I have been asked to write some papers on our Lord’s miracles. I attempt it because the miracles are one way his unseen life found expression, so through them we must be able to know something of that life. He came, the Word of God, that we might know God, so every word of his is needed for knowing God, and we must understand, as far as we can, every word and action of his, his actions being only another form of word. I believe this is the immediate purpose of our creation, and that it will in the end unravel what every man now sees as the knotted tangle of the universe.
Believing in the miracles seems to me to need no great faith—true faith is a power, not a mere yielding. Far harder things can be believed, and a man is asked to believe in the miracles only as part of believing in Jesus. If he can believe there is a God, he can believe that a God who made creatures able to hunger and thirst for him must be able to speak a word to guide them. And a God worthy and capable of being God will speak the clearest, grandest word his creatures can understand. For us that word must be all the expressions of his visible works gathered into an infinite human face, lit by an infinite human soul behind it: that potential essence of man, if I may use a word of my own, which was in the beginning with God. If God thus answers the cry of the noblest of his creatures (for all who cry after him are such), it is natural to expect that the messenger’s deeds would be the Father’s works done in little. If he came to show his Father in miniature, as it were (in these unspeakable things we can only use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest)—to tone down a great voice that men could hear only as inarticulate thunder into a still small voice they could take as human speech—then the works the Father does too widely for men to see, the Son must do briefly and sharply before their eyes.
This, I think, is the true nature of the miracles: an epitome of God’s processes in nature, seen in immediate connection with their source, which is lost to men’s eyes, and too often to their hearts, in the far-receding steps of continuous law. Jesus did his Father’s works thus so that men might see the will of God at work.
An honest reader may object: do you not rank the miracles below the ordinary processes of nature? I answer that the miracles are far mightier than nature as common eyes see it, cut off from a living Will, but less than nature seen with God at its heart. In the name of him who delighted to say “My Father is greater than I,” I say that his miracles of bread and wine were far less grand and beautiful than the works they represented: the Father making corn grow in the valleys and grapes drink the sunlight on the hillsides, with all their delicate mystery of birth. But praised be the Son, who condensed these mysteries and let us see the gifts come at once from gracious hands—hands that love could kiss and nails could wound.
Some might find the New Testament story easier to accept if the miracles did not stand in the way; yet they might accept both if they could see the true heart of the miracles. At the surface they see a violation of nature’s laws; at the heart, at least a possible fulfilment of her deepest laws.
With these I am not mainly concerned now, nor with those who cannot believe in any God and to whom a miracle is therefore absurd. Of the latter I will say only that perhaps it is better to believe in no God than in such a God as they have so far imagined; perhaps they are nearer to true faith—unless they actually prefer the Unconscious generating the Conscious to a self-existent Love, creative because it is love. Such people have never loved woman or child except in a way that lets them accept death carrying the beloved back to the maternal dust. But I doubt anyone would choose a sleepwalking Pan over a wakeful Father; at least, they cannot know the Father and choose the Pan.
Let us then recognize the Father’s works as epitomized in the Son’s miracles: what in the Father’s hands are the mighty motions and conquests of life are, in the Son’s, miracles. I do not believe he valued working miracles as he valued speaking the truth; but all he did had one root, obedience, in which alone any son is free. And the highest obedience is simply following the Father—doing what the Father does, since every true father wills his child to be as he is in his deepest love and highest hope. All that Jesus does is of his Father, and what his works mean concerning him, they mean concerning the Father.
I shrink from the notion of a formal design in any great life, so unlike the free spontaneity of nature (and he is the Nature of nature). Still, I cannot help observing that his first miracle was one of creation—or at least more like creation to our eyes than almost any other. Who can say it was creation, not knowing what creation is or what the process was here?