Meaning in the miracles

As I mentioned the other day, I’m currently reading Jeffrey John’s The Meaning in the Miracles, which explores Jesus’ miracles as related in the Gospels and looks at what they tell us and why that matters. The central point he wants to make is, I think, that if we only ask the question “Did they really happen?” then we are missing almost the entire point of the stories. The Gospel writers selected their material carefully – indeed, they tell us that Jesus did many more things than are written down in the 3 years or so He was preaching and teaching. The questions, then, are why did the writers select these stories to pass on, and why did they write them down in the way that they did?

When talking about miracles, the emphasis is usually first on the historical – did they happen, or (at least) did they happen like this? We try to understand how the thing happened. In doing so, we miss the meaning of the story, the reason that it was written down in the first place. This is a danger especially, it seems to me, for those who insist that the Bible has a “plain, simple meaning” that is clear to anyone who reads the story. Such people usually grasp the first meaning – that miracles show Jesus’ power and Godhood – and nothing more. They have found the “plain, simple meaning” and do not move any further. However, every miracle story is loaded with extra layers of meaning, extra truth, that we miss at our peril.

The amazing thing, reading Jeffrey John’s exposition of the miracles, is how completely the Church has often missed the point of what Jesus was doing – and, indeed, of what the Church itself saw itself as doing in the early days. The miracles of Jesus, almost without exception (and especially the healing miracles), deal largely with issues of inclusion. Jesus heals women, children, lepers, the blind, lame, deaf and gay. These are not just the disabled or disadvantaged – these are people who were unclean, excluded from the religious life of the community. Instead of treating them as outcasts or unclean, Jesus includes them, speaks to them, touches them.

He actually touches them; in direct contravention of the rules of the time, He opens Himself to their uncleanness. And this is where the radical nature of Jesus’ teaching really comes through. He doesn’t see cleanness, holiness as a fragile thing that can be contaminated by simple contact with an unclean person. Instead, He sees holiness as the powerful, contagious thing – contact with Him, the clean person, means that His cleanness spreads to the sick and unclean. This is what we see when the woman who had been bleeding for years touches Him in the crowd. Instead of becoming contaminated with her uncleanness (which is what all Jews of the time would expect), Jesus instead feels his own cleanness, holiness, power spreading from Him into her, healing her and making her well, bringing her back into the circle of the community. And He makes sure to talk to her, to reassure her that all will be well for her.

The radical simplicity of this Jesus shouts itself out of the Gospels once you start to see it. The Church too often establishes its own outcasts, those who are not worthy of inclusion within society – women, children, divorcees, those with AIDS, homosexuals. But this is not what Jesus was about. He included people, He didn’t exclude them.

What would Jesus think of a Church that didn’t go out of its way, didn’t exert its every effort, to including the marginalised – which simply means including everyone. There is no place here for excluding anyone, because Jesus never excluded anyone. Not on the basis of gender, or of health, or of history, or of belief, or of status, or of anything else.

Such a simple thing, so clearly taught in the Gospel, and yet so easily missed.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 8:52pm on 21 February 2005
Category: Faith, Musing, Books