Seasoned with Salt
Day 216 – 4 August
The Rudder and the Gale
“Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.” (James 3:4, NIV)
The Old Man and the Great Ship
In the second century, the satirist Lucian wrote up a day out that half of Athens seems to have taken. An Alexandrian grain ship named the Isis, blown off her course to Italy, had put in at Piraeus, and crowds streamed down from the city simply to stare at her. She measured around a hundred and eighty feet from stem to stern, forty-five in the beam, her hold deep enough to carry grain for a year’s bread, her prow painted with the goddess who gave the vessel her name. Lucian’s friends walked her deck marvelling at masts, cables, and the mountain of her stern, but the detail that stole the conversation was smaller. All that towering, wallowing tonnage answered to an elderly steersman of no great size, guiding the great steering oars with a slender tiller bar, one aged hand deciding where a floating warehouse went. Antiquity had already noticed the wonder; Aristotle puzzled in his Mechanica over how so small a helm swings so large a hull. James, decades before Lucian, hauled the same astonishment into a sermon.
A Blade at the Stern
His Greek stacks the scales against the steering gear on purpose. The ships are tēlikauta (so great); they are driven, elaunō (to drive, to push), the seaman’s word for wind or oars forcing a hull along; and the weather doing the driving is anemōn sklērōn (hard winds), from sklēros (hard, harsh, unyielding). Against all that mass and violence James set a pēdalion (rudder, steering oar), a noun grown from pēdon (the blade of an oar), and he sized it with a superlative, elachistos (smallest, least). His first-century readers pictured no hinged stern rudder, for the invention lay centuries ahead; a ship of their world steered by a pair of broad-bladed oars mounted on her quarters, lashed up when she rode at anchor and loosed when she made way. Luke used the identical word for the identical gear when the sailors of Paul’s doomed grain ship cut the anchors and untied the lashings of the pēdalia (rudders) to run her for the beach, the term’s only other appearance in the New Testament. And James finished with the detail that carries the sermon: the vessel turns, metagō (to turn about), the very verb he had just used for the bridled horse, wherever the hormē (impulse, inclination) of the one steering wills. Greatest mass, hardest weather, smallest instrument, single will. Then the application he wanted all along: the tongue holds that office in the vessel of a human life.
Who Steers the Steerer
Press the picture one step further, though, because the rudder itself decides nothing. A blade of wood has no hormē (impulse); the impulse belongs to the pilot whose grip rests on the tiller, and James chose his phrasing to make us ask who that pilot is. Jesus had already answered. Out of the abundance of the heart, He taught, the mouth speaks; the heart steers the tongue exactly as the tongue steers the life, so the week’s battle moves inboard, from vocabulary to helm. And at that helm the gospel offers an exchange, because one Pilot in the universe has never once been blown off course. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, sang the psalmist; I declare the end from the beginning, said the God of Isaiah, and my purpose shall stand. Empires have risen like weather systems and spent themselves against His intentions without shifting them a single degree. When Scripture pictures Him steering His people, it speaks by accommodation, a harbour image lent to our small understanding, for He is Spirit, grips no tiller, and governs without instruments or strain; the figure teaches His unhurried command, never His anatomy. Nor do the gales come from His character: a fallen creation brews its own hard weather, and He authors none of its evil, yet His course through it holds as though the storm were calm. Hand the heart’s impulse to that steadiness. A life whose helm He keeps starts to speak with His constancy, and words stop swinging with the barometer.
Sailing in Hard Weather
Notice, finally, which ships James chose: ships already labouring in fierce winds. He could have pictured a vessel gliding across a mirror-calm harbour, where any amateur looks masterful at the tiller. He chose a gale, because steering is only proven in weather, and so is speech. Almost anyone talks graciously through an easy morning. The rudder shows its worth at the sharp email, the criticism relayed thirdhand, the school-run chaos, the phone call that lands at four o’clock carrying bad news. A wise helmsman sets his heading before the storm finds him, while the water still lies flat, and then holds the blade against every shove of the sea. Do the same at the start of this Tuesday. Decide now, in the calm, what your mouth will do under provocation, the sentence you will refuse, the tone you will keep, the silence you will hold, so that when the wind rises at noon the course is already chosen and the hand already steady. Salt seasons speech, and a held heading keeps the whole cargo off the rocks.
Declaration
My course today is set before the wind rises. The smallest member of my body will steer the largest hours of my day, so I attend to the small thing first and early. When hard weather blows through my afternoon, my words will answer the heading I chose in the calm, never the gale that happens to be shoving me. I give the steering of my heart to the One whose purposes ride out every storm unchanged, and whatever weather this day brings, I hold that heading home.
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