A plate from FORBIDDEN PASSAGE. I don’t quite understand it either.
A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah." Jesus then left them and went away.- Matthew 16:4
One thing I’m doing these cold winter months is typing out some old manuscripts I inherited from my Great Great Uncle Victor. He fancied himself a thinker and author, and tried his best to get them published in his lifetime, to no avail. He handed them down to my grandmother, who did not particularly care for them. Then they ended up in the hands of my uncle, who told me they could cure insomnia (he’s right). And now they’ve ended up in my hands, and so in some misguided enterprise of filial piety I’m typing books up for self-publication.
The first book I’m typing out is entitled Forbidden Passage. It is Victor’s statement on God, the universe, and everything. Victor was a pantheist who thought Christianity needs to be updated for modern times with its science and atoms and telstar transmissions. I think it’s one great exercise in missing the point. There is a particularly telling passage where he imagines what Jesus might do in his second coming:
As for miracles, it is possible that a modern Christ would readily admit that many miracles were being performed all around Him — in medicine, surgery, electronics, chemistry, and a score of other fields. So, He would turn His attention, as mentioned, upon power politics. With diplomatic and spiritual force He would carry His fight right on through to the very heart of dissension.
My Great Great Uncle seemed to imagine that Jesus’ miracles were about doing good works for others, and that if there were better means at his disposal then he would have used those means to do his good deeds. Victor was not a dumb guy. He grew up going to Church, and was very attentive. He can quote chapter and verse decently well, though with some hiccups. I would not be surprised if Victor isn’t the only one who thinks the reason Jesus heals is because modern medicine had not been dreamed up yet.
The miracles of Jesus are not, first of all, about doing good. The miracles of Jesus are signs. Through them we learn about the Kingdom of God. In John’s Gospel we are told the first of the signs Jesus performed was turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana. That is certainly a miracle. But it is a miracle that feels somewhat frivolous. No one’s life is made meaningfully better. He may have saved the groom some denarii but that’s hardly anything to write home about. What makes the miracle at Cana spectacular is not the good Jesus did. What makes it spectacular is that it is a sign of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is like a wedding, the union of Christ and his Church. And Jesus sanctifies that wedding and brings life to that wedding. Through his miracle, through his sign, he tells us a little bit about his reign. And meditating on it we may have some understanding of Christ and the Kingdom. Understanding, as Ivan Illich puts it, akin to the laughter that comes from understanding a joke.
So it is with all the miracles; healings, exorcisms, walking on water, multiplying a sack lunch, in all these cases the miracle points beyond the immediate action Jesus makes. The miracle becomes a window into the Kingdom. And by mediating on the miracles of Jesus we meditate on the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And as Jesus performed those miracles then, so too he continues to perform miracles as he reigns and tramples down his enemies.