What is your attitude to miracles? - Tenth Sunday of Matthew

Brethren, God has exhibited us Apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill clad and buffeted and homeless; and we labour, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the off scouring of all things. I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me.

At that time, a man came up to Jesus and kneeling before Him said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to Thy disciples, and they could not heal him.” And Jesus answered, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” Jesus said to them, “Because you have no faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.” As they were traveling together through Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will rise on the third day.”

1 Corinthians 4:9-16

Matthew 17:14-23

   In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God, Amen.

   My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, what is your attitude to miracles?  All too common in our modern world we try to downplay the miracles around us.  We are happy to say that Christ rose from the dead but when healings take place, too many of us try to find alternative explanations.  Perhaps we are happy that miracles happen a long time ago, but when they happen near us we try to explain it away: “he was misdiagnosed” or “it was the placebo effect” are common rationalisations, explanations, of the actions of God.

   Others will have completely the opposite view of miracles: they will expect the Lord to intervene at every possible moment.  They will say, “I will pray to get a job …,” “I will pray for my friend to be healed …” or “I will pray for the lottery …” and will then go on to say in their hearts “… because I give money, give time, give energy to Church, God will grant it to me.”  Their faith is centred on God granting them requests like a fairy-godmother and each time the requests apparently fail a little bit of faith is chipped away.

   Still another attitude to miracles is widespread: simultaneously an overreaction and an underreaction.  A story was told to me, a true story, of a priest.  In his church one of the icons miraculously started to stream myrrh.  This was amazing to him: nothing like this had ever happened in his parish and he did not know what to do so he phoned his bishop.  Excitedly he explained what had happened: the bishop replied, “Each Sunday you take bread and wine and they become God’s very own flesh and blood yet you have never phoned me with such excitement.”  That priest was quick to see the extraordinary – the miraculous – which was new but did not see the one which he saw every time he served the Liturgy.

   My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, what is your attitude to miracles?  Do you expect God to answer all your prayers as part of the “deal” you have made with him?  Or do you explain away them as having a natural, rational solution?  Or do you fail to see the miracles which happen before your eyes because there are no fireworks, rays of light or voice from the heavens?  What is your attitude to miracles?

   Today’s Gospel should sound familiar, we read St Mark’s account¹ three weeks before Pascha, the Sunday of St John Climacus.  The Lord had ascended the mountain with his inner-circle – Peter, James and John – to be transfigured and, on his return down the mountain, a man came, looking for the Lord and wanting a miracle: the disciples were unable to perform it.  We may ask, alongside the disciples, why could they not cast the demon out?  The Lord answers them,

Because you have no faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.

It is for their lack of faith in the Lord, not putting their trust in him, that they were unable to bring about this healing.

   But there is another reason: what is the purpose of miracles?  The man came wanting a miracle, like from a vending machine, and the Lord would not bless this.  Miracles are not magic performed in a temple to make our lives easier: that is the very definition of paganism.  Pagan temples are places you go to ask your god to protect you family, your crops, your city, your people, your wealth, your beauty and offer a sacrifice to that god for it to be accomplished.  Whether a bull sacrificed to Aphrodite or a credit card sacrificed to the promise of younger looking skin, pagan temples – in the past and today – are places where transactions take place.  Miracles rather perform a two-fold function: to proclaim the power of God and to bring about repentance.

   “O faithless and perverse generation,” the Lord replies to the crowd assembled, and indirectly to the man, “how long am I to be with you?  How long am I to bear with you?  Bring him here to me.”  For the Lord sees within this situation an opportunity to convert the hearts of those present by showing his power to heal, he desires that they come to repentance.  And he heals the boy.

   We may ask, my dear brothers and sisters, why a miracle does not happen when we pray and fast, when we have faith even as a grain of mustard seed yet the Lord seems to ignore us.  We need to remember two aspects: firstly the Lord is not a vending machine of miracles, secondly that by apparently not answering he may be giving us a better opportunity to come to repentance and so reach salvation – it is not for us to judge how the Lord answers prayers, ours is simply to pray.

   What then are we to do?  Pray!  Pray for miracles but do not expect miracles.  Nevertheless, miracles are always happening around us and we must open our eyes to them: not to dismiss them has having a natural explanation of which we are unaware but as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit who constantly surrounds us.

   A miracle is a reminder from God to offer our thanksgiving, our love, our repentance.  But what, my brothers and sisters, happens immediately after this in the Gospel?  The Church, in her great love for us, does not end the reading at this point.  “As they were traveling together through Galilee,” the Evangelist Matthew goes on to explain in the last two verses of today’s reading, “Jesus said to them, ‘The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will rise on the third day.’”  We see here, then, the destination of a miracle: when the Lord performs a miracle it leads to sacrifice, to the Cross.  Every miracle we witness is a signpost on the way to our own co-crucifixion with him.  Miracles are not the end of suffering in this life – everyone Christ healed, or raised from the dead, still went on to die.  When the Lord performs a miracle he does not offer the end of suffering, he does not prevent death.  But he does give us the opportunity to take up our own crosses alongside his that we may die with him.

   Miracles do not give us an easy life, the Christian way of living is a hard way.  The Apostle Paul, when writing to the Church in Corinth in the reading we have heard this morning, described the Christian life not in a way of honour but a way of suffering, of sacrificial love for the neighbour.  “When reviled, we bless;” he tells us how to turn every evil into a good, every blow we receive into a glorification of God, “when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the off scouring of all things.”  The Christian way is a hard way, a tough way, but the only way which leads to true life.

   My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, pray for miracles!  Pray that you may see the miracles which are constantly happening around you.  Pray for them but do not expect them, pray for them and rejoice in them that the Lord has found you worthy to repent and so come closer to him.  Pray for them, but remember that a miracle is a milestone for your own co-crucifixion with Christ that you may co-rise with him, be co-transfigured with him and co-reign with him in the Kingdom before the Throne of God.

   That we may ascribe glory, honour and might to the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever, and to the ages of ages.  Amen.

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¹ Mark 9:17-31, see also Luke 9:38-42.