Monday morning brings grey skies around here, a little wind to blow to blossoms away, a quiet house, and time to read. I’m also feeling heavy and hungry with five pounds of baby rumbling about under my rib cage. Yesterday at church, I fielded a lot of questions about the state of the baby – I think I’ve reached that public stage of pregnancy when you find yourself talking about little else. So this morning, it’s good to sit in my quiet room and think instead about the lectionary. Though I can’t promise there won’t be any baby thoughts burbling up in this blog. Be warned.
Let’s start with a quick summary of the story: this week’s passage comes from Luke and tells the story of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant. He trusts that Jesus only has to speak the word and that his servant will be healed at a distance. He has faith because of his understanding of authority. And we read that Jesus was “amazed” by the strength of this faith.
It is a miracle story – and as such presents a few problems when we read it today. We’re not quite sure what to do with miracles. Embrace them? Avoid them? Dismiss them? Wonder if they are anachronistic expressions of… what?
Any of you working with children in church probably get to share a lot of miracle stories. There are Old Testament miracles and New Testament miracles by the bucketful. They are habitually included in kids’ Bibles and curricula because they are dramatic and memorable. Water to wine, sticks to snakes, food for all. Fantastic stories to tell. Beangirl and I were chatting about these stories on the way to school this morning. I wanted to know what she thought about them – and also how they made her feel. She said that for the most part, she liked to hear these kind of stories but at times they were confusing. She said that sometimes it was difficult to really believe that all the miracles happened even though they ‘helped’ the story. (I liked that word ‘helped’. I may need to ask her more about that later.) Then she said that she liked to think about miracles anyway, even if she wasn’t sure about them.
Preach it, sister.
I think that’s a fairly good assessment of where a lot of us are today with the concept of miracles. We like them, but we can get tripped up with wondering if it ‘actually’ happened. Some historians and commentators take time to explain away miracles – which both works and doesn’t. It’s interesting to wonder if the feeding of the five thousand was really an exercise in sharing the little that we have with our neighbours in need. But often when we play this game, the miracle gets erased and morality inserted in its place. Which does change the nature of the story and our own capacity to wonder about it. I’d rather read Jesus’ more direct take of morality (and he could be very direct) than find someone else has slipped their world-view in between Peter’s feet and the rushing waves. (And, of course, as with all things, I’m sure I’m plenty guilty of this kind of ‘explaining’, too. I hope that I stand more firmly in the camp of this-story-makes-me-wonder-about instead of this -story-definitely-means. When I don’t, please point it out – it’s healthier that way.)
The power in this and other miracle stories is not in the question of whether it happened or not. In the ancient world, miracles were a given. Magic was the cause-and-effect relationship that underpinned reality, so the point of a miracle story wasn’t to be amazed at the miracle. I think that the power in the story then sits with how it is told. Who is involved? How did it work? Not that long distance healing happened, but how it happened. And what that then makes us think about.
Let’s step sideways for a moment and consider this equation using science instead of magic as science plays a similar role in our own understanding of the world. We believe science. It helps us to understand seemingly random events. We have faith that there are scientific reasons for actions and events. Three statements that are not so many miles from the ancients’ views of magic.
So, here we go: a) it is a scientific fact that female foetuses develop all the eggs that they will ever have while still in their mother’s womb.
The feeling and understanding of that fact changes when we consider it personally.
b) The egg that became YOU was grown in your grandmother’s womb. Your mother carried the potential YOU from a moment before she was born until the moment you were. The love that began YOU was the love between your grandparents.
A bit shivery, eh? There’s meaning in that story that isn’t just about the details of how things happen. It’s deeper and more personal than that.
I think that miracle stories work in something of the same way. It isn’t the fact of the miracle that is “amazing” in this story; it is the personal context and detail. The centurion believed that a word from Jesus could heal his servant across a distance. Just a word. Because that was how his own authority worked – one word could change things. So he believed that Jesus could speak a word that would, through its authority, heal. Jesus was amazed, and he honoured the centurion’s faith and healed the servant with a word.
There is a lot to hear in these moments.
In this story, we hear the words of Luke, sharing fact and faith that we might believe. We hear Luke’s own faith and the faith of his community.We hear the healing word spoken. And in the healing, I hope and I trust that we hear the Living Word.
