• Introduction
• God
• Ethics
• Bible
• Creed
• Prayer
  • On Miracles
  • On Prayer
• Community
• Sacrament
• Eros
• Epilogue
• Appendix

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Prayer

On Miracles

Jesus did not much like doing miracles. He is never seeking to show off or simply prove that he can; far from showing any enthusiasm for the process, he is actually embarrassed by it, and always reluctant. There is always a reason entirely separate from the self-interested desire of the beneficiary.

This pattern emerges in the very first chapter of Saint Mark. Jesus is in the synagogue at Capernaum trying to speak. Somebody is hollering and crying out disruptively like a man possessed. With one word in his direction from Jesus, and one last cry, the man falls silent.²³⁴ Jesus goes from there to the home of two of his disciples, where the mother-in-law of one lies sick with a fever. He takes her hand and the fever is gone.²³⁵ The whole town hears about him and gathers around the door, and he deals with them, but he orders them to tell nobody who he is, and the next morning he is gone long before dawn. The disciples go to find him, saying that everyone is searching for him. This is the point at which he could go back to become a populist miracle-working hero. He goes on instead to the next town, ‘that I may preach there also, for that is why I came’. It is the preaching that matters, not the healing.²³⁶

At the conclusion of the chapter Jesus meets a leper, rejected and untouchable in the culture of the time, cursed to live outside the city walls in a homeless wandering quarantine, having no contact with the non-leprous population. Moved with pity, Jesus stretches out his hand and touches him: there is always another reason. Jesus now pleads with the healed man, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone’. The request is in vain, with the result that Jesus is mobbed whenever he enters a town. He chooses instead to stay out in the country.²³⁷

We next see Jesus preaching in a private home so crowded that those seeking attention for a paralysed friend lower him through the roof. Jesus’s response on seeing him is not to heal, but to free him from any sense of self-blame by declaring the forgiveness of sins. For this he is accused of blasphemy. Speaking angrily to his accusers, he commands the healing as if to prove a point. ‘Which is easier to say: your sins are forgiven, or rise up and walk?’²³⁸ There is similar controversy in the next two episodes, as Jesus dines with notorious sinners despite opposition,²³⁹ and breaks the sabbath by plucking grain as he walks through a field.²⁴⁰ The next healing, at the beginning of chapter three, is a deliberately provocative breaking of the sabbath in full public view in the synagogue.²⁴¹ Jesus does not do miracles for their own sake. There is always another reason. Here it is the fundamental controversy over the role of religious law.

In chapter four Jesus calms the storm to save his disciples.²⁴² In chapter five he heals a wretched man who has been living among the tombs, and sends him home. In the distance a herd of ceremonially unclean swine thunders into the sea.²⁴³ Then in one of the most poignant passages in the whole gospel, we see two stories intertwined. Jesus is called to visit the sick daughter of Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue. On his way there, Jesus is touched by a woman who has had a haemorrhage for twelve years. For this condition she will have been cast out of both temple and synagogue as unclean, effectively by the very ruler of the synagogue to whom Jesus is now attending. In touching Jesus she would have made him ceremonially unclean as well. The ruler of the synagogue and the woman with the haemorrhage represent the opposite extremes of society in terms of the religion and culture of the day. Jesus has compassion for them both. The woman with the haemorrhage initiates the public incident. For the healing of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus allows only his disciples and the girl’s parents to be present.²⁴⁴

In chapter six Jesus feeds the crowd in a deserted place,²⁴⁵ a deliberate echo of the miraculous feeding of the Hebrew people in the wilderness years,²⁴⁶ and a first vision of the global eucharist of today.²⁴⁷ At the end of the day he takes time alone to pray, sending the disciples on ahead into the night by boat. Later he catches up with them on foot, which is practical under the circumstances.²⁴⁸

Chapter seven has the healing of the daughter of a gentile woman, identified above as a major turning point in the gospel narrative.²⁴⁹ A deaf man is taken aside from the crowd for healing in a private place and is asked to tell nobody what has happened.²⁵⁰ Jesus follows the same process for a blind man in chapter eight,²⁵¹ after another great crowd is fed.²⁵²

The Pharisees now come seeking a miracle for its own sake to test Jesus, and he rebukes them.²⁵³ This is highly significant, showing that the miracles are not there to prove who Jesus is, or anything else about him. It also appears to bring the miracle era to an end, as the mood turns darker in the second half of the gospel story. Only two miracles remain: one to cover the embarrassment of the disciples who fail in an attempted healing in chapter nine,²⁵⁴ and blind Bartimaeus at the roadside in chapter ten, who cries out to ‘Jesus, Son of David’, pre-empting the cries of the crowd at Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of Holy Week in chapter eleven.²⁵⁵ Significantly there are no miracles at all in Holy Week itself, apart from the bizarre incident with the fig tree.²⁵⁶ Miracles are not the essence of the gospel project.

Jesus tells Bartimaeus that he is healed by his own faith: ‘your faith has saved you’ (e pistis sou sesoken se). The same formula is used for the woman with the haemorrhage, and a similar formula in Matthew for the healing of the centurion’s servant.²⁵⁷ Presumably it is also the explanation for the healing of all those who reach out to touch him believing they will receive healing.²⁵⁸ It is all part of the euphoria of the first half of the gospel narrative, before the mood turns darker. Jesus announces that euphoric era in Luke chapter four – good news for the poor, release for the captives, liberty for the oppressed, sight for the blind²⁵⁹ – and later in the midst of it all describes it in his message to John the Baptist. ‘Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have good news preached to them.’²⁶⁰

The miracle stories belong to that early era of euphoria. Throughout history and in all cultures, times of spiritual euphoria led by a great teacher or guru are accompanied by stories of miraculous healings and revelations. The distinctive nature of the accounts in the gospels is that there is always another reason: they serve to affirm the humanity of those involved, including the humanity of Jesus himself, rather than blandly showing off his divinity. The message is more important than the miracle.

This principle applies even to the raising of the dead, reported to John the Baptist. The gospels record two incidents: the raising of the son of the widow of Nain in Saint Luke,²⁶¹ and the raising of Lazarus in Saint John.²⁶² In the first of these Jesus is reported to be ‘moved by compassion’. The widow has lost her only son and is therefore, in the culture of the time, entirely without support. Jesus raises the son with a touch. The crowds declare that a great prophet has risen up amongst them. Typically for Saint Luke, each detail deliberately compares Jesus to the Old Testament prophet Elijah, who raises up the son of the widow of Zarephath.²⁶³ Lazarus is the brother of Mary and Martha at Bethany, all of whom are close to Jesus. Martha goes to meet Jesus while he is still on his way, and Jesus reassures her only that Lazarus will rise in the general resurrection at the end of time; she returns home consoled. Martha’s sister Mary then goes out to meet Jesus, followed by other mourners who assume that she is going to the tomb. She argues with Jesus as she weeps: ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’. Jesus is overcome by the emotion of the moment: he is ‘deeply moved’ at the sight of the mourners, he weeps as he walks with them, at the tomb he is again ‘deeply moved within’. Through his own tears he shouts the order for Lazarus to come out.

We can speculate about whether the reported miracles happened exactly as described, but it remains highly significant that those who recorded them did not present them as dramatic public proofs of Jesus’s divinity but as illustrations of his teaching, his humanity and his humility. We see a Jesus reluctant, embarrassed by the process, secretive whenever possible, going ahead despite himself when overcome by anger at his adversaries, at injustice, at death itself. The reports appear in the text almost apologetically, always secondary to the humanity of those involved and to the message that celebrates the inherent goodness of their ordinary humanity. When the people come asking for miracles in Mark chapter one, Jesus walks away. When the Pharisees ask in chapter eight, he rebukes them. When he is tempted to summon the miraculous for his own sake, in the temptations in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry and in the garden of Gethsemane only hours before the crucifixion, his resolution is to remain within the will of God, which is to live a fully human life and death without interventionist privilege.²⁶⁴

In the mean time, healing is built into the system. Wounds heal, and increasingly we recognise that health of spirit enriches health of body even as health of body enriches health of spirit. We can also choose to recognise divine benevolence in every positive coincidence: this is the universe – existence and being – in its abba pater role. A private serendipity that dispels despair can resonate with a gospel euphoria even today.

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