Miracles

I am reading Peter Jensen’s book “The Future of Jesus”. Last year Jensen, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, gave a series of lectures on Australian national radio examining whether Jesus has a future in a secular west. Clever cover, mimicking the iPod ad silhouettes.

For Jensen God is "He" and "in the heavens." We are sinners and Jesus is our saviour. He claims for Jesus basic Australian values of “a fair go” for everyone and everyone is “our mate.” He seems unaware that these are basic older testament values that Jesus lifts up from his birth tradition. While Jensen claims a very modern religious perspective he writes from a very traditional theistic understanding of God. His chapter on miracles, in particular, tested me.

Jensen describes the miracles of Jesus as testimony to Jesus’ command of God’s divine powers to intervene in our human realm. If one does not believe in miracles then one does not believe in the divinity of Jesus. He states that God always has the capacity to intervene, if He chooses, though mostly He does not choose.

This, of course, presumes that God is “out there”, an entity that exists remote from our being, reaching down to alter the ways of this realm as He is so moved to do.

I don’t discount miracles. I believe in miracles. I’ve witnessed a few. I’ve been party to a couple (Janer, are you reading?). I know that there is far more than I know or that we can explain. But I don’t accept Jensen’s concept that miracles are the work of God in heaven reaching down to alter otherwise ordained results.

I put the experience of miracle in quite a different realm. It is not God reaching down from “up there” and more the inexorable power of Life, which is God, breaking free of the constraints of this realm and accomplishing that which our rules and ways cannot. Ever play Red Rover? I think of miracle as “Life” breaking through the opposing line and laying claim to more life.

Surely there are times when bodies are broken, or riddled with disease, when circumstances are so bent and twisted that life as we know it can no longer be held, be nurtured, or be sustained. Passing from this realm is the only outcome.

But for reasons we cannot see and cannot know, over which we have no control, that Will for Life (which is God) is so pervasive and persistent, so insistent and intense, that it finds a crack, slips through it, and defies all of our odds, all of the circumstances as we know them, to perpetuate, accomplish, and extend Life here.

Is this because God chose to have mercy on one and not another? Is it because you were better than some one else? Is it because there was more prayer for him than for her? Is it the luck of the draw? Is it because God liked me better than God liked you?

I don’t believe it is about God consciously choosing one course of action over another, or being swayed by prayer to affect one result instead of another, but a matter of God’s Will for Life being so strong and so persistent that if it is at all possible to sustain life here, it will. And does. Perhaps Jesus encourages or enables this Will for Life in those who encounter him, affecting miracles which defy the logic.

Jensen equates Jesus’ resurrection with the miraculous. I don’t consider resurrection miraculous. I consider Jesus’ resurrection to be a glimpse across the realms, through the veil, of life as it continues beyond this place. It is an insight into the ongoing persistence of God, of Life, when life can no longer be sustained in this realm.

Push back. Tell me what you think, what you have experienced. Is there a place for miracles if we do not see God theistically? If so, then how? If not, then do we have to go back to “Our Father who art in heaven”?

I welcome your thoughts. Post them in the comments sections, including your name so that I know who is writing!