Selective Miracles

In his novel, A Month of Sundays, author John Updike has the main character, Reverend Tom Marshfield, deliver a sermon about the miracles of Jesus. Here is what Marshfield preaches:

"There once thrived, in that pained and sytematic land of Germany, a school of Biblical scholarship that sought to reduce all of the Biblical miracles to natural happenings. The Red Sea's parting was an opportune low tide, and the feeding of the five thousand -- the only miracle attested to each of the four Gospels -- was Jesus shaming the multitude into bringing out from under its multitude of cloaks a multitude of box lunches hitherto jealously hoarded. This school of exegetical thought observes that our Lord, before healing the blind man of Bethsaida, spit upon His hands -- as if saliva is an attested medication for glaucoma. It notes, with a collusive wink, that the saline density of the Dead Sea is so high that one can virtually 'walk' upon it -- without noting that Peter, attempting the same maneuver, sank. It whispers the magic word 'psychosomatic' -- as if Lazarus merely fancied he was dead, the swine spontaneously decided to go for a swin, and the fig tree withered under hypnosis. The absurdities of such naturalism need no belaboring.

Yet a true insight resides in this naturalism. For our Lord produces miracles as naturally as the Earth produces flowers. Miracles fell from Him as drops of water escape between the fingers of a man drinking from his cupped hands. They came in spite of Himself; there is scarcely a one that was not coaxed out of Him -- by His mother, by a disciple, by the hunger of a throng, by the unignorable beseeching of an invalid. For Jesus walked in that Roman Palestine upon a sea of suffering. ...

It is here, not upon the plausibility of these miracles -- they happened as surely as any event in the Gospels happened -- but upon their selectivity, that we stumble. If these few, why not all the ailing from the beginning of human time? ...

Are we not moved to revolt and overthrow this minute and arbitrary aristocracy of the healed, which by chance lived in the three years of our Lord's wandering ministry and by aggresion pushed themselves forward in His notice? ...

And are we not moved, now as then, to rise up, and thrust Him our of the city, and lead Him to the brow of the hill, that we might cast Him down headlong, so that He might taste, with us -- us the drowning man, the starving man, the falling man -- might taste the implacability of natural laws that do not suspend an atom of their workings however huge and absolute the cry of our appalled spirits?

And now as then, He passes through our midst invisible, ungraspable, and goes His way. For His way is not ours.

The hard lesson is borne in upon us, alleviation is not the purpose of His miracles, but demonstration. Their randomness is not their defect, but their essence, as injustice (from our point of view, which is that of children ) is essential to a Creation of differentiated particulars. In the primal partition of darkness from light, the potential for better and worse was born, and with it the possibility of envy and pain, process and loss, sin and time. He came not to revoke the Law and Ground of our condition but to demonstrate a Law and Ground beyond."