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Monday, August 01, 2005
What Miracles Are Made Of
A couple of Sundays ago Joanne and I went to San Francisco's Stern Grove for a free concert.
Opening the show were Linda Tillery's Cultural Heritage Choir, an African-American a capella group from Oakland. Then came Ladysmith Black Mambazo, South African singers who in their own modest way helped bring down apartheid in the 1980s. Their leader closed the concert with a shout of "Peace, love, hope, and hallelujah!"
Amen to that.
I had dropped Joanne off, then taken 1/2 hour to find curbside parking. Then I'd walked a switchback path down, down, down to the amphitheater. I somehow found Joanne amidst the audience of thousands, and learned she'd had to negotiate that same steep path ahead of me.
Then we had to stand for the whole concert. This with my poor wife just 3 weeks free from a 6-week hospitalization for pneumonia. Yikes.
And then we trekked back up the steep slope to street level. Double yikes.
But all the way to the top, Joanne never once stopped to catch her breath or even cough. A minor miracle. Hallelujah for sure!
Well, not quite a miracle.
We use the term pretty loosely nowadays, flexing it to mean something like, "I'm blessed, grateful for a special good surprise. Thank you, God!"
Technically, a miracle is a contradiction of (in contemporary terms) the laws of nature. Biblically we might say: of the usual patterns of the created order.
Either way, what usually happens doesn't. Life-as-usual is reversed, slowed down, speeded up, or stopped.
So, the Red Sea parts to let the Israelites cross ahead of the Egyptians chasing them down. Or, Joshua prays and the sun stands still a while so his army can win their battle. Jesus walks on water. Or he turns water into wine to rescue a wedding reception.
In Matthew 14:13-21, he takes five loaves of bread and a couple of fish and feeds 5,000 men with them, not counting all the women and children eating right along with them.
That last one, I think, gives us a model of what goes into most miracles. Not what happens in a miracle. It'd take somebody a lot smarter than me to tell you that. But what God is up to in making the miracle happen....
1. Compassionate Care: Jesus saw the crowd was tired and hungry after a long day of good spiritual stuff, so he went the extra mile to give them what they needed -- Food!
2. Creative Power: Jesus re-worked the created order to make something good -- and timely -- happen for the people he cared about.
3. Complete Provision: Jesus' miracle fed his people's souls as much as their bodies. He's a full-service Savior!
In "Jesus Christ Superstar" King Herod sneers at Jesus, "Prove to me that you're no fool. Walk across my swimming pool!" But that kind of grandstanding Jesus would never do. His miracles weren't done to prove a spiritual point, but to provide a spiritual point of contact.
Always were. Always will be.
posted by Jack Buckley at
6:52 PM
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