So what’s the one Bible story you’ll never preach a sermon on?”
I popped a cube of cheddar in my mouth and washed it down with some red wine. An introvert with dubious people skills, I spend most social gatherings exactly like this—camped out by the buffet table, asking inappropriate religious and political questions of whatever poor schmuck dares strike up a conversation with me. Fortunately, this was an event for Episcopal clergy, and if I have anything in common with Episcopal clergy, it’s a fondness for cheese, wine, and inappropriate religious and political questions. I fit right in.
“Oh, without a question, it’s the story about the fish with the coin in its mouth,” said the priest, referring to the time Jesus paid his temple tax by instructing Peter to go to the lake, cast out a line, and remove a four-drachma coin from the mouth of the first fish he caught.
“It’s weird enough trying to preach a sermon about taxes,” said the priest, who serves a wealthy parish in Virginia. “That story just makes it weirder.”
I laughed, for indeed the Bible includes some strange miracle stories, and many of the strangest have scales. In addition to the miracle of the fishy tax payment, there’s the one where Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and transforms them into a feast to feed five thousand, with baskets of leftovers to spare. Then there’s the story of how Jesus called his first disciples by instructing a group of discouraged fishermen to try casting their nets into the sea one more time. When they skeptically oblige, they are rewarded with a draught so epic it breaks their nets and nearly sinks their boat. “Follow me,” Jesus says, “and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19 ESV).
Of course, all these tales are eclipsed by what may be the greatest fish story of all time: the story of Jonah, the Old Testament prophet tossed overboard, swallowed by a giant fish, kept alive in its belly for three days, and then coughed up onto shore, all so God could reach the people of Nineveh with forgiveness. To this epic tale Jesus likened his own three-day stint inside a tomb, calling his resurrection “the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matthew 12:39–40). Is it any wonder that the first symbol of the Christian faith wasn’t the cross, but rather the ichthys—the sign of a fish?
Now, I hail from Dayton, Tennessee, home of Lake Chickamauga, where a few years ago an angler named Gabe Keen landed a 15.3-pound largemouth bass, shattering a sixty-year-old state record. Our fishing here is legendary, drawing thousands of anglers for tournaments every summer and flushing our local economy with much-needed cash. I’ve seen people pull catfish out of those muddy waters that would give Leviathan a scare. I’ve also heard more than a few fish stories in my time. Dine at a local restaurant during bass season and you’ll pick up all sorts of tall tales about the one that broke the line and got away—or better yet, the one that ate the one that broke the line and got away.
Sometimes the miraculous moments in Scripture strike me as those kinds of fish stories—colorful exaggerations of events that may or may not have transpired as recounted. In addition to being an introvert with dubious people skills, I’m a dependable skeptic, cautious of attributing supernatural causes to ordinary events. I’ve watched far too many people of strong faith succumb to illness and tragedy to believe God rewards the righteous with miraculous intervention with any sort of routine regularity. While it’s plausible to me that the Holy Spirit moved with special urgency during Jesus’ ministry and as the gospel spread throughout Asia Minor, the stories of Jesus healing the sick and walking on water, and of the apostles raising the dead and casting out demons, are some of the hardest of the New Testament for me to believe, and I know I’m not alone.
Some will argue that the Bible’s miracle stories render the whole thing intellectually untenable, proving only the gullible and uneducated believe the Bible to be true. Others attempt to rationalize the miracle stories by developing elaborate, scientifically plausible explanations for them, whereby Lazarus suffers a cataleptic fit, the wise men spot a rare triple planetary conjunction, and Peter walks a conveniently located sandbank in the Sea of Galilee. Still others spiritualize every apparent miracle as strictly metaphorical, from the virgin birth to the healing of the blind and deaf to the resurrection of Jesus. And of course, many insist that only a literal interpretation of all these events will do.
Growing up, my conservative evangelical culture insisted on the latter, with one’s confidence in the factuality of the Bible’s miracle stories an important test of faith. Belief in the authority of Scripture required belief in its scientific and historical veracity, so if the Bible says the sun stood still for twenty-four hours, then that’s exactly what happened. The earth stopped rotating and the sun froze in the sky; end of story. Often I was reminded of Jesus’ words to Thomas that “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). One cannot be selective about which biblical miracles you believe, I was told, when they’re all essentially the same.
Later, as a young adult, I would see the appeal of metaphorical interpretations, both at a scientific level and a literary one. The story of Jonah reads more like a parable than history, employing fanciful literary conventions and language, so why impose literalism on a text when the genre doesn’t seem to demand it? And yet the epistles of Paul and the accounts of Luke, whether you believe them or not, purport a different purpose and employ a different literary style than Jonah, so it seems just as disingenuous to impose metaphor where those authors likely presumed fact. Furthermore, I had a hard time believing that a religion so concerned with bodies, ritual, suffering, and sustenance would produce a Messiah interested only in spiritual transformation and not physical transformation, when in Judaism the two are inextricably linked.
I once attended a lecture given by a Christian theologian who rejected the notion of the physical resurrection of Jesus in favor of a spiritualized interpretation wherein Jesus simply rose from the dead “in his disciples’ hearts.” Just as Jesus lives on in our collective memory, he argued, so friends and family do not literally rise from the dead but rather gain “eternal life” whenever we honor their legacy.
After the lecture, I turned to the person next to me, a black pastor who had been fidgeting anxiously throughout the hour, and asked what he thought.
“If the resurrection is about getting raised in memories and hearts,” he said, “that’s not very good news for me or my people. What does spiritual resurrection mean for all the brothers who died on slave ships and all the women lying in unmarked plantation graves? Where’s their justice? Where’s their liberation?
“If there’s one thing historic Christianity is clear on,” he said, “it’s that bodies matter to God. A revolution without bodies isn’t a revolution.”
Of course, this pastor was speaking for himself and not necessarily all African Americans of faith, but I found his point persuasive. What makes the Bible’s miracle stories so compelling is the idea that God cares about people’s suffering, not simply their “spiritual blindness” or “spiritual poverty” but also their actual blindness and actual poverty. The apostle Paul insisted to the Corinthian church that the physical resurrection of Jesus, as witnessed by more than five hundred people, portends the resurrection of all who have died, all who have suffered, and that without it “our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14).
And so I found myself dissatisfied with both sweeping literalism on the one hand and disembodied abstractions on the other.
It wasn’t until churches started asking me for homilies based on the lectionary that I began really looking for answers. The Revised Common Lectionary assigns specific biblical texts for each week of the liturgical year, working through much of the New Testament over a three-year cycle, so when I visited these churches on speaking tour, I couldn’t fall back on my old, polished lectures, but instead had to preach from “the text,” which might bring me to Jesus casting out demons one Sunday, Jesus cursing the fig tree the next, Jesus walking on water the next. In order to offer a meaningful word to these congregations, I had to figure out what these stories were actually about.
In my research, I learned that while the gospel writers certainly emphasize the physicality of sickness, suffering, feeding, and healing, there is more going on in these stories than simple transmission of fact. For example, in Mark and Matthew’s gospels, the feeding of the five thousand is followed by a nearly identical miracle just two chapters later, in which Jesus again multiplies food but starts with a different number of loaves and fishes, feeds a different number of followers, and produces a different number of basketfuls each time.
These numbers must be significant because in Mark’s gospel, Jesus quizzes the disciples about them on a boat ride to Bethsaida.
“When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” he asks as they sail out across the Sea of Galilee.
“Twelve,” they reply.
“And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?”
“Seven,” they answer.
“Do you still not understand?” Jesus asks (Mark 8:19–21).
And that’s the end of it. The question just hangs there.
Reading along, one might respond, “Well no, actually, I don’t understand. What am I missing?”
In Judaism, certain numbers carry special theological significance, and most scholars believe the numbers in these stories symbolically underscore the expansion of Jesus’ ministry from the Jewish community to the greater Gentile world. The number twelve recalls the twelve tribes of Israel and is often employed in Scripture to refer to the Jewish people. (Remember: Jesus began his ministry with twelve disciples.) The number seven carries Gentile connotations and also signifies “fullness” or “completion.” This interpretation finds support in the fact that the first miracle took place in a Jewish neighborhood near the Sea of Galilee, whereas the second occurred in the Decapolis, a Gentile area. The point, then, is that Jesus intends to feed and bless not just the Jews, but also the Gentiles, thus bringing to fruition God’s promise to Abraham that through his people the entire world would be blessed. The bread in this case represents both physical and spiritual sustenance, its miraculous multiplication reminiscent of God’s provision of manna to the liberated Hebrews, only this time made available to all who hunger.1
Such a reading might seem unnecessarily complicated, but the gospel writers intentionally direct us to the details. They want us to pay attention to them.
We see similar allusions at work in the episode of Jesus cursing the fig tree. As the story goes, Jesus and his disciples are headed toward Jerusalem from Bethany when they come upon a fruitless fig tree. No one is particularly surprised, as it isn’t the season for figs. But Jesus, it seems, is hungry. So he curses the tree, saying, “May you never bear fruit again!” and according to Matthew’s account, the tree immediately withers (Matthew 21:18–22). In Mark’s account, the disciples only noticed the withered tree on their way back from Jerusalem (Mark 11:12–25).
What’s going on here? What’s the point of this curse? Is this just what happens when God-in-flesh gets “hangry”? Or does it mean, as one clever counterprotest sign posits, “God Hates Figs”?
In Hebrew Scripture, fig trees and vines symbolize plenty and peace, but when the Babylonians were threatening invasion and the people of Israel ignored the prophets’ calls for repentance, Jeremiah warned that God would “take away their harvest. . . . There will be no grapes on the vine. There will be no figs on the tree, and their leaves will wither” (Jeremiah 8:13). Perhaps this imagery was on Jesus’ mind as he traveled to Jerusalem that day. In Mark’s account, the story of the fig tree bookends the story of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, suggesting the curse illustrates his frustration with Israel’s fruitlessness and foreshadows his impending rejection by its religious and political leaders.
Often the key to unlocking the deeper meaning of a miracle story lies in Hebrew Scripture. Many of Jesus’ actions serve as living, breathing reenactments of biblical images and prophecies. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, for example, he chose to ride through the city on the back of a donkey in order to fulfill Zechariah’s vision of a king who comes to Zion, “righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey” (9:9). Many scholars believe Jesus’ calming of the stormy sea and his exorcising of the Gerasene demoniac together function as a sort of double fulfillment story based on Psalm 65:7, which declares that God “stilled the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations.” In Scripture the sea represents chaos, its churning, unpredictable waters teeming with monsters and demons, threatening death. So when Jesus rebukes the stormy sea, when he commands its fish and walks on its waves, he’s not just showing off; he’s making a statement about the God who reigns over even our most visceral, primal fears, the God who, in the words of the psalmist, “makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters” (Isaiah 43:16 ESV). “Take courage!” Jesus tells the dumbfounded disciples as he walks across the sea. “It is I. Don’t be afraid” (Matthew 14:27). The best translation of “It is I” from the Greek is “I AM”—a clear reference to the God of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Miriam.
Throughout the New Testament, Jesus “acts out” biblical stories and images in order to infuse them with new meaning and point to himself as their ultimate fulfillment. Far from abstracting the redemptive themes of Scripture, Jesus seems intent on putting flesh on them.
Even the healing miracles, which undoubtedly reveal Christ’s compassion for the suffering, carry a deeper theological message. The gospel of Mark includes three stories that make this plain.
In the first, a man with leprosy comes to Jesus, falls on his knees, and begs him for help, pleading, “If you are willing, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40). In the first century, leprosy could refer to a number of different skin conditions, including the disfiguring infectious disease for which the word is used today. In Jesus’ culture, anyone regarded as a leper faced intense social and religious stigmatization, for not only did the condition make a person potentially contagious; it also rendered them ritually unclean, or nonkosher. This meant exclusion from corporate worship in the temple and rejection from communal life. According to the book of Leviticus, simply touching someone with leprosy results in physical and spiritual contamination.
When Jesus sees the leper, he responds emotionally. Some translations say he was “moved by compassion”; others report he was “indignant,” likely over the man’s unjust treatment. Regardless, Mark chose his next words carefully: Jesus “reached out his hand and touched the man,” and immediately the man was healed (v. 41).
The second story describes a woman who suffered from what appears to be a chronic uterine hemorrhage. “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had,” Mark noted, “yet instead of getting better she grew worse” (5:26). (What a sad and stark description of life with chronic illness.) Awful as this condition already was, it was made worse by the fact that the law prevented physical contact with menstruating women and considered them ritually impure for the duration of their periods and seven days after. This woman’s continual bleeding rendered her perpetually untouchable, cut off from her husband, her community, and her temple.
Perhaps she had heard about Jesus healing the man with leprosy, for in this account she garners the courage to join a large crowd following Jesus through the city streets, pressing in around him.
“If I just touch his clothes,” she resolves, “I will be healed” (v. 28). So she stretches out her arm, and in an act of defiance, touches Jesus’ cloak with her fingertips. Mark reported that “immediately her bleeding stopped; and she felt in her body that she was free from her suffering” (v. 29).
Jesus, sensing “the power had gone out from him,” stops and asked who touched him. His disciples remind him they are in the midst of a mob at the moment, so there’s no way to know. But the woman, “trembling with fear,” falls before Jesus and tells him what happened (vv. 33–34).
Jesus responds with tenderness. “Daughter,” he says, “your faith has healed you” (v. 34).
In the third story, which Mark dramatically interwove with the story of the hemorrhaging woman, a religious leader named Jairus rushes to Jesus and begs him to come to his home and heal his daughter, who is at the point of death. Jesus agrees but is slowed by the crowds and by his interaction with the woman above. By the time Jesus arrives at Jairus’s house, the girl has died and the household is in mourning. Mark wrote that Jesus went to the little girl, “took her by the hand,” and said, “Little girl . . . get up!” Immediately she gets up and begins to walk around (5:41–42). Once again, Jesus touches someone who shouldn’t be touched, for according to the law, contact with a corpse was also considered nonkosher and demanded a period of quarantine and ritual washing.
In all three stories, the point isn’t just that Jesus healed these people; the point is that Jesus touched these people. He embraced them just as he embraced other disparaged members of society, often regarded as “sinners” by the religious and political elite—prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans, Gentiles, the sick, the blind, and the deaf.
As Jeffrey John explained in The Meaning in the Miracles, these and other healing stories “seem to have been deliberately selected by the evangelists to show Jesus healing at least every category of persons who, according to the purity laws of Jesus’ society, were specifically excluded and labeled unclean.”2
“Each of these healings,” he wrote, “is, of course, a demonstration of Jesus’ healing power and compassion for the individual, but that is not the main point. Uppermost in the evangelist’s mind—and far more relevant to us—is the miracle’s universal significance: the overturning of social and religious barriers; the abolition of taboos; and Jesus’ declaration of God’s love and compassion for everyone, expressed in the systematic inclusion of each class of the previously excluded or marginalized.”3
Many believe Jesus’ miracles hold eschatological significance as well, which is just a fancy way of saying they reveal God’s greatest dreams for the world, God’s ultimate purpose for a wayward creation. The miracles of Jesus prefigure a future in which there is no more suffering, no more death, no more stigmatization, no more exclusion, no more chaos. They show us what it looks like for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and they invite us to buy into that future now, with every act of compassion and inclusion, every step toward healing and reconciliation and love.
“Hope,” wrote N. T. Wright, “is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to change the world.”4
The miracles of Jesus aren’t magic tricks designed to awe prospective converts, nor are they tests from the past, meant to sort true believers from doubters. They are instructions, challenges. They show us what to do and how to hope.
The apostles certainly took this to heart as they spread word of the good news across the Roman Empire. In the book of Acts, Luke reported that with the aid of the Holy Spirit, the apostles themselves “performed many signs and wonders among the people,” healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead (5:12). They miraculously survived shipwrecks, snakebites, and angry mobs; God even sent an earthquake to break them out of jail. But perhaps most miraculous was the apostles’ continued embrace of outsiders. One of the first Gentile converts to Christianity was a royal Ethiopian eunuch, whom Philip enthusiastically baptized and welcomed into the family of God even though eunuchs were sexual and ethnic minorities forbidden from worshipping in the temple (Acts 8:26–40). When Peter, a devout Jew, encountered the hospitality and faith of the Roman centurion Cornelius, he made the radical decision to not only meet with the Gentile, but to set aside nearly every kosher restriction in the Book and share a meal with him. “It is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile,” Peter confesses to his new friend. “But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:28).
The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.
So what does this mean for a perpetual skeptic like me, someone who isn’t certain any of these miracles actually happened?
I like how Dallas Willard put it: “We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it,” he said, “or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.”5
So perhaps a better question than “Do I believe in miracles?” is “Am I acting like I do?” Am I including the people who are typically excluded? Am I feeding the hungry and caring for the sick? Am I holding the hands of the homeless and offering help to addicts? Am I working to break down religious and political barriers that marginalize ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and people with disabilities? Am I behaving as though life is more than a meaningless, chaotic mess, that there is some order in the storm?
Activist Shane Claiborne likes to challenge Christians to not only believe in miracles but to “live in a way that might necessitate one.”6
Indeed, the people in my life who seem most convinced of the reality of miracles are exactly the people who take the message of the Bible’s miracles to heart: hospital chaplains, food pantry directors, addiction counselors, relief and development workers, nursing home volunteers, foster parents. These folks witness a whole lot of heartbreak from unmet needs and seemingly unanswered prayers, of course; they are neck-deep in it. But their proximity to the suffering and marginalized means they occasionally catch a glimpse of the miraculous—of limited rations multiplying like fishes and loaves, of centuries-long tribal suspicions melting away over a meal, of storms natural and man-made suddenly calmed by the presence of Jesus, of donations and care packages arriving at exactly the right time.
At least that’s what they tell me.
I confess my own miracle stories are the sort for which I can readily offer alternative explanations (Everyone thinks their child’s birth is a miracle; what about the people who didn’t narrowly avoid the accident?), that my skeptical mind is both protecting me from exploitation and blinding me to a spectrum of colors I know others can see. A lot of religious folks think they can help by insisting over and over again how important it is to “just believe,” as if belief were something one could conjure by force of will. But in my experience, simply wanting to believe doesn’t work. The only thing that “works”—and probably only about half the time—is the long and storied spiritual discipline the sages of the faith refer to as “fake it till you make it.”
Go to church.
Take communion.
Show up at the homeless shelter.
March in the protest.
Pray for healing.
Rebuke the chaos.
Act like you believe and maybe, at long last, you will. Move your feet and your heart will catch up.
It’s been said that if you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat. Sometimes getting out of the boat looks like showing up for another recovery meeting. Sometimes it looks like filling out hospital paperwork for an elderly neighbor. Sometimes it looks like making a casserole for the family down with the flu or offering free babysitting for the friend with a job interview. Sometimes it looks like jumping when it matters.
“Jesus calls his disciples,” wrote Sara Miles, “giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn’t show us how to reliably cure a molar pregnancy. He doesn’t show us how to make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick pieces are held in love, and given meaning. In which strangers literally touch each other, and in doing so make a community spacious enough for everyone.”7
Not long after my exchange of fish stories with the priest at the dinner party, I found myself at yet another Episcopal church at yet another buffet table, this time asking the random strangers who had gathered about their favorite Bible stories.
“The one where Jesus meets his disciples on the beach,” said a young mother, referring to a story from John’s gospel.
Early one morning, shortly after Jesus has risen from the dead, the disciples are out fishing once again when they spot a mysterious figure on the shore.
“Friends, haven’t you any fish?” the stranger asks (John 21:5).
When they answer no, he tells them to try casting on the other side of the boat. Sure enough, the net gets so heavy with fish, it nearly sinks the boat. The disciples immediately recognize the man as Jesus, and Peter is so overcome with emotion, he jumps out of the boat to swim to his teacher and friend. (Ol’ Pete spends a lot of time jumping out of boats.) When the rest of the disciples catch up, lugging their catch behind them, they see Jesus has made a charcoal fire over which he is cooking some fish. He has bread too, and invites the disciples to join him for a meal. The text notes they catch a total of 153 fish, “and although there were so many, the net was not torn” (21:11 ESV).
“I like that one too,” I said to the mother, and then posited the theory that the number 153 in rabbinic numerology signifies “completion” and perhaps corresponds to a specific prophecy in Ezekiel that describes a great river full of all kinds of fish flowing out of a restored temple. It’s worth noting, I added, that John emphasized that the net was full but not torn, which means the net might symbolize the church, holding a great diversity of fish together in unity. Early Christian art depicts Peter and John holding a net on either side of a stream flowing from a temple, suggesting they made that connection too.
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking about all that,” the woman said with a smile. “I just like the idea of God frying up fish for breakfast.”