The Gospels tell multiple storm stories, each one echoing the other like waves striking a shore. In Mark 4, the disciples are already at sea when Jesus falls asleep in the stern. A furious squall arises, threatening to capsize the boat. The disciples wake him with the anguished words: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” (Mark 4:38, NIV). This cry is haunting because it feels utterly human. It is less a request for divine intervention than a demand for presence. In the moment of crisis, they do not ask for an explanation of suffering or a theological discourse on providence—they ask only if their leader cares that they perish.
Jesus responds not first to them but to the elements. “Quiet! Be still!” he commands the wind and waves (Mark 4:39). The sea falls calm. Then comes the gentle rebuke to the disciples: “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” (Mark 4:40). Their fear shifts into awe, for even the forces of nature obey him. What the story preserves is not only the miracle but the rawness of the disciples’ terror, and the honesty of their question.
Matthew 14 recounts another storm, but with a crucial difference: Jesus is not in the boat. After sending the disciples ahead while he prays on the mountain, the wind begins to batter their fragile vessel. “Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake” (Matt. 14:25). Instead of relief, their first reaction is panic: “It’s a ghost!” they said, and cried out in fear” (Matt. 14:26). They mistake presence for threat. It is only when Jesus speaks—“Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid” (Matt. 14:27)—that something begins to shift.
Simon, always impetuous, then steps into the scene. He challenges the vision before him: “Lord, if it’s you, tell me to come to you on the water” (Matt. 14:28). Jesus responds with one word: “Come.” For a moment, Simon walks on the water. But when he sees the wind, his courage falters, and he begins to sink. His cry is one of desperation: “Lord, save me!” (Matt. 14:30). Immediately, Jesus reaches out his hand and catches him. This immediacy is striking—there is no delay, no distance. The miracle is not only that Jesus walks on the waves, but that his hand grasps Simon at the very point of collapse.
The walking-on-water episode is often read as a story of faith and doubt, but it is also a story of transformation. Simon begins as a man testing boundaries, daring to step out, and ends as a man clinging for his life. Yet it is precisely in this movement—from boldness, through failure, into reliance—that Simon becomes Peter. He begins to learn that following Jesus is not about bravado, but about relationship. His plea—“Lord, save me”—is not weakness, but the beginning of strength.
Rembrandt’s Painted Sea
When Rembrandt painted The Storm on the Sea of Galilee in 1633, he chose to depict Mark’s version of the storm. The canvas is alive with turmoil. The sea is not background but protagonist, a wall of water rearing up to smash the boat. The mast creaks, the sail tears, ropes whip violently in the wind. The disciples scatter across the deck, each embodying a facet of human response to crisis. One prays, another clings to the rigging, another vomits over the side. In the stern, Jesus remains unnervingly composed, a counterpoint to the disciples’ panic.
What makes the painting unforgettable is not merely the technical mastery of light and shadow, but the psychological insight. Rembrandt was a master of chiaroscuro, and here he uses light not simply to illuminate but to dramatize the very clash between chaos and calm. A shaft of light falls across the faces of the men, highlighting their fear, while the sea and sky remain in near-darkness. It is as though the disciples’ inner turmoil has been thrown onto the canvas, magnified by nature itself.
But the most audacious detail is Rembrandt himself. He paints his own face among the disciples, gripping a rope, staring out of the canvas directly at the viewer. In that gaze, the painting becomes not a historical illustration but a mirror. Rembrandt implicates himself in the storm, and by extension, implicates us. The viewer is not a distant spectator but a fellow passenger, caught in the chaos, desperate for calm.
This is the same move The Chosen makes in dramatizing Matthew’s storm. The show does not place us outside the story but inside it, shoulder to shoulder with the disciples. We do not watch Jesus from a divine vantage point; we see him through the frightened eyes of fishermen. Rembrandt and The Chosen, though separated by centuries and media, both collapse the distance between text and viewer. They draw us into the storm.
Seen together, the painting and the show amplify the literary power of the Gospel stories. They remind us that storms—whether on canvas or screen—are not simply about the past. They are about the present human condition. We too are in the boat. We too know the cry: “Lord, save me!” Don’t you care if we drown? Don’t let me go.
The Chosen and the Transformation of Simon
What most struck me in The Chosen’s storm episode was not the special effects of waves and wind, but the intimacy of Simon’s breakdown. Exhausted, drenched, and undone, he collapses into Jesus’ arms, repeating through sobs, “Don’t let me go.” It is a line not found in the biblical text, but one that feels deeply faithful to its spirit. It crystallizes what the storm stories are truly about: not divine pyrotechnics, but human fragility and the longing not to be abandoned.
This is significant because, in the show, Simon is not yet Peter. He is still in the process of becoming. The storm is his first true initiation into discipleship—not a triumph, but a collapse. He begins with bravado, daring to step onto the water, but he ends with tears, clinging like a child. And it is here, paradoxically, that his transformation begins. Strength is not forged in control but in surrender. Identity is not built in mastery but in dependence.
The narrative arc here is profoundly Jungian. Carl Jung often spoke of storms and water as archetypes of the unconscious—vast, uncontrollable forces that threaten to engulf the ego. In Symbols of Transformation, he writes: “The storm is the unleashing of those hidden powers of the psyche that can submerge and renew.” To step onto the sea is to confront the unconscious, to risk drowning in forces greater than oneself. To be saved is to integrate those forces, to emerge with a deeper sense of self.
Simon’s cry, “Don’t let me go,” becomes the archetypal plea of the ego overwhelmed by the unconscious. It is not only theological but psychological. We all know what it is to feel buffeted by waves of anxiety, grief, or despair. We all know the terror of sinking. And we all know the desperate longing for a hand to hold us. What The Chosen captures so powerfully is that moment of breakdown as breakthrough: the moment Simon begins to become Peter.
In this way, the storm scene is not simply about a miracle at sea. It is about initiation into discipleship, into identity, into the archetypal journey of transformation. Simon’s collapse is his beginning. His tears are his threshold. His plea—“Don’t let me go”—is the seed from which Peter will grow.
The Storm as Archetype
Storms have always carried symbolic weight. Across cultures and myths, they represent chaos, upheaval, and the power of forces beyond human control. In biblical literature, the sea is a place of threat—the dwelling place of Leviathan, the emblem of chaos. To master the sea is to master chaos itself. But Jung saw in storms not only threat but transformation. The storm, he argued, is a metaphor for “psychic energy unbound,” for the eruption of the unconscious that can destroy or renew.
In this sense, the disciples’ storm is universal. It is not only their sea, their wind, their fear. It is ours. Each of us knows storms—the sudden upheavals of illness, loss, doubt, or despair. Each of us knows what it is to feel our small boat battered, our control stripped away. In Jungian terms, these are the moments when the ego is destabilized, when the unconscious surges, when the structures of selfhood are threatened. They are dangerous moments, but also moments of potential rebirth.
Peter’s faltering steps on the water embody this process. He dares to step beyond the safety of the boat—beyond the known structures of ego. He confronts the wind and the waves, the archetypal forces of chaos. He falters and sinks, overwhelmed. But in being grasped, he is not annihilated but renewed. He emerges not simply as Simon but as one who has begun to be transformed into Peter. The storm becomes his initiation.
Kierkegaard once said, “Faith sees best in the dark.” The storm, then, is not a mistake in the story of discipleship but its crucible. Without storms, there is no faith—only comfort. Without sinking, there is no grasping hand. Without the cry—“Lord, save me! Don’t let me go”—there is no transformation. The storm is both terror and gift.
And so Rembrandt, Jung, and The Chosen converge. Each in their own medium reminds us that storms are archetypal, that they reveal us to ourselves, and that they hold within them the possibility of renewal.
My Place in the Boat
When I reflect on these storms—biblical, painted, dramatized—I cannot keep myself outside them. Like Rembrandt, I recognize my own face among the terrified disciples. Like Simon in The Chosen, I know the desperation of clinging to something larger than myself. Like the Gospel writers, I know what it is to cry out, “Don’t you care if I drown? Lord, save me! Don’t let me go.”
For me, reading the Bible as literature does not diminish its power. On the contrary, it heightens it. Literature is powerful because it names what is most human. It stages our anxieties, our faltering courage, our desperate longing for presence. These storm stories do precisely that. They are less about theology than about psychology; less about dogma than about drama. They reveal the human condition with an honesty that transcends centuries.
The storm is not confined to Galilee. It surges in classrooms, in hospitals, in moments of private despair. It batters in times of loss, uncertainty, and fear. And in those moments, I find myself echoing Simon’s cry—not as doctrine, but as literature, as archetype, as psychology: “Don’t let me go.” It is the most human of prayers.
And perhaps that is the enduring gift of these stories. Whether one believes in the literal miracle or not, they endure because they speak to something deeper. They remind us that storms come, that we falter, that we sink. But they also remind us that in the very moment of collapse, a hand may reach out, light may break in, calm may come. And even if only for a moment, the sea will grow still.