Miracles
Page 9
Still, it’s difficult. It seems self-evident that to reject all that is beyond the material world is the “scientific” way forward. But what if the evidence of science really does increasingly lead us to believe that perhaps there is something beyond the material world? Can we consider this? Or must we bow to the shibboleths of our culture, fearing scorn from people whose opinions mean so much to us? To believe in miracles in this day and age may require a real act of bravery. The hardest thing about opening oneself up to such beliefs is that it may reveal some unpleasant things about the people whose opinions we once took so seriously. But perhaps that is not such a bad thing, in the end.
7
THE BIBLICAL MIRACLES
Then said Jesus unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.
—JOHN 4:48
To speak of miracles without speaking of the miracles in the Bible would certainly be odd, if not perverse. Where but in the Bible should we look for some template of what miracles are or might be?
The most important point to be made about the miracles of the New Testament in particular is that they are all signs of things beyond themselves. Let’s first consider the assumptions we have when we think about miracles, whether from the Bible or elsewhere. Most of us automatically seem to divide miracle stories into those we think plausible and possible and those we think implausible and impossible—or perhaps even ridiculous. If we accept that the God of the Bible created the cosmos out of nothingness, we can probably accept that he is capable of raising a corpse to life or multiplying loaves and fishes. Such things may strain our credulity, but they don’t seem to go beyond the limits of what most people would accept as within the realm of possibility for the creator of the universe. Sometimes, though, we hear miracle stories that for one reason or another simply do not seem right—but why don’t they? The answer is that whether we are considering a work of art or a miracle story, each of us has an innate sense of limits and proportion, and this comes into play as we form our judgments.
GOD CAN DO ANYTHING—BUT DOES HE?
Some years ago I translated a Grimms’ fairy tale from the original German. It’s titled “The Fisherman and His Wife” and is not written in the German of other Grimms’ tales but in a dialect from Germany’s northern coast, which makes sense since it’s a story about a poor fisherman who catches a fish that can talk and grant wishes. But the fisherman’s ill-tempered wife is never satisfied with what the fish grants them. After they get a big house, she complains that they should have one that’s bigger still. She then demands a palace and wants to be queen, and then an even larger palace and wants to be emperor. Finally—reflecting the era in which the story originated—she demands that the fish make her pope, with power over all the kings and queens in western Christendom. But then came the difficulty for me. Because after the fish grants this wish, the woman is described as sitting on a throne “two miles” high. Before this detail, everything seemed to make sense. I had no difficulty accepting the outlandish idea of a talking flounder, or that it could grant wishes, but when I came to the detail of the throne’s height, I balked. Something was amiss. But why could I accept everything else in the story but not this detail of the throne being two miles high? It simply seemed out of proportion, so I kept digging and eventually discovered a different, archaic definition of the German word “myle.” That older meaning was not “mile,” but rather “fathom,” which is about six feet. So the throne, instead of being described as approximately ten thousand feet high, was actually being described as about twelve feet high. That was more like it. Somehow we intuitively sense what is within the logic and the limits of a story.
When we read the miracles of the New Testament, we bring this same instinct to the table. So for most readers, the healing miracles of Jesus don’t especially strain our credulity, taken in context. Nor does turning water into wine. Nor even do the instances of his raising three people from the dead.* But when we come to something like Jesus walking on water, we cannot help but stop and wonder precisely how that was accomplished. It is somehow harder for the modern mind to comprehend or accept.
But once again reminding ourselves that God invented and created and sustains the endless reaches of the ever-expanding universe, that he created a reality whose surface the brightest humans only scratch when they explore the implications of quantum physics, can we not accept that if he were to be incarnated as a human being, he would be able to walk on water? If we accept that he can rise from the dead and that he afterward could appear and disappear as he pleased, passing through walls and then visibly ascending into the heavens, can we not accept that he has a relationship to the structure of matter that is necessarily different from the one the rest of us have?
But there are some miracle stories that are harder to accept, and with good reason. For example, in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which is not in the Bible—and which the church and historians have always rejected as fictional and spurious—there is an account of the five-year-old Jesus fashioning sparrows from mud and then making them come to life and fly away. To most people, this sounds like an invention, but why is that? Why does it seem wrong in the way that a two-mile-high throne seems wrong in the context of that Grimms’ fairy tale? How is it that we intuitively grasp that this anecdote is somehow different from the miracles attributed to the Jesus of the canonical Gospels?
Part of the reason is that most of us have read so many stories of so many kinds that we can sense which genre the story belongs to. This one invariably falls into the camp of stories in which fanciful miracles are attributed to saints, as in the story of Saint Patrick chasing all the snakes out of Ireland. We somehow know these things never actually happened, that they’re just a bit of folklore and a bit of a tall tale. But there’s more to our jaundiced view of this apocryphal childhood stunt. The idea of Jesus making sparrows from the mud also has something unmistakably show-offy about it, which is radically out of keeping with the character of Jesus we find in the rest of the Gospels. After all, what is the point of a five-year-old doing this if not simply to impress his friends on the playground? It seems to evoke the image of a crowd-pleasing tuxedoed magician more than it evokes the heroic and captivating Son of God we know from the pages of the New Testament.
Also, unlike other miracle stories, this one has the feeling of a cul-de-sac or appendix. Where does it mean to lead and what it is supposed to be saying to us on a deeper level? Every one of the real miracles attributed to Jesus is a sign pointing beyond the miracle itself. When Jesus brings sight to a blind man, he is signifying the idea that we are all spiritually blind and need God’s help to see. He is also fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah. When he multiplies the loaves and fishes, he is doing something with many levels of meaning, the most fundamental of which is that he is feeding the hungry. But what exactly is the point of this playground sleight-of-hand involving sparrows? Even though we know God can do anything—and the Bible says “with God all things are possible”—we have a sense that Jesus simply wouldn’t do this and didn’t. It’s out of character and somehow out of plumb, generally speaking.
God gave us common sense and he wants us to use our brains when we think about miracles. So it’s a fact that even though we might believe that God can do anything, we know there are some things he wouldn’t do. Some miracles would violate his character. But the idea that God has a character is itself interesting to consider. Many of us have an idea of what his character is like, but the question is where we got that idea from. Our ideas of who God is can often be formed by factors that have little to do with the God of the Bible. Some of us have an idea of God’s character that we’ve cobbled together from bits and pieces of pop culture. Perhaps we think he’s a bit like George Burns in the Oh, God! movies from the seventies. Or perhaps our idea of God comes from an overly severe and legalistic religious upbringing, or from the many portrayals of this kind of religiosity in TV and movies. Or perhaps we think
God the Father is like our own fathers, who may not have been trustworthy or consistent or loving. So when we talk about God’s character, the only standard to which we can consistently repair—and which is at all subjective—is the one we can see from the stories in the Old and New Testaments. These are the original sources, after all. So in keeping with this idea of God’s character, when we hear any miracle stories, we want to evaluate them in part on whether they seem to fit with the character of the God of the Bible.
We know that unlike the gods in some stories from pagan folklore, the God of the Bible isn’t a trickster or someone who “plays games” with us. For example, some people believe that the universe was created a few thousand years ago, but when confronted with geological evidence to the contrary, they respond that God “can do anything,” including creating geological “evidence” that is deliberately misleading. When asked why, they say that he did that “to test our faith.” Some have even maintained that God planted dinosaur bones in the rock strata for the same reason. Perhaps the single greatest difficulty with such arguments is that the character of this God of whom they speak is not consistent with the character of the God of the Bible. Jesus certainly never did anything intentionally misleading, nor does the Old Testament contain any examples of God misleading people along such lines. If you know the character of the God of the Bible, you are obliged to reject such ideas.
THE GRACE OF GOD IN A FISH STORY
In chapter 17 of Matthew’s Gospel, there is another story that stretches the boundaries of what seems possible and that speaks to us of God’s character. It’s the one in which Jesus tells Peter to pay the tax they owe by catching a fish, whose mouth will contain the necessary coin. Here is the passage:
When they had come to Capernaum, those who received the temple tax came to Peter and said, “Does your Teacher not pay the temple tax?” He said, “Yes.” And when he had come into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth take customs or taxes, from their sons or from strangers?” Peter said to Him, “From strangers.” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. Nevertheless, lest we offend them, go to the sea, cast in a hook, and take the fish that comes up first. And when you have opened its mouth, you will find a piece of money; take that and give it to them for Me and you.”
Of all the miracles in the New Testament, this one is probably the quirkiest. What are we to make of it? To understand it properly, we need to look at the details.
The coin referred to in the passage is almost certainly a silver one-shekel coin, equal to two Alexandrine drachmas. We know the tax would have been one-half shekel per person, so the coin would have been precisely the right amount to pay for Jesus and for Peter. Speaking to the plausibility of this story, those who know something about fish can easily corroborate that if someone had dropped such a coin into the water by accident a fish might have quickly gobbled it, as fish often do when shiny things suddenly present themselves. Others have established that these fish—most likely what we now call tilapia—keep their young in their mouths for a time, and also pick up pebbles from the seafloor. Who can say what exactly was going on? But the detail that a fish had a silver coin in its mouth is not at all implausible. Nonetheless, the problem with “naturalistic” explanations is that they make the event seem plausible, while simultaneously “explaining it away,” as though it weren’t a miracle after all. In this case, however, that cannot be. Because even if we understand that a fish could have a silver coin in its mouth—and given Peter’s years as a fisherman, he may even have seen such things many times—we still have to account for the further idea that Jesus tells Peter to go fishing, knowing that he will catch precisely that fish that has the coin in its mouth. Obviously that is the miracle. Of course, there’s also the idea that Jesus would have known that the fish had the coin in its mouth in the first place. How could he know such things unless it were miraculously? The text makes plain that he did.
As with all the miracles Jesus does, there’s more than meets the eye, and it is meant to point us to see something beyond the miracle itself. Certainly one of the most important aspects of this story is how it demonstrates a specific aspect of the character of Jesus, namely that of his unfailing graciousness. Jesus makes clear in what he says to Peter that they don’t really need to pay the tax, but he says that they will do so anyway, “so that no one is offended.” He wishes his disciples—and us—to understand that we must always go the proverbial “extra mile.” We don’t do what we are required to do; we do more. If we believe that God has given us much, we can well afford to give others more than is merely “just” or “deserved.” God has been overgenerous with us, so we who are his blessed children should also be overgenerous. God himself never gives what is our just deserts but rather gives out of the superabundance of grace, and so should we.
This idea of grace and generosity and unforced self-giving is at the heart of the New Testament idea of agape love and in the tiny detail of this story we see it once again. The most important and central illustration of this idea is, of course, in Jesus’s death on the cross, where he sacrifices himself for others out of love, and not because we deserve this sacrifice. It is this grace that humbles us and makes us grateful to him, if we understand the situation. He didn’t need to do what he did, but he did it anyway, not because we deserve it but because he loves us. To anyone not disposed to accept such a humbling gift, this idea is of course grating and off-putting, even offensive.
But Jesus always calls his followers well beyond the justice of “an eye for an eye; and a tooth for a tooth” and into this realm of agape love—of generous, gracious, selfless giving, borne out of the superabundance of a relationship with God. We even see this at the dawn of Jesus’s public ministry, when he goes to the Jordan to be baptized by his cousin John the Baptist. If Jesus was the sinless Son of God, he certainly didn’t need to be baptized, to have his sins forgiven and symbolically washed away. But Jesus wanted to identify publicly with the rest of us, who do need to be baptized and cleansed. He comes down among us not only by leaving the glory of Heaven to come to Earth but also by publicly entering the waters of baptism, humbling himself publicly. Jesus illustrates the same thing when he does the job of the lowest slave by washing the feet of his disciples. He over and over humbles himself in this way to show that if we want to be like him, we need to humble ourselves too. Paying the temple tax with the silver coin is one small example of that. So this detail makes this story consonant with the character of Jesus and with the rest of the New Testament stories, especially with his teaching that we love our enemies, that we walk the “extra mile,” and “turn the other cheek.”
It even links us to the famous story of the woman at the well, which gives us a visual image of the radical superabundance of God. In that story, Jesus talks with a woman who is all alone at a well, drawing water in the middle of the day. It is believed that she was somehow a woman of ill repute and was therefore there alone at a time atypical for drawing water. Jesus tells her that what he offers her is not just the cup of water we need to quench our thirst but a veritable gushing fountain that will overwhelm us with more than we can ever ask for or think about. He is not a utilitarian God, stingily parsing out the minimum we need for our sustenance. He is a God whose love and resources are boundless and who wants to shower us with them.
Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:13–14)
THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND
The well-known miracle of the loaves and fishes illustrates the same principle of God’s superabundant grace. It also illustrates the larger idea that each one of these miracles—or signs—Jesus did was meant to signify much else, and to point the people present—and us—to God himself.
Before Jesus performed th
is miracle, he had just heard of the beheading of his cousin John the Baptist by the evil Herod. He enters the scene filled with grief.
When Jesus heard [the news], He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities. And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude . . .
Jesus is plainly in no mood to be overwhelmed with crowds of people desperate for his attention. He wants to be alone with his disciples, to grieve over the murder of his beloved cousin, who was not merely his cousin but who in Jesus’s estimation was the greatest prophet of God who had ever lived. That the evil Herod had beheaded John to satisfy the whim of the woman with whom he was committing adultery—or her daughter—must have been overwhelmingly painful. But the innumerable miracles he had been doing had so captured the attention and imagination of people that by now literally thousands were moving through the countryside in the hopes of getting a glimpse of him, and then when he got out of the boat, heavyhearted and fatigued, he saw that this multitude of humanity had intercepted him. So the text says that despite his grief and all-too-human fatigue, he “had compassion on them and healed their sick.”
We are often so familiar with what the Bible says that we skip past words and miss their meaning entirely. That Jesus “had compassion on them and healed their sick” is a staggering sentence, magnificent in its understatement. Jesus got out of the boat to see many thousands awaiting him. There was a wild desperation among them and Jesus was filled with compassion. But the verse says that “he healed their sick.” A few verses later we see that there were five thousand men in the crowd, which means that there were probably fifteen or twenty thousand people in total. Many of them had traveled there specifically because they believed Jesus could heal “their sick,” whom they had brought along, and in many cases had literally “carried” to this remote place. So when the text simply reads “he healed their sick,” can we imagine how many miracles actually took place that day? It is likely that it was well into the hundreds, yet not a single one of them is mentioned in the Gospel accounts. We have a picture here again of the superabundance of God, and of the outrageous generosity of Jesus. The writers of the Gospels didn’t feel the need to mention any of these healing miracles specifically, focusing only on the ultimate miracle of the multiplied loaves and fishes. In John’s Gospel (21:25), using hyperbole to make the larger point, John writes, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”