chrysostom’s interpretation has a strongly pastoral character: the difficulties of the Christian life are not signs of God’s inattention but occasions of deeper formation. The disciples who survive the storm know Christ in a way they could not have known him without it.
3. The Fathers and the Exodus Typology
Many of the Fathers read the sea-crossings against the background of the Exodus, identifying Jesus as the new Moses. But they consistently note a difference that elevates the Gospel typology above the original: Moses divides the waters by God’s power given to him; Jesus commands the waters by his own authority. The identity of Jesus is disclosed not only in the fact that the waters obey but in the mode of that obedience. The storm-stilling is therefore not only a miracle of power but a Christological revelation: the one who commands the sea is the one through whom, as the Prologue of John states, all things were made.
VI. The Mystical Tradition: Night, Sleep, and the Shore of Union
1. The Sleeping Christ: St Thérèse of Lisieux
Among the Gospel interpreters who have read the sleeping Jesus most profoundly, St Thérèse of Lisieux occupies a unique place. Her reading is neither primarily Christological in the patristic sense nor primarily ecclesiological in Augustine’s sense. It is the reading of the Bride.
Thérèse knows by personal experience the darkness in which God does not make himself felt. She writes in the Story of a Soul of a prolonged trial of faith in which the sense of God’s presence is withdrawn entirely. Yet her response is not to demand that Christ wake up and reveal himself. Her instinct, rooted in the spirituality of the Song of Songs and the Carmelite tradition, is precisely to let him sleep.
This is what she calls the “délicatesse” of the Bride. The Bride does not insist on possession. She does not measure love by felt presence. She knows — and this knowledge is the core of her little way — that God cannot be seen during earthly life in the mode of direct experiential clarity: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). The greatest courage of faith is therefore not to wake him but to remain in the boat, in the storm, knowing that he is there precisely because he is not felt.
This connects directly to the Song of Songs: “I sleep, but my heart is awake” (Song of Songs 5:2). The Bridegroom’s apparent sleep is not absence but the hidden mode of his presence. To insist on waking him is to demand a mode of presence that the Bridegroom has chosen to withhold, and to miss the deeper intimacy of trust that his hiding calls forth.
In Thérèse’s interpretation, the comparison between the disciples before Pentecost and the mature soul is implicit but significant. The disciples cry “We are perishing” because they look at the storm and forget who is in the boat. The soul that has grown in love says instead: “He is sleeping; therefore I am at peace, because he is here.” This is the movement from servant-faith to bridal faith.
2. St John of the Cross: The Dark Night and the Structure of the Crossing
For St John of the Cross, the decisive transitions of the spiritual life are not upward movements of clarity and illumination but passages through obscurity. The night is not a misfortune; it is a structure. The soul advances not by increasing intelligibility but by increasing surrender of the modes through which it previously held God.
The correspondence with the lake crossing is structural. The disciples in the boat have left the shore of the first comprehension; they have not yet arrived at the other shore of union. They are in the middle: between modes of knowledge, between phases of relationship with Christ, in a space where neither the old nor the new is available as a stabilising framework.
St John of the Cross identifies three phases of the night, though his elaboration of them is complex and not always linear. The initial phase is the purification of the exterior sense and affective attachments — corresponding to the Exodus. The middle phase, the most severe, is the night of the spirit: the purification of the deeper structures of the ego’s relation to God, including spiritual consolations, the soul’s own ways of understanding God, and even its mode of faith. The third phase is the dawn: the arrival at union.
The middle of the night is the darkest point. This is the moment in the crossing when the other shore is no longer visible, the first shore is gone, and the storm is at its height. It corresponds to what St John describes as the most disorienting phase of the dark night, where even the spiritual reference points of the first conversion are withdrawn, and the soul has not yet received the new mode of union. The boat is between shores; faith is between modes of knowing.
3. St Teresa of Ávila: The Threshold of the Supernatural
St Teresa’s teaching on the Fourth Mansions provides the most direct structural parallel to the Johannine fourth sign. At the opening of the Fourth Mansions in the Interior Castle, she makes a declaration that is deliberately categorical: “Here begins the supernatural.” She is not describing a quantitative increase in devotional effort or a more intense version of previous prayer. She is marking a qualitative change in the principle of action.
Up to this point in Teresa’s schema, prayer is largely characterised by discursive effort, active meditation, and structured attention. The soul works. After this threshold, something begins to be received rather than constructed. The soul does not become passive in a lazy sense, but it ceases to be the primary organiser of what happens in prayer. God begins to act in the soul in a mode that exceeds the soul’s own capacity to produce or explain.
This is precisely the transition enacted in John 6. The disciples have been following Jesus, listening to his teaching, witnessing his signs. They have been active, effortful, earnest. But at this point they are compelled to enter the boat — not by their own initiative — and to cross into a night where they can do nothing. What happens during the crossing is not produced by them. And what they find on the other shore — the Bread of Life discourse with its radical Eucharistic realism — is not what they could have constructed from their prior understanding of Jesus.
Teresa also insists that the beginning of the supernatural is not marked by external spectacle. The transition is often interior and quiet, even invisible from outside. This again corresponds to the Johannine logic: the multiplication of loaves is the public, spectacular sign. The crossing is the hidden, obscure transition. The discourse is the interior revelation. The spectacular draws the crowd; the crossing is for the disciples who are compelled to enter it.
VII. The Two Shores: From Sign to Union
1. The First Shore: The Literal and the Immediate
The first shore is not a place of error or ignorance. It is the place where Christ is genuinely known, genuinely followed, genuinely received. But it is the place of first reception: the level at which his teaching and signs are encountered in their immediate intelligibility. Even the Sermon on the Mount — whose literal sense is already of a higher spiritual register than ordinary ethical teaching — can be received at the level of the first shore as an elevated moral programme rather than as an invitation into the very life of the Son.
The crowd in John 6 is the figure of those who remain at the first shore. They have witnessed the multiplication of the loaves. They have eaten. They recognise something extraordinary in Jesus. But their reception is still within the horizon of earthly categories: they want to make him king. The sign is received, but reduced: reduced to what can be assimilated within the existing framework of messianic expectation.
In the terms of classical hermeneutics, the first shore corresponds to the literal sense of Scripture — not in a pejorative sense, as though the literal sense were false, but in the sense that it is the first and immediate level of meaning, the one available to the reader who has not yet crossed into the deeper modes of appropriation. The Fathers distinguished the literal or historical sense from the allegorical and anagogical precisely because they understood that the res — the reality to which the text ultimately refers — cannot be possessed by remaining at the surface of the letter.
2. The Crossing: Darkness, Parables, Symbols and Hope
The crossing corresponds to the middle level: the space of symbols, parables, and allegorical reading. Jesus himself used parables precisely to create this middle space. The parable is neither straightforwardly transparent nor absolutely opaque; it requires a crossing into its meaning. It invites the disciple beyond the surface of the story into the mystery it carries. The parables of the Kingdom in the Synoptics function exactly as the crossing does in John: they separate those who are content with immediate comprehension from those who must press through to the interior meaning.
The darkness of the crossing corresponds to the darkness of allegorical and symbolic knowing. One is between meanings: no longer satisfied with the literal or the immediate, not yet arrived at the union that the symbol promises. This is the space of faith in the technical sense: neither empirical knowledge nor direct vision, but the orientation of the whole person toward what cannot yet be seen. As St Paul writes: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
This is also why the crossing involves storm and fear. The move from the literal to the symbolic to the mystical is not a smooth progression. It involves a crisis of categories. What one thought Jesus was — a great teacher, a wonder-worker, the expected Messiah in an earthly mode — must be surrendered. The storm is the phenomenological correlate of that surrendering.
3. The Other Shore: The Res and Union with Christ
The second shore is the res: the reality to which all signs, symbols, and parables have been pointing. In the classical sacramental theology derived from Augustine and developed by the scholastics, the sacrament moves from signum (sign) through res et sacramentum (reality-and-sign) to res tantum (pure reality). The res tantum is the grace itself, the union with Christ that the visible and symbolic orders serve but cannot contain.
In the context of John 6, the second shore is the shore of the Bread of Life discourse — the shore where the total identity of Jesus as the one who gives his flesh for the life of the world is disclosed. It is also, in the logic of the Gospel as a whole, the shore of John 17: “that they may be one, as we are one”. The second shore is not a geographical location or even a state of spiritual progress; it is a mode of existence in which the disciple abides in Christ and Christ in the disciple, in the manner of the union between the Father and the Son.
This is union in the theological sense: not merely a close relationship or a felt intimacy, but a participation in the divine life mediated through the humanity of the Son. The second shore is what the entire Gospel of John is pointing toward: the reality of the vine and the branches (John 15), the mutual indwelling of John 17, the “Bread” that is the flesh of the Word made flesh.
VIII. Duc in Altum: The Necessity of Going Deep
There is one further dimension of the lake symbolism that deserves attention: the call to go into the deep. Luke 5:4 records Jesus’ command to Simon before the miraculous catch of fish: “Put out into the deep” (Duc in altum). Although this is not a crossing episode in the strict sense, it belongs to the same symbolic complex. The shore is security, shallowness, the place where one’s own feet can touch bottom. The deep (Greek: bathos) is the place where that security is impossible; where one can only float or sink; where the catch of fish — the mission itself — awaits.
The imperative to go deep is the imperative that structures all the lake episodes. The disciples are not called to the water’s edge; they are called out from the shore into the place where depth makes human control impossible. This is the spiritual geography of the supernatural: the disciple cannot stand. The only mode of existence in the deep is one of total reliance on what supports from below.
St John Paul II famously took this phrase as the motto for his pontificate and for the jubilee year 2000: “Duc in altum”. His use of it was not arbitrary. He understood that the Church in the new millennium could not simply refine its existing modes of operation; it needed to go into the deep, to the level where only grace, not human competence or institutional security, could sustain it.
The call to depth belongs with the call to cross. The crossing of the lake is always a crossing into the deep: away from the shore where the feet can find bottom, into the water where the only question is whether Christ is in the boat.
IX. There Is No Return
One of the most important features of the lake-crossing symbol, as it functions in John 6, is its irreversibility. Jesus does not merely suggest the crossing or offer it as one option among others; he compels it (“hēnagkasen”). And once the crossing has been made, the territory it opens cannot be un-entered. Those who turn back in John 6:66 do not simply return to a prior neutral state; they withdraw from the new reality that has been disclosed.
This irreversibility is not a function of psychological stubbornness or theological rigidity. It reflects the ontological logic of the Kingdom. Once the Bread of Life has been disclosed — once it has been announced that the food of the Kingdom is Christ’s own flesh given for the life of the world — there are only two possible responses: to receive it or to depart. There is no position of comfortable neutrality available. Peter speaks for those who have crossed: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). This is not triumphalism; it is the confession of someone who has lost all other shores.
In the mystical tradition, this irreversibility corresponds to what John of the Cross calls the point at which the soul can no longer return to its former modes of relation to God. Having entered the dark night of the spirit, having been stripped of spiritual consolations and natural modes of knowing God, the soul cannot reconstruct the earlier devotional architecture. It must go forward or remain in the night. The night itself is the irreversibility — a threshold that can only be crossed, not un-crossed.
This does not mean that failures, regressions, and moments of abandonment are impossible. The history of Christian mysticism is full of souls that entered the dark night and, temporarily overwhelmed, attempted to return to earlier securities. But the attempt always fails. Once the soul has tasted the deeper reality, the earlier modes of satisfaction no longer satisfy. The shore that was home before the crossing is recognisable but no longer livable.
Practical Conclusions
The foregoing analysis has implications not only for the interpretation of the Gospels but for the practice of spiritual formation and direction. Several practical conclusions can be drawn.
First, the storm is not a sign of departure from the right path. For those who are compelled by Christ into the crossing, the storm is the environment of the commanded passage. Spiritual directors and those in formation need to understand that the experience of turbulence, obscurity, and apparent divine absence during the middle of the spiritual journey is not evidence of error or failure. It may be evidence of precisely the right obedience: the soul is where Jesus told it to go.
Second, the sleeping Christ is not the absent Christ. Thérèse of Lisieux’s reading has direct pastoral application. When those in spiritual direction report that they can no longer feel God’s presence, that prayer is dry, that faith seems to operate in a vacuum, the question to ask is not: “what is wrong?” but rather: “where is Christ in the boat?” The absence of felt presence is not the absence of the person. Christ is in the boat; faith is learning to rest in his sleeping presence.
Third, the transition from the first shore to the second shore is a decisive moment in formation that needs to be named and prepared for. Those being formed spiritually need to understand that there is a level of Christian life that cannot be reached by simply intensifying the practices of the first phase. The multiplication of loaves is followed by the Bread of Life discourse, but only after the crossing. The formation director who does not help those in formation navigate the crossing risks leaving them on the first shore permanently — well-formed in the first phase, but unable to enter the supernatural dimension of the Kingdom.
Fourth, the irreversibility of the crossing needs to be communicated with honesty. Those who are approaching the threshold of the Fourth Mansions, in Teresian terms, are approaching a point after which ordinary consolations and the standard mechanisms of devotional life will no longer function in the same way. This is a moment of vulnerability. The spiritual director who responds by recommending a return to the earlier methods of prayer may inadvertently confirm the soul in a regression that the Holy Spirit is trying to prevent. The call is to go forward, to keep the gaze on Christ walking on the water, and to receive his hand when one begins to sink.
Fifth, the fourth sign of John corresponds to a real and identifiable stage in the lives of those seriously engaged in the spiritual life. Spiritual directors, formation directors, and pastors need to be able to recognise this stage, to name it, to accompany it, and to resist the temptation to domesticate it by resolving its tensions prematurely. The teaching of Teresa, John of the Cross, and Thérèse is not esoteric; it is the spiritual theology of the crossing that the Gospel of John has already narrated.
Conclusion
The Sea of Galilee is not incidental geography in the Gospels. It is a theological landscape — a controlled symbolic architecture in which the movement of Christian existence is narrated. The crossing of the lake, undertaken at night, in storm, at the command of Christ, with Christ sleeping in the boat, is the image of the soul’s passage from first reception of the faith to the specifically supernatural mode of union.
The first shore is the site of immediate and still-literalising reception: of signs, miracles, and teaching within the horizon of what is already comprehensible. The second shore is the site of union: of the res itself, the life of Christ given as flesh for the life of the world, received by faith that has passed through the darkness of the crossing. Between them lies the lake: the space of symbols and parables, of night and storm, of the sleeping Christ and the fearful disciples, of deepening purification through which the soul learns that Christ is its only shore.
The structure John builds in John 6 — multiplication, crossing, discourse, rupture — is not simply the narrative of a historical day in Galilee. It is the map of the spiritual journey from the beginning of faith to the threshold of the mystical life. The fourth sign is placed where Teresa places the beginning of the supernatural: at the point where God ceases to be primarily what the disciple seeks and becomes primarily what acts in the disciple, where the food of the Kingdom is disclosed as the total self-gift of the incarnate Son.
The storm must be crossed. The night must be endured. Christ may sleep. And the soul that knows who is in the boat — like Thérèse with her délicatesse of the Bride, like Peter who has no other shore — finds on the other side not merely a deeper understanding, but the Bread of Life itself.
Select Bibliography
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John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew. NPNF Series 1, vol. 10. Translated by George Prevost. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983.
John of the Cross. The Dark Night of the Soul. In The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.
John of the Cross. The Spiritual Canticle. In The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.
Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle. In The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila, vol. 2. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980.
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