JONAH 2:1-9

PSALM 29

ROMANS 9:1-5

MATTHEW 14:22-33

Sermon – 8/11/02

A number of people, including some Christians, find it a bit hard to believe in Jesus’ miracles. Sure, he was a wise and courageous moral teacher, and he died on a cross with words of forgiveness on his lips and did many admirable things, but really! Healing people instantaneously? Feeding 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish? Stilling storms? Raising the dead? Turning water into wine? And in today’s Gospel reading – walking on water?

Doesn’t this seem a bit hokey? Do even the writers of the Gospels think we’re all children? Isn’t it a bit, well, embarrassing to have these stories in the Holy Scriptures? These are some of the reactions some people have had. More intellectually, some people pose the question thusly, “Would God really break his own rules?”

“Well, now”, as George Will would say. Certainly, it’s good to have a healthy skepticism of people claiming remarkable powers, whether old-time patent medicine salesmen, ‘90’s venture capitalists or financial advisors – or hot line psychics.

Most of them, after all, deserve the response an old-time New England Yankee gave to an out-of-town hustler who asked for change for an $18 bill. “Sure,” the Yankee replied, “How’d you like it – two nines or three sixes?”

But it’s important to realize something very remarkable about the protagonist in Jesus’ miracles. Jesus never asked for or received a penny for anything he ever did, miraculous or not. He died, in fact, owning nothing but the clothes on his back – and they were nothing fancy. Unlike thousands of fakes, frauds and wannabes, Jesus never attempted to get material gain for himself, or had it thrust on him despite his efforts.

Second, none of Jesus’ miracles were to help himself. In fact, his greatest temptations were to do just that: in the temptation stories very early in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, Satan tempts him to feed himself, to show off in a dramatic publicity stunt, and to become “King of the World” – under him. And while Jesus was dying on the cross, the scoffers said, “’Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.’”

So, if Jesus did do anything miraculous – outside the normal course of nature – he did not do it for money, power, or fame. In fact, he often told people not to publicize the fact when he healed them, and today’s story of Walking on Water – was at night in the middle of a large lake with no witnesses besides his closest followers. Not the timing of a publicity hound.

“Outside the normal course of nature” – now that’s an interesting phrase. What exactly is “the normal course of nature”: can we yet claim to know all about it? An awful lot of normal life today was science fiction not many years ago. When my grandmother was a girl, aspirin hadn’t been concocted and x-rays hadn’t been discovered, never mind a host of more sophisticated medicines, diagnostic tools or therapies. Einstein’s theories have revolutionized our understanding of “reality” in ways that are still challenging to understand and defy the witness of our senses to “observed reality” – reality as it can normally be observed with the five senses.

And I haven’t mentioned yet what we’ve learned about astronomy, and how much is added to our knowledge of “the normal course of nature” every year.

The British astronomer J.B.S. Haldane once famously wrote, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” He wrote that in 1927. We have learned much about the universe since then that was, indeed, beyond the imaginations of nearly everyone in 1927, enough for us to be – I hope – a bit more humble. What after all, do we still not know?

To summarize, if anyone thinks that at this moment all is known and understood about the universe, then that person doesn’t know much. The more we learn, the more we learn how much there is to learn, and how many questions are still unanswered.

So before anyone dismisses Jesus’ miracles as “impossible” because they are “outside the normal course of nature” let’s consider how much we very likely still do not know about “the normal course of nature.” We should, in short, be skeptical about skepticism.

Third, if Jesus really was who he said he was – the pre-existent Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, through whom all things were made, couldn’t he do pretty much what he wanted regardless of whatever “the normal course of nature” really and truly is?

After all, if we believe that God is the Creator “of all things visible and invisible” from bacteria to hummingbirds to galaxies, what would be so hard about turning five loaves and two fish into enough food for thousands? If God designed and created human beings (and all our ancient ancestors), what is unthinkable about God healing one, or hundreds, of people – transforming their broken or illness-wracked bodies into bodies functioning far closer to their design capacity?

The eminent physicist John Polkinghorn has noted that the four fundamental forces in physics (gravity, the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism) are calibrated exactly right in this universe for life as we know it to be possible. (If, for example, gravity were a bit stronger, the earth would fall into the sun; weaker, it would fly off into space; and in either case atoms couldn’t form and life as we know it would be impossible.) The universe, in short, is as finely tuned as a Lexus, and to believe this happened by chance is more of a stretch than to believe it happened because Someone designed it that way. So, it takes more “faith” not to have faith than it does to believe in a Creator!

If God designed the basic forces of the universe so exactly right, what would be impossible about the same God, incarnate as a human being, also being able to walk on water?

So point one, Jesus’ reported miracles were not motivated by a desire for money, power or fame such as ordinary purported wonder-workers usually lust for – which makes Jesus’ miracles more believable: they weren’t just PR hype. Second, we even now don’t know everything about how nature works, so we shouldn’t dismiss reports which contradict our current understanding of nature automatically and conclusively. Third, if Jesus really was (and is) the Son of God, he would indeed have extraordinary powers.

Which leads us to the question of why he did what he was reported to have done. If he didn’t have the ordinary human motivations – money, power, fame – or a scientist’s desire to explore the limits of the possible (since for him the only limits were self-imposed), why did he do what he is reported to have done?

And why do the Gospels, while reporting many incidents we would call miracles, focus their narratives heavily on the part of Christ’s story where he is most like us: vulnerable and mortal. Mark’s Gospel, which has the highest ratio of miracle stories to teaching episodes of the four Gospels, also has the highest percentage of its narrative devoted to Christ’s arrest, torture and death.

Orthodox Christian theology declares that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine. He didn’t morph from one to the other. He was the whole package throughout his life.

The only explanation that makes sense to me for why Jesus accepted the vulnerability of humanness and embraced the powers of his divinity as he did is that he embodied pure, self-giving love for the human race and for every member of it.

This becomes clearer if we imagine Jesus reversing his powers and his vulnerability. Suppose his divinity was expressed in his being personally invulnerable, and his human limitations were expressed in his being unable to help anyone more than the average guy on the street. (Jesus sinks in the water, complains about the storm, feeds five of the disciples – but the whips, nails and spears of the Romans bounce off him.) What exactly would be the

point of that? That would be, in fact, exactly the kind of God some people think God is: immune to the experience of human pain, and unwilling to help people who do experience pain!

In fact, Jesus came to show us and all human beings what God is like: that God understands and has experienced human pain, and that God uses his powers to help.

That is why Jesus walked on the water – to help the disciples as they struggled, rowing into the wind. That is a vivid image for how he is willing to help us now. When we feel like we’re “rowing into the wind,” trying very hard and not getting anywhere, he can come to help, and nothing is an obstacle to his helping – not even if we’re “in the middle of a lake.”

He guides us, he strengthens us, he saves us because we need help in the challenges of our lives, we need forgiveness for our sins and a fresh start, and we need hope for a new creation where we will no longer experience the brokenness of this world or feel the effects of our own or other peoples’ sins.

Jesus’ miracles tell us what God is like: God uses God’s powers for the purposes of self-giving love to those who need help. And the great “unmiracle”, the crucifixion, tells us God loves so much that he became totally vulnerable because that, too, is what we needed – and we needed to know both that God the Son died to take away our sins and that God understands any and all suffering we go through.

Perhaps Christ’s greatest miracle really was the unmiracle: not using his powers to defend himself as anyone else would have. And it takes no faith to believe the Roman Empire tortured and crucified a Jew it labeled a troublemaker; that happened all the time. What takes faith is identifying this particular Jew as the incarnate Son of God, who “miraculously” refused to do a miracle which would benefit only himself while denying benefits to everyone else, but who instead suffered and died for us.

That is the attitude of self-giving Love Who is at the very heart of Reality, Who created and still surprises us as we seek to understand more fully “the normal course of nature”, and Who now we perceive as through a glass, dimly, but one day may see face to face.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church