The Gospels occasionally feature Jesus performing miracles. The Gospel readings of the second half of June featured two: in one, Jesus calms a storm at sea; in the other, he heals a sick woman and raises a dead girl.
Jesus’ miracles in some sense are stumbling blocks for moderns. By modernity, I refer to the whole way of thinking generated by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and going forward. Thomas Jefferson, after all, edited the New Testament to excise all Jesus’ miracles.
It’s that allergy to the miraculous that sustains a certain view of Jesus not as Son of God, but as a great “ethical teacher,” a Semitic Confucius. Jesus’ “insights” should be marshaled alongside Moses’, Buddha’s, Mohammed’s, Lao-Tze’s, and George Harrison’s, producing each individual’s own “My Sweet Lord” from selections in the buffet of spirituality.
But before we too readily dismiss that heritage, let’s not minimize the impact deism has had on Anglo-American thought. Although full-throated confessors of deism might today be few, its tenets—that God created and then took off on an ongoing vacation—can be quite appealing. By admitting “creation,” we add a dollop of “spirituality.” By then putting God in a box, safely and hermetically sealed off from creation, we can then get on with “science” as opposite of faith, even if it makes Providence a casualty along the way. History no longer need be seen as “God’s plan,” but rather as some “arc” that automatically moves somewhere (usually in the direction of whatever politician is talking about it). And with God safely packed up and not interfering, man can get about to his fantasy since Eden: a self-autonomy in which God does not stick his nose.
But there’s no denying that the Gospels (as opposed to human adulterations of them) speak of miracles. That said, are they essential to Christianity?
Yes. Because the greatest miracle of all—the Resurrection—is sine qua non to Christianity. No Resurrection, no Christianity: see 1 Corinthians 15:14.
Note that, in comparison to the religions that existed alongside Christianity in the ancient world, Jesus’ miracles are relatively low-key. Jesus does not pull off miracles just for show. He doesn’t do a primetime live broadcast of bringing somebody to life. He often tends to minimize rather than maximize the witnesses (and note I said “witnesses,” not “audience”). Not infrequently, he enjoins his disciples not to speak of them, at least “until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”
Jesus’ miracles are low-key because they are intended not to titillate, but to elicit faith (which is why the modern regard of miracles as stumbling blocks to faith is so diabolical). Jesus is looking not for ratings, but for believers—those who recognize the presence of God really active here and now in life and pattern their lives accordingly.
Jesus’ miracles mostly fall into two categories, as the two we mentioned above illustrate. They are either nature miracles or healing miracles, the latter preponderant.
Nature miracles. Like the calming of the storm at sea (or the multiplication of loaves), Jesus occasionally performs nature miracles. But these are qualitatively different from what we find in other, man-made religions. “Religions” like those of the Greeks or Romans or Babylonians personified various nature forces as “gods”—a sun god, a rain god, a thunder god. Israel, starting in Genesis 1, cuts that deification down to size: there is one God, above all, who created everything that exists and made it good. That means he is the God who gave order to creation. It is therefore only logical that the maker of that order can sometimes intervene in that order—not arbitrarily, but, as we know from Romans 8:28, for the good.
When Jesus calms the storm, it is not a display of power. It is an act of care for disciples who are terrified of drowning, aware of their impotence, and open to deepening their faith in him who acts on their behalf. Likewise, when we overcome our intellectual barriers to admit that God can intervene in my life, it is an act of faith that acknowledges dependency on God, not a “test” of his love. It is an act of faith not just in God, but in setting ourselves against a world and its cultural biases that says “you’re being foolish” and “God doesn’t do things like that (if there is a God).”
Healing miracles. Most of Jesus’ miracles are healing miracles: curing the blind, deaf, and dumb; exorcising demons; healing the sick; raising the dead. Jesus is not out on a public health campaign. Jesus’ miracles—all of which lead to the ultimate healing, the Resurrection—reveal the truth of St. Irenaeus’s claim, that “the glory of God is man fully alive.” Man fully alive, healed from sin and the effects sin causes, such as suffering and death.
Jesus heals in order to point to the fact that salvation is, above all, an act of healing. It is not an act of cancelation, obliterating the reality of history and the choices (including the evil choices) that were made in it, as if God reset the clock to a minute before the forbidden fruit. It is a healing of man as he is, offered incomparably greater gifts than even the First Man received, by virtue of him who on Easter destroyed death and everything that leads to it.
When Jesus heals, he seeks a deepening of our faith. It’s for that reason, and not an offended sense of pride, that he scores the nine Jewish lepers who, in contrast to the Samaritan, couldn’t come back to say “thank you” for being healed.
Once we understand how Jesus’ miracles reveal who he is—as the Word through whom creation was made and as him who redeems us—we find that his miracles are not accretions moderns should best strip away. They are fundamental revelations of the one we follow. They are not stumbling blocks to faith; rather, they are building blocks reinforcing faith.