(Musing about miracles)
In several previous essays, I examined the subjects of God’s invisibility as well as the surprising effect of miracles on both Jesus’ disciples in particular and the Jews generally. Of the many descriptions of miracles in this 1st Century context, too few highlight well enough this startling sense of bewilderment that was experienced by everyone involved as something quite beyond normal everyday life, and hence its effects were varied yet profound. Only in a few films about Jesus can this be clearly seen. In this essay, I want to shed greater light on the linkages between God’s perpetual invisibility, the reactions to Jesus’ miracles and how this plays out in both His ministry as well as His eventual crucifixion and resurrection: a sort of psychology of miracles.
We take God’s invisibility for granted, to our detriment. His invisibility is the foundation for the best and worst theologies in any and all religions, whether simple or complex, and no matter how many gods are involved, since Jews and Christians accept only one God, while the ancient Egyptians, for example, believed in perhaps a thousand gods. Everything about either Judaism or Christianity stems from God’s invisibility: from Moses asking to see God’s face to the Jews’ 613 religious and dietary laws to the Christian Trinity to the Shroud of Turin. Millions of people revere a cloth created in a perhaps radioactive instant by the first-ever divine photographer, not only because we can finally see Jesus for the first time since ca. 30 CE., but because we can also surmise the divine power of His Father. He whom we shall likely never see (even if we get to Heaven) affects everything about our religious ideas and practices, which often renders them too unnecessarily human. It is always “this is what we think God is like.” At best, only two of the four Gospel writers reported any eye-witness experiences with Jesus, perhaps John more so than Matthew. God’s invisibility affects theology, but, more importantly, it affects how the Jews (and ourselves) experience and interpret miracles, since by nature they fall outside the realm of religious concepts and practices, and indeed, everything else we know. They shake our very spiritual earth, what we thought we know with certainty, our very being. Hence, no more idols.
*
Idols do not have any innate capacity to provoke miracles. The Israelites used idols, such as Baal, to render God (more) visible as some likeness that allowed Him to “live in their homes.” Moses became angry because his fellow Jews could not stand to have “nothing to look at” day after day, even while he was on Mount Sinai securing the holy tablets for their people. Not having Moses, even temporarily, meant for them no clear kinship with God, and so they had to have a viable substitute, akin to satisfying thirst and hunger. Such is the fragility of our Godly worship. It is our various religions and, yes, our many kinds of idols, which allow us to “see” God, this ever-invisible being “out there somewhere” for whom we (generally) have great affection. It is admittedly the strangest relationship possible, this human love for the invisible divine. Yet Moses was angry because his brethren could not forego having “someone to see” for even a little while. The Temple itself had become a kind of idol, yet ironically, idol worship largely abated during the Babylonian exile and the destruction of their first Temple, around 586 BCE. After the Maccabean revolt in the mid-2nd Century BCE, there evolved a fresh sense of the Jewish messiah (Mashiach), which conjured some sort of warrior-like figure who would free the Jews from the oppressive stench of the Romans. The Jews could finally have their lives back, if only their Mashiach would come. This conjuring of a Savior would replace both their use of idols and (I would say) the need for the Temple itself, since such a man would likely prove more valuable than a building, no matter that it once contained the Ark of the Covenant, which, for me at least, is still a sort of idol. It is this evolving desire for their Mashiach to finally arrive that, in terms of the time frame, is an important aspect of why Jesus came when He did. His people were hungry to be spared more years of Roman oppression, but, as we know, Jesus was not quite who they had in mind. As many others have said, Jesus wanted to expand His fellow Jews’ sense of God’s holiness from merely a cherished building toward He who would embody such votive fervor Himself. Jesus’ prediction that their second Temple would be destroyed within the next generation (forty years—-in 70 CE) amplified His vision of how a life of service to others would prove to be more useful than mere animal sacrifices and compulsively obeying their many, many dietary and religious laws. Jesus thus told His fellow Jews that there is more to our faith than everything you have known for at least the past 1,200 years, and, in particular, don’t think I am your next idol.
Most of us are familiar with at least the basic outlines of Jesus’ ministry. He got baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, began to preach and teach, and eventually, the healings and the miracles started to come. There were other teacher-preacher-healers at the time, but most of them have become only names in history books compared to Him.What about Jesus’ miracles? All of them were important, both as events themselves as well as what they meant for His larger purpose, differing one to another. Many were singular but some affected thousands of people at a time. Some or many people came to see Jesus only to witness or even experience one of His miracles, and soon He too became familiar with this sentiment, and sometimes chastised them. Clearly, Jesus was no “living idol.” For the first time in Judaism’s long history, one of their own was not only receiving and obeying the Commandments (Moses), building a Temple (Solomon) or complaining about the Jews’ chronic sinfulness and idolatry (virtually all of the Old Testament prophets). Jesus basically said I am offering you something new, here and now, so what you do say? It was His miracles that told His brethren that the hand of God was finally present, telling each other What man alone can do such things? These miracles were the beginning of both the popular confusion about Jesus as well as sowing the seeds of His eventual demise. Too soon, He became “not quite one of them,” akin to a “spiritual stranger,” which never really stopped.
*
Whether His disciples, the Pharisees or common people, no one was immune to Jesus’ miracles. Every Jew shared a sense of what “God was like,” according to generations of their faith. Jews have always quarreled about aspects of their religion, yet it was and is coherent and familiar to them. Jews have never had the denominational rancor of Christian Protestants, which I have come to find unnecessarily human vis-à-vis “what God is all about.” While Jews accepted that miracles occurred and there was an after-life, these were not serious preoccupations for them, nor what they concerned themselves with or argued about. Only the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection, though this was not a real source of contention within the religious elite. Jews shared a common historical and religious system which, in practice, altered little for at least 1,200 years before Jesus, and neither did He wish to change it much, saying “I have come to fulfill the Law.” Miracles, then as now, were not a subject of great religious discussion, and so when His miracles started coming, everyone’s heads turned, the world suddenly changed, and God’s divinity became plainer.
Although the Gospels describe Jesus’ miracles coming somewhat regularly, we really don’t know how often they occurred over perhaps the three years of His ministry. There were all the healing miracles, one feeding miracle and the resuscitation miracles. Each miracle provoked varying reactions amongst the common people, the disciples and the Pharisees. Each and every person could not avoid being profoundly affected by Jesus’ miracles in the sense that “no reaction at all” was not possible, akin to being in a hurricane or tornado. Miracles are spiritual weather, they necessarily affect us, transcending any religion or understanding of how life works. Miracles are what spread Jesus’ fame the quickest and the loudest, since “everyone’s talking” about them. Miracles are not gossip, but they prove to be contagiously ripe like the juiciest gossip. So how did these various groups receive Jesus’ miracles?
Common people, whether unfamiliar with Jesus or even those who had seen Him before, would have been utterly dumb-founded by His miracles. As we know, they sought Him out to be healed of all sorts of maladies, experiencing the eclipse of Judaic religion and entering the divine realm of God, to acutely sense the majesty of the universe. This is not my hyperbolic non-sense—-this is what actually happens to people, since miracles affect us like nothing else. We know the crowds pressed upon Jesus to the point that sometimes he would have to escape them to rest for a while. He fleshed out what John the Baptist had been telling them beforehand, and now they knew that John had neither exaggerated or lied. Jesus was the true miracle worker, without question, that much they came to understand, and so they followed Him wherever He went. The Gospels state “He healed all those who came to Him.” Jesus, though, wondered aloud “will they stick with Me.”
The Pharisees were another matter. I sense that they struggled with Jesus’ healing miracles (the man born blind, for example), but more so the raising of Lazarus (both: John’s Gospel) in particular, because no dead person had ever been successfully resuscitated before—-even on the fourth day after Lazarus had died. I think it was the raising of Lazarus that truly provoked the spiritual envy of the Pharisees, even beyond the crowds and Jesus’ evolving fame. It was something quite inexplicable on any religious level, they could not consult the Torah for guidance, and there was no point arguing about whether His miracles were real or not: they were, and they knew it. Even more so than Jesus’ over-turning the money-changers’ tables a few days later at the Temple, the raising of Lazarus provoked an envious rage in the Pharisees that would permit only one “solution”: to kill Him, because this was not only Judaism itself, this was truly God’s work, which they clearly were not ready to receive, despite some 1,200 years of practice. There are no religious doctrines or customs when it comes to miracles. The world had utterly changed, and the Pharisees knew in a certain sense that they were no longer needed so much. Jesus now “owned” them, He had become what Freud called ego alien for them, and so, He would have to die.
Jesus’ disciples were yet another matter altogether, and present us with the clearest situation psychologically regarding His miracles, given their constant proximity to His ministry. Conjure yourselves in the daily company of an unexpected miracle-worker over years of time. Each miracle and its situation was at least a little unique, even on the days when Jesus would heal people for hours until He grew too tired to continue. You as His disciples would undoubtedly talk amongst yourselves as to what might be going on. You would be regularly faced with God’s obvious divinity, for which we are never truly prepared to witness. There would be no “reasonable” answers to your questions about how this was occurring, beyond platitudes about “God’s Will.” The miracles would always be freshly perplexing, as though you are being slapped in the face at any time by someone you could never see. It becomes more than slightly traumatic, in a good way, but there are never enough explanations, which leaves you confused and wondering who is this God we have been searching for all these centuries, and what is He really like after all? Remember, the miracles are always different, and never make complete sense, except that they are necessary. This goes on and on, day after month, which I think both excites and wears down the disciples over time, because the divine nature of Jesus’ miracles never makes enough sense to mortal humans who, after all, were previously struggling to make a living and some sense of their Jewish lives under constant Roman oppression. The chasm between the earthly and the divine never really shrank for them, and Jesus was constantly “upping the ante,” with new teachings to digest, and eventually the worst news: He would die on the cross, largely at the hands of their fellow Jews. So psychologically, I do not fault their chronic confusion or some of them sleeping in Gethsemane while Jesus prayed and asked God to relieved of His deathly burden. We would do no better. It was the miracles which drenched all those who came into contact with Jesus with the never-quite-edible phenomenon of this is what God is all about, and all religion became background.
In our own time, some of us ask God for (usually) healing miracles, and we are overjoyed when they (too rarely) happen. We have learned from Jesus’ disciples not to be afraid of God anymore, since we better than they know “the end of His story.” Better late than even later.
August 2021
Every Day Easter 