The Lord Who Passes By
Jesus "passing by" on the sea in Mark 6:48 echoes Old Testament divine encounters, revealing his sovereignty. The disciples' failure to recognize him highlights a deeper spiritual blindness.
Divine Proximity, Perceptual Limitation, and the Marcan Epiphany
"AND he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them. And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them..."
— Mark 6:48
Theophany and Perceptual Limitation
The narrative of Jesus walking on the water in Mark 6:45–52 contains one of the most enigmatic phrases in the second Gospel: “he intended to pass by them” (θέλων παρελθεῖν αὐτούς, thelōn parelthein autous). Taken as a mere description of physical movement, the phrase is narratively redundant, suggesting that Jesus designed to bypass his struggling disciples. However, when read within the matrix of Israel’s Scriptures, this phrase emerges as a deliberate theophanic idiom. The evangelist employs this language to situate Jesus’s action within the established pattern of divine self-disclosure, wherein the one true God reveals his presence while simultaneously establishing the boundaries of human perception.
This theological grammar of “passing by” is rooted in the foundational encounters of the Torah and the Prophets. In Exodus 33, Moses requests to see the glory of YHWH. The divine response establishes a pattern of mediated presence: “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD’” (Exod 33:19). When this promise is realized, YHWH descends in a cloud and “passed by before him” (Exod 34:6). In the Septuagint, this action is translated using the verb parerchomai, specifically parēlthen in Exodus 34:6, the very verb Mark uses in his Gospel.
The Sinai account carefully delineates the limits of this encounter. Moses is placed in the cleft of the rock, covered by the divine hand, and permitted only a rearward view, for “my face shall not be seen” (Exod 33:23). Divine accessibility is thus coupled with a strict prohibition concerning direct sight, establishing that YHWH remains sovereign over the terms of his own disclosure.
A parallel structure informs the experience of Elijah at Horeb. Elijah is commanded to “stand on the mount before the LORD,” and the text records that “behold, the LORD passed by” (1 Kgs 19:11; LXX parēlthen). The divine presence is not disclosed through the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. Elijah encounters the divine address only after “the sound of a low whisper” or “sheer silence” (1 Kgs 19:12).
In both narratives, the act of “passing by” (Hebrew ʿābar) denotes a transient, authoritative self-disclosure. God becomes genuinely present and perceptible, yet he retains absolute control over the manner and limits of his revelation. The human recipient is left with a profound sense of divine nearness that is nevertheless qualified by what is withheld. This dialectic of presence and limitation provides the essential interpretive key for the Marcan sea narrative.
Jesus on the Sea
When Mark writes that Jesus walked on the water and “intended to pass by them” (Mark 6:48), he is not describing an aborted rescue attempt but is invoking this rich theophanic tradition. The verb parerchomai functions as a probable intentional echo of the Septuagintal accounts of Exodus and 1 Kings. This verbal echo is reinforced by the spatial setting of the miracle. In the Old Testament, walking upon or dominating the sea is a unique prerogative of YHWH, who alone subdues the forces of cosmic chaos. Job declares that God “alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea” (Job 9:8). Similarly, the Psalmist sings of YHWH, “Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen” (Ps 77:19).
By traversing the wind-swept lake, Jesus physically performs the cosmic sovereignty associated with Israel’s God. The narrative does not present a simple nature miracle designed to evoke wonder; it depicts an epiphany of the divine Actor known from Israel’s Scriptures. The disciples’ reaction of terror and their assumption that they are seeing a “ghost” (Mark 6:49; Greek phantasma) align with the dread that characterizes human encounters with the divine. They witness an action Scripture attributes to the creator God walking upon the deep, yet they are unable to decode the event. Their failure to recognize Jesus is not due to a lack of physical visibility, but to their inability to perceive the divine identity operating within the human form of the Messiah.
A Test of Perception
The evangelist explicitly diagnoses the disciples’ misrecognition as a profound spiritual failure. Mark writes that “they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened” (Mark 6:52). The description of their hearts as “hardened” (pepōrōmenē) denotes a condition of dullness and insensibility. The miracle of the loaves (Mark 6:35–44) was itself a performance of divine provision in the wilderness, echoing YHWH’s feeding of Israel with manna. Had the disciples possessed the spiritual discernment to recognize YHWH’s hand in the multiplication of the bread, they would have been prepared to recognize the same divine presence walking upon the waters. Their problem is not an absence of evidence, but the absence of the inward perception required to interpret the signs correctly.
This pattern of divine disclosure and human limitation corresponds to other scriptural expressions of God’s self-manifestation, such as the “Arm of the LORD” (Hebrew zĕrôaʿ YHWH). In Isaiah, the Arm represents the visible, active exercise of divine power and salvation in history (Isa 51:9). In Isaiah 53, the revelation of this same Arm is closely associated with the appearance of the suffering Servant, leading the prophet to ask, “To whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?” (Isa 53:1). While “passing by” represents the spatial proximity of God, the “Arm” represents the historical operation of his saving power. Both motifs demonstrate that God reveals himself through concrete, historical actions that nevertheless remain hidden to those without faith.
This failure of perception forms a suggestive canonical contrast with the promises of the new covenant. In Jeremiah 31:33–34, YHWH promises a day when the law will be written on human hearts, resulting in an intimate, inward knowledge of God: “And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor... for they shall all know me.” Mark does not explicitly invoke Jeremiah here, but the contrast remains theologically illuminating. The disciples witness the external performance of the divine name and power, but they lack the inward understanding necessary to comprehend it. Mark’s narrative thus functions as a test of perception not only for the historical disciples but also for the readers of the Gospel, challenging them to look past the external signs and recognize the one true God present in Jesus.
Conclusion
In Mark 6:48, the phrase “he intended to pass by them” serves as a dense theological shorthand for the mystery of divine self-disclosure in the incarnation. Rather than depicting a distant or indifferent savior, the evangelist uses the Septuagintal language of parerchomai to situate Jesus within the identity and prerogatives of the God of Sinai and Horeb, who draws near to his people in their distress. By walking on the sea, Jesus performs the unique, sovereign actions of YHWH, revealing that the single divine subject of Israel’s Scriptures is now personally active in the person of the Son.
Yet, this revelation is consistently governed by the scriptural pattern of perceptual limitation. The disciples’ terror and hardness of heart demonstrate that the external sight of divine power is insufficient to produce saving faith. True recognition requires an inward transformation, a heart cured of its hardness and made receptive to the new covenant reality. Mark leaves his readers on the shore of this realization, confronting them with the ultimate question of the Gospel: whether they have the eyes to see and the hearts to understand the Lord who passes by.