Bible Stories

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became Man.

It is impossible to read in the Gospels the account of Jesus‘ ministry without being struck by the many stories about Jesus doing things such as healing people and stilling the storm which people normally cannot do. There are over thirty such incidents recorded, apart from some general accounts which refer to large numbers of people being healed.

Word clues

The Gospel writers use three words to describe these actions and each word gives us a clue to what these actions are about:

• ‘Mighty works‘ This description emphasizes the great power Jesus had over disease, over evil spirits and over nature itself. He said that this power came from God his Father, and he showed how great his control was when he shared this power with others.
• ‘Wonders’ This word shows the effect his works had on those who witnessed them. They wondered at his power and were full of awe at this extraordinary man. ‘Who is this man?’ they said. ‘Even the wind and the waves obey him.’
• ‘Signs’ This is the word for key selected miracles in John’s Gospel. The works of Jesus, bringing relief and evoking wonder as they did, were also intended to point to something very special about Jesus.

Sometimes the meaning of the miracles is spelt out. According to Isaiah, the Messiah was expected to perform miracles, so when they saw Jesus‘ power the people of Jerusalem said, When Messiah appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?’ But more often the onlooker is left to draw his own conclusions. The story of Jesus‘ raising Lazarus from the dead vindicates his claim to give life to anyone who believes in him. It also raised enormous questions about who Jesus was. For all the importance of the ’signs and wonders’ element, however, we are not to think of all these ‘mighty works‘ as being merely of educational value. Many of the healing stories simply tell how Jesus was confronted with a fellow human being in great need and was moved with pity and love to do something.

The miraculous is by no means limited to the life of Jesus. His disciples, as described both in the Gospels and in the Acts of the apostles, performed miraculous healings. In the Old Testament Moses, Elisha and many others were empowered to carry out actions which spoke of God’s supernatural power. Usually these actions worked for the benefit of God’s people or for their deliverance. We can think of Elijah and the inexhaustible jar of meal (which saved a household from starvation), or Jerusalem delivered from a siege, or the plagues in Egypt which led to the Israelites’ rescue from slavery.

Miracles and science

It is sometimes argued that miracles cannot happen because they break the ‘laws of nature‘, which never vary. There are two things to be said against this:

• The expression ‘laws of nature‘ can be used in a way which gives scientific statements a status they do not in fact possess. These ‘laws’ are not prescriptive — they do not say what must happen; they are descriptive — convenient ways of describing what normally does happen. On the vast majority of occasions dead men stay dead. If one man should not do so, then clearly that ‘law of nature‘ will be inadequate to describe the particular event. The event does not depend on the description, but the description on the event. All scientific assertions are provisional.
• To say that ‘miracles cannot happen’ is not a scientific assertion. It is a faith- statement on exactly the same level as when a Christian says ‘Jesus performed miracles‘.

There are thinkers inside the church, too, who have great difficulty in assenting to miracles. The reason for this stems from their understanding of what God is like.

Those who concentrate on the ‘otherness’ of God may well see him as remote from his creation — almost unconcerned with the day-to-day fate of individuals. It would be beneath the dignity of such a God to do miracles. Or there might be those who tend towards a pantheistic, God-in n^ature view, so that ‘breaking a law of nature‘ would be almost the same as God ‘violating his own nature‘, which of course he cannot do. Or again, there might .be those who see God’s relation to his world as like that of a referee to a football match.

[While he controls all that goes ion, he is logically incapable of being a member of a team and taking part in the play.

In the Bible the key to the future of God is that his Son became the man Jesus of Nazareth. In the person of Jesuse see not only that revelations possible and that God loves us, but also that God can get Involved with his creation in a `deep personal way. The incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus are thus quite the biggest ‘miracles‘ of all, though it is hard to classify such unique and staggering events in the same category as other happenings, however breath-taking.

But granted that this breaking- in of the life of God into the created order has taken place, it is no great matter to accept that wonders could and did accompany it which we would call ‘miracles‘.

The definition of miracle

The ‘wonder‘ of an event is not enough to make us call it a miracle. The Tapanzee Bridge over the Hudson River is a wonder but it is not a miracle. So it is not enough to say that a miracle is ‘an event above or contrary to or exceeding nature which is explicable only as a direct act of God‘. This definition has as its focus the inability of people to explain an event. On this definition a Turkana tribesman seeing television for the first time would call it a miracle, meaning that it is ‘a wonder‘. He would describe it in this way because he would not have the conceptual apparatus to explain it in any other way. But television is certainly not ‘a miracle‘ in the Christian sense. On the other hand, an event like the parting of the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds) is made explicable by the mention of ‘a strong east wind all night’ but it is still a miracle, because God is understood by Moses and the people to be personally involved.

It is when God ’speaks’ to us in an event that we perceive it to be an act of God; only then does it become a sign to us of his presence and his word. We can talk about it to others if such a thing happens to us, but however compelling it may be for our own faith, it will not necessarily be conclusive evidence of God’s existence for other people. However, it would still be too wide a definition to say that ‘a miracle is a wonderful event in which God speaks to us‘, for that would include such everyday events in the life of the Christian as listening to a sermon or attending the eucharist. We need to include a ‘mighty work’ aspect in the definition, along with the ‘wonder‘ and the ’sign’.

For the Christian, then, a miracle is a mighty work, beyond the normal functioning of human beings, which evokes wonder and in which we hear God speaking of his personal involvement and care for people.

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