“They that Go Down to the Sea in Ships”
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep psalm 107, 23-24
These words come readily to mind as I write aboard the Queen Mary 2, as do those of the readings from the Mass I celebrated last Sunday* aboard ship as we sailed past Nova Scotia in the early stages of our journey to Southampton:
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters… (Isaiah 55,1)
and
Jesus went out of the house, and sat by the sea side. And great multitudes were gathered together unto him, so that he went into a ship, and the whole multitude stood on the shore. And he spake many things unto them in parables….
(Gospel of St Matthew 13)
The themes of the sea, ships, and water are powerfully invoked in the Bible in a number of rather different ways – even though some profound elements of continuity can also be discerned.
While the Israelites were not a seafaring people, ships and the sea appear at crucial points in the Old Testament – moments that bring together divine power, providence, and judgement on one side in tension, with human waywardness and ambition on the other. But there is ambivalence too, insofar as water itself is presented as both life-giving and yet also a symbol of chaos – just as it is also fertile and threatening. The imagery of the sea often thus demarcated to the ancient Israelites the boundary of ordered creation, wherein ships could betoken human dependence in a world that is not ultimately under human control; while considered under a different aspect, water could both effect and symbolize deliverance.
Of all the Old Testament references, the ark is pre-eminent as the primal biblical vessel. While frail and earthly in its wooden construction, Genesis presents God as its architect and both later Jewish and Christian thought dwelt extensively upon this vessel as a figure of salvation through crisis.
Genesis depicts the ark as the means by which God “establishes” his covenant with Noah and his family (Gen. 6:18), thus marking out the vessel as not merely a temporary refuge but in fact a covenantal instrument of preservation.
In the New Testament, First Peter explicitly receives and develops this typology and develops it to link the flood to baptism and salvation “through water” (1 Pet. 3:20–21), thus making the ark a prefiguration of incorporation into Christ’s saving body. This was soon further developed in the early church into a straightforward ecclesiological logic where the ark is one, while being divinely appointed, and containing within it a redeemed community that cannot save itself. The unity it embodied became central in later Christian thought, where the Church was imagined, not as merely as some voluntary association of the spiritually inclined, but as the concrete vessel that begins in this world but continued into the next – and through which God gathers, bears, and preserves his people through the flood of history and its many vicissitudes looking on to the end of time (eschaton).
The early church Fathers regularly read Noah’s ark as a type of the Church, with Augustine and later medieval writers seeing in it the shape of the ecclesial mystery wherein the Church itself was at once both material (symbolised by the wood) and divine, visible and salvational, howsoever buffeted through history by turbulent waters which, by divine providence, we can be assured will never prevail. Within this imagery, the ark’s one door naturally came to symbolize Christ’s unique mediation, while its enclosed fellowship could also be seen as symbolic of the unity of baptismal membership.
Thus did the powerful line of interpretation link the Old Testament ark to the Church as a sacramental vessel. The waters of judgment thus became, in Christian rereading, waters of regeneration – and what destroyed the old prior world in Genesis becomes the medium through which a new covenant and people are brought forth.
In this way, the story of the ark is deeply ecclesiological and represents so much more than merely an illustration of the right moral course; it does not simply represent a lesson in obedience, but is an image of how salvation is incarnationally mediated in this corporate vehicle that is the church of the ages.
As an ecclesiological metaphor, the ark emphasizes four themes:
• Unity: as there is but one ark, which is God’s Church, as the ark of salvation through the unique sacrificial salvific ministry of Jesus Christ as Son of God. The church as a theological ark thus stands ultimately as one reality that is not properly expressed when fragmented, any more than it is something to be made captive by structures of mere human invention – a perspective that provides a powerful incentive to authentic ecumenism.
• Catholicity: since the end goal of the church (its telos) is intrinsically universal in scope, as it strives to encompass and enfold the entirety of redeemed creation through Christ – a perspective that points to a comprehensive rather than limited, or merely sectarian, vision of how it is embodied and of what the redeemed life entails.
• Pilgrimage: the ark represents a passage towards the destination but does not itself comprise that destination. Thus the ark and church embody hope and the life lived towards a promised renewal beyond the present – and the dangers represented by the flood.
Moreover, we have to recognise that the metaphor also has a corrective edge insofar as it makes clear that salvation is not secured by individual competence, charisma, or control. The ark is not a ship of mere human mastery but an act of divine provision, and one that brings together all those who follow Christ. This makes clear that the church is a received reality rather than a human or self-created institution.
All of which brings us to the New Testament.
* I do have to note, with considerable sadness, that Cunard refused to allow the Mass to be announced in any way to the passengers of the QM2 on this occasion (as has always happened previously, through the daily bulletin, when I was aboard and celebrated). This was especially unfortunate when there was no Roman Catholic priest to celebrate their Mass either. On one previous occasion, when that happened, well over two hundred attended the Anglican service – careful as I was to make that identity clear. One passenger made the point that this was the first Sunday in over seven years when he had been unable to attend Mass and was prevented by not knowing that one was being celebrated.
In the New Testament, we find the imagery of ships changing in scale as we move from the universal flood of Noah to hear of the boats in the Gospels and Acts.
The highly local Sea of Galilee becomes a kind of primary stage on and around which Jesus reveals his authority, calls his disciples, and teaches from the waterline. This then leads into the formation of the first communities of the faithful as they learn his teachings and then later after the Passion and Resurrection have to retain their faith and grapple with it through the intense instability and growth that ensued.
The boat in this context is first a place of teaching and call. Jesus “got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s,” and taught the crowds from it (Luke 5:3). The vessel here is neither mere scenery nor a neutral platform: it becomes an instrument through which the word of God reaches the multitude. The miraculous catch that follows turns the boat into a sign of abundance given by Christ’s command, not human expertise.
Patristic readers readily made this ecclesial once again: so Augustine and Ambrose saw the boat as a figure of the Church, and the net-filled vessel as the Church’s missionary fecundity under Christ’s direction.
Yet the boat is also a scene of danger and revelation. In the storm on the lake, Jesus is asleep in the boat and then rebukes the wind and the waves, eliciting the disciples’ question: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41).
Cyril of Alexandria sets out the Christological analysis: Christ shows himself to be the one who rules the sea in Israel’s Scriptures, so that the same Lord who seemed to sleep as man commands the storm as God. Theologically, therefore, the boat symbolizes again the Church or the believer amid tribulation, while Christ’s presence discloses that creation’s apparent disorder is not beyond his sovereignty and does not have the last word.
In Acts, the ecclesial imagery intensifies and with Paul’s voyage to Rome – and especially with the shipwreck in Acts 27 – we see in the ship a figure of the missionary Church journeying through danger yet all the while never losing divine direction. Paul’s assurance, “I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told” (Acts 27:25), turns the crisis at sea into a lesson of trust in providence and witness. Later Patristic interpretation continued to see in the ship: the Church; and in the storm, persecution or temptation, with the eventual arrival representing the preservation of the faithful through Christ. And the lesson is at its most powerful when the ship founders, for even then, the divine purpose is not frustrated as the passengers reach land in safety – illustrating once again the prevenience of God and his sovereignty.
Again, in the story of Peter, we have a particularly poignant scenario that begins in failure but is followed by faith and witness enhanced – a story that captures the instability of faith when it turns from Christ to circumstance, and the immediacy of grace when fear becomes prayer.
In the sea narrative, when Peter tried also to walk on the water, his sinking is not simply weakness; it dramatizes the divided heart, while Christ’s grasp reveals that salvation begins outside the self.
Patristic and later theological readings often treat Peter as the representative disciple. He truly responds to Christ’s word—“Come”—and therefore his brief walking is a genuine participation in faith, not a mere pretense. But when faltered amidst the wind and waves the narrative shifts from promise to perception, and that shift symbolizes the vulnerability of discipleship to distraction and fear.
Peter’s sinking reminds us of the sea as a place of chaos, and his – Peter’s – movement upon it at first shows his faith but then how faith can falter when the threatening world becomes more vivid than the call of Christ.
Patristic interpreters commonly read this as a lesson in the necessity of sustained gaze upon the Lord, since faith is not one unique and grand heroic act but rather a continuing relation of trust through which the life’s work of sanctification can unfold.
Peter’s cry of vulnerability, “Lord, save me,” is thus the decisive moment. The meaning is not that Peter rescues himself by renewed effort, but that he is saved by the hand that immediately reaches out to him when in faith he seeks it. This makes the episode soteriological: the disciple’s sinking exposes human insufficiency, while Christ’s response reveals prevenient mercy and the absolute capacity of divine aid.
And once again, the boat can be seen to represent the Church, and Peter’s experience therefore mirrors ecclesial life under duress. The Church steps into dangerous waters at Christ’s command, and it remains subject to fear, wavering, and partial vision; yet, what matters, is that its hope lies not in some mere human steadiness of its own, but in the Lord who is present and always rescuing it. In this way, we can see Peter’s moment of failure as not merely a personal failure redeemed by Christ but rather an image of the Church’s dependence on Christ throughout its history.
The scene thus should inform our confidence in restoration. Peter’s sinking foreshadows later moments of denial and renewed calling, showing that failure does not have the final word. The narrative thus combines both an element of rebuke when we presume to trust upon ourselves alone, and the merely human – and yet also of consolation; for Jesus corrects Peter’s “little faith,” but does so while holding him fast, so the failure becomes pedagogic rather than a moment of abandonment. Peter’s rescue reminds that discipleship is sustained by Christ’s initiative in support of mere human courage. The sea exposes our weakness, but the Lord’s hand interprets weakness as the place where grace is most clearly undertood to be needed, accessible and given.
As Augustine reminds us, therefore the boat and the ark, in particular, is a figure of the Church sojourning throughs history: one visible community preserved by God amid the floods and trials of each successive age. (City of God XV.26, where Noah’s ark is “a figure of the city of God sojourning in this world; that is to say, of the church.”)
That phrase is crucial; because Augustine does not treat the Church as an escape from history, but as God’s pilgrim people carried and bearing witness to him through it – a pilgrimage we are each called upon to do in our own time and place.
In the words again of Psalm 107, of the God in whom we trust:
25 For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind,
which lifteth up the waves thereof.
26 They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths:
their soul is melted because of trouble……
28 Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble,
and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
29 He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
30 Then are they glad because they be quiet;
so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.
31 Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,
and for his wonderful works to the children of men!