What is a “miracle” really?

Colloquially speaking we tend to associate the word “miracle” with a specific event that is not explainable in natural terms, and the outcome of that event seems to be inspired or caused by divine agency.  A miracle is a happy ending – a sudden and divine solution to a seemingly unsolvable situation.  It is a supernatural event that is inherently good and works to make everything better.  According to this definition in light of Christian theology, God is the divine actor – God is the supernatural problem-solver – God is the miracle-worker.

While this definition of a miracle is fairly common, I’m going to suggest that it is problematic.  But before I go there, I would like to introduce you to Ruth Jolly.  In her book Something Absolute: Surviving a Miracle, Ruth describes her own encounter with something miraculous.  One morning while sitting in her living room she received a phone call from a nurse at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, who informed Ruth that her son Charlie had been in a serious plane crash during a flight lesson.  Charlie’s flight instructor had died upon impact, but Charlie had somehow managed to survive.  The nurse told Ruth that Charlie would be in surgery for the rest of the afternoon and that she should call her family because they were not sure how much longer he would live.

Charlie did manage to survive, but his recovery was a long and painful process.  As a young, independent, and athletic man in his early 20s, Charlie suddenly found himself nearly crippled in a wheelchair, living in his childhood bedroom, and completely dependent upon his parents.

Ruth writes that while she was completely thankful for the odd miracle of Charlie’s unlikely survival, she found herself struggling to cope with this incredibly significant change in her life.  In the first few chapters of her book she describes some of the reactions she received from friends while going through the difficult and painful healing process with Charlie.  She writes that her friends seemed to only be able to focus on the fact that Charlie had lived – as if that fact alone somehow alleviated the incredible stress caused by the discontinuous change of the accident.  Ruth began to feel guilty that she felt tired, frustrated, and even depressed.  After all, is not a miracle an event that transforms everything for the better?  Why then was life after Charlie’s accident so incredibly hard?

Holding on to the story of Ruth and Charlie, let’s look at another story.  The blind man from John 9: 1-42, like Ruth and Charlie, also survives a miracle.  His story begins in the middle of things as Jesus and his disciples are walking along a road.  They come upon a man who is well known among his neighbors as being blind since birth.  “Teacher,” the disciples say.  “Is it because of this man’s sin or the sins of his parents that he was born blind?”

Jesus answers, “Neither this man nor his parents have sinned.  Instead, this man was born blind so that God’s work may be revealed in him.”

After Jesus said this he bent down, scooped up some dirt, spit on it, mashed it up into mud, and then smeared it across the blind man’s eyes.  Then Jesus said, “Go and wash in the pool of Siloam.”

The blind man did as told and returned to his village seeing everything along the way.  When his neighbors discovered that he could see, they were very confused and troubled.  They interrogated him then brought him to the church leaders for further investigation.  The church leaders questioned both the formerly blind man and his parents.  After concluding that the formerly blind man was a sinner, they kicked him out of the church.

It seems to me that the formerly blind man’s life after the miracle is not a happy ending.  The more he continues to tell those around him the truth about what has happened to him, the more alienated he becomes.  His neighbors no longer trust him, the church leaders hurl insults at him and throw him out of the church, and even his own parents betray him knowing that if they confirm what he says they will also be thrown out of church.  Though his sight is restored, his problems are not solved.

We see in the stories of both Ruth and the blind man what it means for miracles to happen to good people, and it’s sort of a disconcerting image.  Sure it seems that after a miracle new life is found but that life seems to come at a pretty high cost.  Charlie’s battered body took years to recover and placed an incredible stress on his family.  The blind man was essentially not trusted by his community, betrayed by his parents, and kicked out of the church.

What these stories begin to reveal I think is that, contrary to popular belief, miracles are not necessarily happy endings. Ruth writes about it in this way:

“When something truly extraordinary happens to you, the minutiae of life by which your days are shaped and your energy is expended, cease to matter…For a long time – a very long time – after a miracle, you flounder, and in a way, there are no more certainties ever again.  Something has happened for which there is no clear, solid explanation.  And try as you might to re-order events in a logical, factual way, at the heart of it all there remains a mystery.  One simply has to cobble together some words that sound vaguely plausible and leave it at that.  No, a miracle, wondrous though it is, is not a ‘happy ending’.  Rather, it is a shattering new beginning, and when the world starts to turn again, what you make of it is seriously down to you.”

I don’t know about you all, but I think I’d rather not witness a miracle in my life.  I like the way things are now – I have learned how to manage things, I’m comfortable, I have a routine.  I’d rather that things just stay the same, but unfortunately things do change.  While it may be too bold to suggest that we have all experienced miracles in our lives, I do think that the stories of Ruth and the blind man are ones to which we can all relate.  Like Ruth and the blind man, I suspect that we have all experienced some sort of radical, unexpected, discontinuous change that has intimately shaped the course of our lives thereafter.

I can relate to this in a very personal way – In the fall of 2008 my husband got a Rhodes Scholarship, which brought us to Oxford. That sudden event pulled me away from my familiar, beloved community at home and plucked me into a new, loving community.  My whole life changed when I moved to Oxford, and it was somewhere between a plane crash and sight restoration.  These past two years our lives have been filled with discontinuous change, and I can definitely understand what Ruth means when she describes life as full of “shattering new beginnings.”

So I have suggested that a miracle is not a happy ending.  I think the stories of Ruth and the blind man definitely attest to that.  We have begun to see that the colloquial definition of “miracle” is problematic – but what about the rest of it?  Earlier we said that a miracle is caused by a supernatural, divine agent whom Christians name as God. What about that part?  Is that as problematic as the happy ending assumption?

Understanding God as the cause or primary actor in an event of sudden, discontinuous change is indeed problematic, and I will suggest it is so for two reasons.  First, it opens a Pandora’s box of questions about God’s involvement in human suffering and death.  If God saved Charlie from death, why didn’t God also save 21-year-old Katie when she missed a turn on the highway and rolled her car?  If God chooses to heal the blind man, why does God let Bernard continue to suffer with advanced pancreatic cancer?  God as the initiator of a miraculous event compromises some of the basic theological claims we make about God as all-loving, compassionate.

This definition of a miracle is also problematic because it goes against what the story of the blind man suggests.  Let’s quickly revisit the story once more. “Why was this man born blind?” the disciples ask Jesus.  “Was it because of his sin or the sins of his parents?”

“This man was born blind,” Jesus responds, “so that God’s work may be revealed in him.”

Jesus is being both cheeky and clever here – the first part of his response is intentionally phrased in the passive voice so that no clear actor is given responsibility for the man’s blindness – the man was simply born blind – neither God, nor anyone else, caused his blindness.  There is no actor or cause.  Instead, Jesus’ answer suggests that God works through that which has already happened to reveal God’s love and presence in the world.

What the text suggests here is that the point of a miracle isn’t who or what caused it to happen (although I do think it’s fair to ask those questions). The point is to examine what our lives look like after a sudden, life-changing event. Against the colloquial definition, I want to suggest that a miracle is not so much of an event as it is a relationship – a relationship among the events of our lives, God, and us.  This relationship inspires us to ask, “What does God’s participation in our life after a miracle look like?

As Ruth suggests, what we make of it all is seriously down to us.  It may be far too simplistic to say “God has a plan for you. God works through your suffering to reveal his purposes and love for you.” And yet, it seems that is what the story of the blind man suggests.  It’s an incredibly provocative, inspiring, and even troublesome thought – one that I’m not even sure I’m ready to subscribe to.  But what if we did?  What if we believed the Creator of this entire universe was active in our lives – not as the cause or cure of our suffering, but as our companion in it? It seems to me that that might be the true miracle.