On Miracles and the Miraculous

Christ Healing the Mother of Simon Peter's Wife, by John Bridges, 1839

Donald Trump loves miracles, apparently. He keeps invoking the name of the miraculous in combating the COVID-19 crisis. “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said in February. “It was like a miracle,” he said in April, speaking of hydroxychloroquine treatment. More ambitious media creators than me have made extensive B-roll clips of President Trump citing the word “miracle” to deflect the coronavirus threat.

Clearly, to Trump (who, though nominally Presbyterian, has apparently seldom darkened any church door as an adult), miracles mean something which suddenly, abruptly, solves a problem, with minimal explanation. Miracles are, essentially, an on-demand quick fix for difficult, dangerous problems with grim political implications. Trump’s willingness to expect miracles got me thinking: as a left-leaning Christian myself, what do miracles actually mean?

To answer this question, let’s first set politics aside. President Trump’s appeals to miracles seem, superficially, to resemble a political panacea. But Jesus didn’t heal lepers or raise Lazarus from the tomb to excuse them from social consequence. When he healed the bleeding woman who touched his garments, that woman still probably needed to undergo temple rituals to return to Jewish life. Jesus didn’t just make problems go away.

Miracles happen when some important problem changes direction. Jesus’ most common listed miracles involve healing sickness, which to his Jewish proselytes meant driving away social stigma, since Temple-era Jews perceived physical disfigurement as outward signs of God’s judgement. But Jesus also drove out demons, raised the dead, controlled nature and the weather, and ultimately was resurrected himself. These were all considered miraculous.

Returning to the bleeding woman, I find something important. This miracle ranks so high, it appears in all three synoptic gospels: Matthew 9, Mark 5, and Luke 8. The healing has a two-part formula: the woman first believes that God through Christ will heal her. That is, the woman places trust in authority outside herself. But then Christ affirms: “Your faith has made you well.” So she trusts God absolutely to heal her, then God’s Son affirms that trust did the healing.

Many mass-market healers, like Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn, place great emphasis on the “Your faith has made you well” aspect. To them, human belief is the precursor to miracles. Believe hard enough, the televangelists proclaim, and healing is yours. Like money or power, televangelist theology makes wellness part of the “name it and claim it” philosophy. To them, human faith is the first mandatory component of miraculousness.

Jesus as a Young Jew, by Goya

This isn’t completely unfair. Jesus, in the Gospels, tells the faithful to expect miracles, and they’ll appear. When four men lower a paralytic through the roof for a healing, Jesus says their faith makes the healing possible. You cannot have miraculous healings without first believing miracles are possible. So the televangelists, much as I dislike their self-serving tendencies, have something biblically solid there.

Yet something happens even before their belief. The bleeding woman, according to Mark, spends years and fortunes on doctors, hoping for treatment. Jesus meets the ten lepers in the wilderness, because they’ve been exiled from society. The hunched woman and the paralytic at Bethesda both suffered for years, pushed to society’s margins, because nothing they’d done could improve their situation.

Nothing they had done.

Jesus performs miracles upon these suffering people only when they’ve exhausted all human remedies. When everything possible within Iron Age medicine had failed, and the Jews believed the only remaining explanation was God’s judgement, these patients surrendered hope in human action. They turned their hope outside themselves, trusted that the universe’s order (which we call God) could provide healing, and sent their prayers toward that order’s human incarnation.

Let me restate that: miracles happen when we turn outside ourselves. When we stop seeking inside our egos, our sense of ourselves as individuals mastering life’s unpredictable circumstances, only then do miracles become possible. Even to Jesus Himself, miracles are the action which happens when doctors, priests, and kings have failed to produce results. The universe restores its internal order only after internal sources have made every reasonable human attempt.

By making miracles his first recourse, Trump front-loads the entire process. He makes miracles the first option, rather than the last, and therefore makes miracles, and the God who performs them, beholden to human ego. This happens whenever humans expect, even demand, miracles. This takes God’s action completely from the two-part formula, and makes reality subordinate to human arrogance.

Miracles cannot be bought or sold. Kings who simply expect them must, like Herod, eventually fall.