Proving Not So Much That He Is God As What Sort Of God He Is...

In our intercessions today (as we do every week)– we will be praying for people who are sick – praying because we wish Jesus to make them well.

If you read the Quran you will find something surprising. The Quran refers on multiple occasions to the miracles that Jesus performed – to him healing the blind, healing a lepper and even to Jesus raising people from the dead. But when it comes to Muhammed no miracles are records. Later legends attribute some miracles to their prophet, but the Quran doesn’t and indeed implies the opposite when it “They say: ‘Why are not signs sent down to him from his Lord?’ Say: ‘The signs are only with Allah, and I am only a plain warner.’ [1]

Its not just the Quran that refers to Jesus performing miracles. Josephus the relatively neutral Jewish historian writing only a few decades after Jesus describes Jesus as “a doer of wonderful deeds” [2] whilst a more hostile Jewish document , the third Century Babylonian Talmud accuses Jesus of “practicing sorcery and leading Israel astray” —ironically affirming that he was known for performing acts that astonished people.

In his polemic On the True Doctrine, the Roman Pagan Celsus claimed Jesus learned magical arts in Egypt and used them to perform miracles. [3]

It seems that the association of miracles with the person of Jesus is an ancient one. Even his enemies accept weird stuff happened around him – they just attribute it to the Occult and to sourcery rather than to God.

It’s in that context that we hear today’s Gospel reading –

Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God

[Luke 10:10-13]

For those of us living in a modern western context – this can be a bit problematic – but miracles are very much a part of Jesus’s ministry.In deed the point of today's Gospel is that Jesus caused a stir – not by anything he said – but by what he did. By the fact he did something and healed the woman on the Sabbath.

The fact that Jesus performed miracles tells us something about Jesus. Not just that he is God – but about what sort of God he is.

But before I come back to that, lets flash forward three centuries to the great theologian St Augustine of Hippo. You may have heard of him? Even if you don't know what he wrote, he's quite a famous name.

Well, before St Augustine was a Christian, he was a philosopher, a neo Platonist. He was initially drawn into Christianity by Platonist leaning Christians. And as a Platonist he had a bit of a suspicion of miracles. Why would a spiritual get involved in our messy physical problems that needed healing. According to Platonists, Spiritual was the opposit of that messy physical stuff. Augustine could just about cope with the idea of Jesus performing miracles – perhaps they were needed to prove Jesus’s divinity to onlookers – but he was deeply uncomfortable with the idea that they might still happen in his own day.

Perhaps because he didn’t realise that miracles aren’t just there for Jesus to tell he is God, but for him to tell us what sort of God he is.

However the longer St Augustine was a Christian- the more real life confronted him with the fact that God was healing people.

“I realized how many miracles were occurring in our own day and which were so like the miracles of old, and how wrong it would be to allow the memory of these marvels of divine power to perish from among our people. It is only two years ago that the keeping of records was begun here in Hippo, and already, at this writing we have nearly seventy attested miracles.” [4]

Don’t get me wrong St Augustine was very clear that these things were rare- if they happened all the time they wouldn’t be miracles – but he is very clear that they were happening.

Here are a few he recounts -

………………….

“In the … city of Carthage lived Innocentia, a very devout woman of the highest rank in the state. She had cancer in one of her breasts, a disease which, as physicians say, is incurable. Ordinarily, therefore, they either amputate, and so separate from the body the member on which the disease has seized, or, that the patient's life may be prolonged a little, though death is inevitable even if somewhat delayed, they abandon all remedies, following, as they say, the advice of Hippocrates. This the lady we speak of had been advised to by a skillful physician, who was intimate with her family; and she betook herself to God alone by prayer. On the approach of Easter, she was instructed in a dream to wait for the first woman that came out from the baptistery after being baptized, and to ask her to make the sign of Christ upon her sore. She did so, and was immediately cured. The physician who had advised her to apply no remedy if she wished to live a little longer, when he had examined her after this, and found that she who, on his former examination, was afflicted with that disease was now perfectly cured, eagerly asked her what remedy she had used, anxious, as we may well believe, to discover the drug which should defeat the decision of Hippocrates. But when she told him what had happened, he is said to have replied, with religious politeness, though with a contemptuous tone, and an expression which made her fear he would utter some blasphemy against Christ, I thought you would make some great discovery to me. She, shuddering at his indifference, quickly replied, What great thing was it for Christ to heal a cancer, who raised one who had been four days dead?”