What's in a Miracle?

Thoughts inspired by Peter Whittle's original post on Modern Day Miracles

Are miracles that important?

I remember thinking – in the early stages of my humdrum Christian years – that if I could witness a miracle first-hand, then I could cast aside all my doubts and just focus on loving God.

With that in mind, I made it my mission to scrape the barrel of my everyday routine for fragments of what might be conceived as a “God-moment”, which ultimately led to me over-thinking every minor incident as a potential miracle:

I found a parking space today! Praise God!

My favourite Tim Hughes song just started playing on shuffle on my ipod! Praise God!

I had a headache earlier, but now it's not so bad! Praise God!

At the time, it was clear that I wasn't the only one wanting to experience the miraculous. Every Sunday at my old church, the pastor would set aside a time for people with niggling headaches, sore limbs, and various other grave afflictions to step forward and experience the healing power of Christ.

I remember once seeing a senior member of the church hop around in a euphoric state after having suffered from long-term leg pain. I thought to myself, “Wow! God is definitely real! This is it!!”.

But it wasn't it. Or at least the feeling didn't last, and in a few short weeks I was back on the hunt for the next miraculous moment.

Thinking back, it makes sense that I would have wanted to experience God in such a tangible way so that I could boldly move forward with my faith. But in reality all I really did was waste time and energy chasing an empty miracle.

By “empty miracle”, I mean a miracle without reason or purpose. In the Bible, when the supernatural occurs it is usually there to supplement a theological point raised by the author. For example, Whittle, in his post on Modern Day Miracles, mentions Jesus walking on water, which is probably one of the best biblical examples where the miracle itself is secondary to the theological message intended by the author.

If we take Mark's version as a starting point (which seems logical given that it is likely the earliest account within the Gospels), Jesus walking on water functions together with Jesus calming the storm, and as a result Mark was able to demonstrate Jesus' dominion over the creation. However, despite this significant nod to Jesus' divinity, Mark notes that the disciple's hearts were hardened.

When we look at Matthew's account, it starts by following the same pattern as Mark's. However, instead of having Jesus get on the boat and calm the storm, Matthew adds a whole new segment to the story where Peter requests that Jesus command him to come out onto the water with him.

In doing so, Peter is able to briefly walk on water until the moment he starts to falter in his faith. Jesus then picks Peter up out of the water and gently scolds him for his doubt. When they eventually get back on the boat, the disciples openly worship Jesus as the Son of God (very different to Mark!).

And then there's John... John takes a different approach altogether. Like Matthew, he follows Mark's original pattern to a certain point. Nothing is really made of the storm (although it is briefly mentioned) and Peter's side-story added by Matthew is ignored.

In John's account; Jesus walks on water, gets on the boat, and then they are all magically transported to their destination.

There is enough in this simple little outline of each account to cause one to question the validity of the miracle of Jesus walking on water – probably the most troubling issue being that Luke, who out of all the Gospels takes the agenda of portraying an accurate summary of Jesus' doings, chooses not to include this story in his account despite sharing the same source material as Matthew (that is, Mark's Gospel and the elusive Q document).

However, in each account the miracle doesn't stand alone. Every story has something bigger to say than just talking about a man who walked on water. In Mark, we gain a greater understanding of Jesus' authority over creation. In Matthew, we gain a greater understanding of faith and doubt. And in John... well, John just wants us to know that Jesus was amazing.

I don't know whether miracles happen or not. The fact is the vast majority of people have not and will not experience a life-changing supernatural event in their lifetimes. However, what I do know is that there are things in Scripture that are considered more important than a miracle.

These are the things that I am more interested in now.

How Science Helps Me Believe in Miracles

By Ben Molyneux

This is a response to another recent post on miracles, Modern Day Miracles, written by Peter Whittle.

I’m quite a cynical person. When I’m trying to kid myself, I might conclude that I’m a realist, but the reality is that cynicism is hard-wired into the way I view the world. So when it comes to the subject of miracles, my gut response is fairly unsurprising:

Miracles really just don’t happen.

The whole thing seems at least a little bit silly. We no longer live in an uneducated pre-modern world, where everything is governed by fairies and capricious gods. We don’t need miracle accounts to prove which religion is right, particularly as every religion seems to claim some sort of miraculous proof. Miracles just aren’t necessary to us any more, so we should just drop them and move our faith into the 21^st century.

So when I read Pete’s blog on miracles, I found myself instinctively nodding along. Let’s just forget about demanding the supernatural and be prepared to find the miraculous in living out the command to love one’s neighbor.

And yet… I can’t quite give up on it all. I still can’t work out how God interacts in the world, but something in me can’t quite buy the idea that he doesn’t. A world without a God who steps in to do something from time to time just seems so hopeless. Even Pete, in his blog, acknowledges, “there are many things that happen that science can not adequately explain.”

This should leave me in a very a convoluted position. I’m naturally suspicious of any reports of supernatural events and I’m likely to reject them, whilst at the same time believing that they could be possible and desperately wanting at least some of them to be true. It gets even more complicated on a practical level; what do you do if someone asks you to pray for them? It’s a problem I used to struggle a lot with. Responding, “I can if you want, but I don’t really know if anything will happen or not, so it might be better to ask someone with a stronger faith” only leads to some very British awkwardness, but when I agreed I always felt like a fraud and a hypocrite.

Pete’s comment, in response to my question about this, is perhaps more extreme than I am, but gets at the same idea: “I struggle a lot with the concept of 'supernatural miracles', I don't want to deny them, but I find it impossible to affirm them either.” The practical, every-day implications of this were, for a long time, very confusing and very difficult. Then something strange happened.

Science saved my belief in miracles.

It’s a bit of an odd one, I admit. Traditionally, the opposite has tended to be true. As we discover more about the power of the human brain, particularly placebo effect and psychosomatics, there seems to be more and more basis to discredit supernatural origins for miraculous healings. But I wonder if we aren’t looking at this the wrong way round. After all, these explanations prove one thing: Science says praying for people actually works. It might not always work the way we expect, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. How many people cured of life-threatening illnesses will be demanding their illness back if they suddenly prove it was a placebo effect that healed them?

This means that I can have a confident, rational basis for maintaining that miraculous healings can happen. My doubts about the mechanics of supernatural intervention don’t get to stop me acting, but at the same time I don’t have to reject all claims of the supernatural. There’s a helpful unknowability about it all; I can’t separate the supernatural healings from the naturalistic ones, meaning that I can maintain that both can and do occur. So I can absolutely believe that God intervenes miraculously, even if I have no idea how that works, whilst maintaining that not all the miracles have supernatural origins and acknowledging that Science can explain at least some miracles and will probably go on to explain many more. It doesn't stop me feeling deeply awkward and self-conscious about the whole thing, of course, but I don't think any theology in the world would.

At the end of the day, I guess I agree with Pete’s original post – miracles are to be found when the people of God get up and do something. But that “doing something” should include praying for the miraculous and expect it to come about – regardless of how exactly it does come about.

Modern day miracles

By Peter Whittle

Edit: After reading check out this response by Ben Molyneux, and this one by Charlie Comerford.

The bible is full of miracles, from the manna given to the Israelites in the desert, to Jesus walking on water, to the many and varied healings. Jesus alone recorded 37 'miracles', and John 21 says there were “many other [miracles]” that went unrecorded.

But do miracles still happen today? A quick google search reveals hundreds upon thousands of people who claim to have had some form of miraculous experience, especially common are miraculous healings, including many from incurable conditions. 

Science does give us some explanations for so-called miracles, for instance placebo effect, or even the power of positive thinking in dealing with illness, however there are many things that happen that science can not adequately explain.

I think that looking at these more traditional miracles throws up more questions than answers, but I also think that if we simply focus on if the happen or not, we miss the point. The question is not so much did God do these things, but what is the purpose behind them? For instance, does Jesus walk on water is far less important a question than why are we told that Jesus walked on water? In other words the purpose behind the miracle is the thing of importance, not the miracle itself.

Jesus Walking on water

The catholic Church describes miracles as “works of God, either directly, or through the prayers and intercessions of a specific saint or saints” which is a fairly broad definition, so with that In mind I've thought about what a modern day miracle would look like.

We like to think of miracles as supernatural acts of God, in which something incredible happens (preferably involving dramatic effects, like explosions, or at the very least a bit of smoke), and we tend to minimise 'works of God' which can be passed off more easily as works of man, but if we look at the above definition, it specifically mention the intercessions of saints. If we as saints are not physically doing something, I believe there are no miracles. Through the whole bible God works through his people, and it is no different now.

In churches, we are obsessed with seeing the outworking of God's power, we long for miracles, and yet how often do we neglect going and being miraculous? Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourself, and to me there would be no more obvious example of a miracle in history than if our churches started to live by this. Honestly whether or not miracles happen should not even be a question, because our churches should be full of them, just maybe not in the way we expect.