Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Scripture Readings
Sunday, June 27, 2021
What is a miracle? By now, you should know that nothing in the world of faith is as simple as it seems at first glance. Taking religion at face value may be appropriate for little kids, but real faith is a very adult pursuit. We know what happens when people apply childish faith to adult issues. It doesn’t work. So, back to my question. In today’s gospel, we find two interwoven miracles: the raising of the daughter of Jairus from the dead and the cure of the woman with a hemorrhage. What was that all about?
As usual, our human language stammers when it tries to convey spiritual experience. This is even more true for us who have to wade through to thousand years of stammering to arrive at anything like an understanding. In the original Greek, the words used by Saint Mark to describe the actions of Jesus in performing a miracle are: ποιησει δυναμις, ‘to exercise power.’ In Greek, the focus is on Jesus’s powerful action. The Latin translation of the Greek word, δυναμις, ‘power’ is miraculum which comes from the verb murari, ‘to wonder.’ In other words, in Latin—and therefore in English—the focus shifts from what Jesus did to the reaction of the crowd: from power to wonder.
The understanding of what a miracle is gets even more confused in English when we try to define it. I don’t know about you, but I was taught in Sunday school that a miracle was a suspension of the laws of nature. This definition actually comes from the eighteenth-century British philosopher, David Hume, who called miracles “violations” of the laws of nature. To this day, most people think of miracles as something unnatural. But, fourteen centuries earlier than David Hume, Saint Augustine was correct when he said a miracle is not contrary to nature, but only to our understanding of nature. In fact, miracles are not unusual. What is unusual is when miracles fail to occur.
Think about it: the universe is permeated with the power of God. All that is, is miraculous. It is we who take it all for granted. We who are ready to dismiss it all as just “natural” as though “nature” actually exists as some sort of mystical, independent force. It is we who ignore miracles by calling them “coincidences.” These expressions of the power of God—these miracles—are around us everywhere. But we don’t see them. Why?
We ignore the power of God active all around us because we find it threatening. It’s threatening to our sovereignty. From the time we leave the womb, we begin the process of differentiation. We differentiate ourselves from our parents, then from our peers, then from our communities. We strive to be unique and beholding to no one. We’ve become emotional adolescents—rebellious teenagers. Some people never get beyond that point. We want to be in control of our own destinies. In fact, we want to be god. That’s why the power of God is such a threat. That’s why we don’t see miracles everywhere. That is until, of course, we reach the limits of our human capacity and we come face-to-face with our utter powerlessness. Only then is there nothing left for us to do but look for a miracle.
The people in today’s gospel were at that point. They were at their wit’s end. There was nothing left for them to do but to seek out a power greater than themselves, and both of them—Jairus and the woman with a hemorrhage—saw that power at work in Jesus. The whole thrust of the gospel is to seek out the gentle, healing power of God in faith. And that’s what faith is all about. It’s not about beliefs. It’s about seeing the universe and all that happens within it with new eyes. It’s like in the movie Field of Dreams when the hard-nosed skeptic finally looks up and asks, “Where did all these ball players come from?” Or in the Polar Express when the skeptical boy finally hears the bells on Santa’s sleigh ring. Before we can experience miracles, we have to be healed from our disease of terminal self-reliance.
There’s an aphorism in 12-step recovery that is true for any spirituality. It goes, “I can’t; God can; I think I’ll let him.” We see that in the gospel. Both Jairus and the woman with the hemorrhage were out of options. They’d already tried everything. They trusted that God’s power—his miracle—could do what they couldn’t do. Once their eyes were opened, they saw the healing power of God in Jesus and sought him out. They found faith and their faith was rewarded with a miracle.
Once again, as always in the gospels, their healing was not for their benefit alone. Everyone in the story died long ago. Jesus’s healing—in fact, all of his miracles—were prophetic actions. Prophetic actions are future-oriented. John’s gospel doesn’t use the Greek word δυναμις that we translate as ‘miracle.’ Instead, he uses the word ‘sign.’ A sign is something that points to something else. In this case, Jesus’s healing actions point to the power of God alive in our universe and available to all of us if we’re ready to accept it. They are also signs of the triumph of the power of God over all negativity: evil, disease, and even death itself. In this, the miracles of Jesus are signs of hope. What Jesus taught through what we call ‘miracles’ is that the power of God is here, all around us. Indeed, “the Reign of God is at hand.” We don’t need to earn it. We only need to get our grandiose self-absorption out of the way long enough to be able to recognize it and embrace it and give ourselves over to it. There’s no greater miracle than this.