Gospel Miracles
Sep 8th, 2009 by Bill
Gospel Miracles
There’s a very curious passage in chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel. Some Pharisees and Sadducees approach Jesus and ask him to give them a sign – presumably they want a demonstration of his credentials as a special emissary from God. After all, the great characters from Jewish history – Moses, Elijah, Elisha and the rest – were all able to perform works of wonder to show the people that they were not ordinary men. But Jesus refuses. ‘It’s only a wicked and faithless generation that looks for miraculous signs,’ says Jesus. ‘You’ll get none from me.’
Why is this a curious passage? Because the Gospel text has already told us of many miracles performed by Jesus! He’s cured a leper, a paralysed man, a deaf and dumb man, and a blind man; he’s exorcised numerous demons from people; he’s walked on water, and fed two groups of thousands on a few fish and a couple of loaves. But Jesus doesn’t say to the Pharisees, ‘Haven’t I given you enough signs already?’ He tells them that he’s not going to give them any signs at all.
Scholars have pondered this puzzling passage down the centuries, and come up with all manner of explanations. Perhaps Jesus was really saying that he wouldn’t give the Pharisees and Sadducees a sign – that he saved his miracles for the ordinary people and for his apostles. Perhaps Jesus had said these things at the beginning of his ministry, and then changed his mind and Matthew had put the incident in the wrong place. What seems more likely to me, is that the Gospel writer knew full well that no matter what Jesus did, those who didn’t want to believe in him wouldn’t be impressed. So, it’s not that Jesus refused to give them a sign; it’s that no sign would have any effect on their hardened hearts.
The passage from Luke’s Gospel which we heard earlier reinforces this interpretation. The rich man who, in death, finds himself cast into the outer darkness, begs to be allowed to return to warn his brother to mend his ways. But Abraham tells him that it would be useless. ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ (Luke 16:31)
The Gospel writers knew that miracles never convince anyone who isn’t willing to be convinced. Why not? Because there’s always another explanation. Take any of the great miracles of the Bible and you can always come up with a cogent, non-miraculous interpretation. The Ten Plagues of Egypt have been explained as a sequence of calamities following a comet hitting the earth. According to some commentators, the Children of Israel walking dry-shod through the Red Sea owed more to Moses’ knowledge of tidal patterns than to divine intervention. Jesus didn’t really feed five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; the people all had food with them and when Jesus began to preach, they were all so ashamed of selfishly hiding their food away that they began to share with each other. And Jesus didn’t really walk on the water, he walked on some sort of rocky ledge just below the surface; it just looked as if he were walking on the water. Even the resurrection of Jesus from death – considered by many to be the ultimate evidential miracle – has been explained in numerous ways: he didn’t really die and his moribund body was resuscitated by his followers, being the most popular one.
What was apparent to the writers of the Gospels should be even more apparent to us. We have seen the most amazing conjuring tricks, either in the theatre, or the street, or on television. Our eyes have been deceived many times. Derren Brown, the contemporary illusionist, mystifies and baffles: he seems to be able to read people’s minds; he materialises objects from thin air and makes them disappear again; he does amazing things with a pack of cards. And yet we know that when we see him – or David Copperfield, or Penn and Teller, or Paul Daniels, or our own George McCaw – that trickery is involved. And one contemporary magician, James Randi, has offered a reward of a million dollars to anyone claiming miraculous powers who can prove beyond reasonable doubt that what they do is genuinely miraculous and not just a sophisticated illusion. The reward has not been claimed. On the news just a couple of weeks ago there was an incident recorded on CCTV of a man hypnotising a check out girl into giving him the money in the till. If our minds can be messed with individually, why not collectively? Some say that the Indian Rope Trick, in which a man climbs up a rope and disappears into the sky, is just a case of mass hypnotism: observers are fooled into believing that they are seeing something that is not happening. All of which reinforces the 18th century philosopher David Hume’s advice that we should doubt the information coming to us from our senses before we doubt the consistency of nature’s laws. And if we can’t trust our own eyes, how much less can we trust the eyes of another, particularly when he or she is separated from us by time or distance? When the Mormons tell me that, 170 years ago, Joseph Smith was directed by an angel to dig up some golden plates and then translate them using a pair of magical spectacles; or when the followers of some Indian guru tell me that their master can make golden rings appear from nowhere, I have to tell them that I can think of an easier explanation for such supposed events than divine intervention.
Another reason why we should be sceptical of such things is that we are now more than ever aware that the human mind is capable of producing quite extraordinary effects upon the body and even, some would say, upon the physical world. We know about psychosomatic illnesses – illnesses which appear in the body but which have their cause in the mind. And if they have their cause in the mind, they can have their cure in the mind, too. A recent study has shown that placebos – substances without any medical properties – can be as effective in helping to cure such illnesses as mild depression as Prozac. It seems that if we think something can help us, it probably will – a justification of many so-called ‘complementary’ therapies such as Reiki or homeopathy. We also know that diseases behave in very strange ways and that there are rare instances of extensive cancers disappearing spontaneously and completely, never to return. All this is remarkable and baffling, but it is not miraculous; it is simply showing that ‘nature’s laws’ are more comprehensive than we had previously thought.
The great spiritual luminaries have never relied on supposed miracles to support their teaching. In fact, like Jesus, they have tended to be suspicious of them. For example, the Buddha was on one occasion approached by an excited disciple who told his master that he had, through years of spiritual effort, mastered the art of walking on water. The Buddha was unimpressed: ‘Why have you spent so much time and effort learning to do something that a flea can do effortlessly, and that the boatman would do for you for a penny?’ he asked. On another occasion, a disciple told him that sometimes, when deep in meditation, he was visited by angels and other celestial beings. ‘Just keep concentrating on your breathing,’ said the Buddha, ‘and the angels will go away.’
Similarly in the Jewish tradition. There’s a story of two rabbis who were arguing about a particularly abstruse theological point. Rabbi Akiba, exasperated at his opponent’s stubborn refusal to accept his argument, calls upon God to settle the matter. ‘Dear God, if I am right and he is wrong, make the river outside begin to flow backwards.’ Sure enough, the river instantly reverses its direction, but even this doesn’t change Rabbi Hillel’s mind, and he goes on arguing as before. ‘God, this man is so impervious to reason that only if you speak directly to him will he be convinced. Please tell him I am right,’ begs Akiba. God’s voice booms out, ‘My servant Akiba is correct. Stop your dispute!’ To which the stubborn Hillel replies, ‘What’s it got to do with you? You gave us brains and reasoning powers; are we now expected to stop using them?’
The problem with miracles – defined as singular, rare, and extraordinary interventions by God into the workings of the natural world – is not only that they are impossible to verify, it is that they are distractions. While we are looking for, or concentrating our attention on, spectacular events which may or may not occur, we are missing the amazing things that are certainly happening around us everyday. The disciple of the Buddha who was so pleased that he could walk on water, had forgotten just how astonishing it was that he could walk on the ground. The man who was amazed that on rare occasions he could see angels in his meditation had ceased to be amazed that he could see human beings – and dogs and cats and daffodils – while walking about the street.
I don’t know whether it is to do with growing older, but I am more aware than ever that everything in the world around me is ‘magical’, ‘miraculous, ‘mysterious’. I am amazed that life exists in such profusion and such variety; that my own capacities of consciousness and intelligence enable me to love, to speak, to read, to remember, to laugh, to weep, to understand; that so many intricate processes take place in my mind and my body to keep me functioning as a perceiving entity. ‘What stranger miracles are there?’ asks Walt Whitman. I am also more aware than ever that my life is not as random as I might have previously supposed; I am conscious of patterns of experience, some vague some clear, which seem to show me that I am part of a process that I can’t even begin to fathom, indicating to me that my life has an ultimate purpose, that, in the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
There is a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough hew them as we will.
But such emerging convictions – which I cannot hope to convince you of and would not even try – are not based on isolated ‘miraculous’ incidents, but on a whole matrix of events and experiences occurring almost daily. Walt Whitman says that ‘a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels’, meaning of course, that the things we take for granted should themselves astonish our jaded sensibilities.
As I have said so often from this pulpit, one of the main objectives of the spiritual life is to give us a new perspective on old experience, to refresh our tired awareness, so that we see the world with new eyes. This is what William Blake called ‘cleansing the doors of perception’, opening ourselves up to a new vision, which does not seek isolated examples of the presence of God in the world, because it sees everything and everyone as ‘miraculous’.
Walt Whitman again:
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see god better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
The spiritual life does not require us to become more credulous, to sacrifice our reason or our discernment, nor does it encourage us to seek special signs from heaven like the Pharisees and Sadducees of old were said to do. To live the spiritual life is simply to nurture the power of attention, like Matajuro in our children’s story today, so that we alert ourselves to the presence of God in everything. When we, like good old Walt Whitman, find ‘letters from God’ every day in the street, we will begin to understand the real meaning of the word ‘miracle’.
6th April, 2008
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<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–> Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–> Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, section 48