Of our Lord's many miracles, we have only a particular record of thirty-three--one, that is, for every year of His life, one for every month of His ministry. Over the winds and waves, over plagues like leprosy, over fevers and diseases, over infirmities of the eye and the ear,--whether inherited or contracted,--and even over wounds like a severed ear, His prerogative was absolute. It extended to the growth of trees, the movement of fishes, the processes of chemistry, which transmute liquids like water into wine and solids like flour into bread; and to coincidences, like the penny found in a fish's mouth. To that prerogative, animals like swine were subject, and the devils themselves.
Yet embracing all nature, animate and inanimate, the prerogative was sparingly invoked. Our Lord always displayed a reverent consideration for the established order of the world. While He walked on the water, He did not abolish the laws of gravity. Peter at once fell when the link of faith between him and the Almighty was broken. While He stilled the tempest, He left the world with air to breathe, and so taught us that our life depends even on the hurricane. He made wine out of water, not out of nothing; and in feeding the multitudes, He used what loaves and fishes there were, however few, and the fragments that remained over were carefully preserved for the future. When He observed His last Passover, He sent His disciples to prepare that sacred meal in the usual way; and while, on one occasion, He found a coin by His omniscience, the money in Judas Iscariot's bag was collected by ordinary methods. If people had not given it, humanly speaking, He _and His missionaries would have starved. In all His works, His object was not to relieve us of our responsibilities. His religion was not legerdemain. He left us still to live our humdrum lives, but showed what a difference His presence makes in the kitchen, the counting-house, the ocean-liner, and the railway train. Environment remains, but He rules it.
Christ's Works and the "Greater Things"
So it was that He dealt with the solemn mysteries of pain and death. He did not, by putting an end to disease, give immortality to our bodies as we know them. I doubt whether His ministry made any appreciable difference to the census returns of the Roman Empire. All those who were raised from their beds or from the tomb ultimately fell ill again or otherwise died. What He granted to them was what He grants to us--a brief postponement, which shall teach that our times are in God's hands. When He came, He found that men and women were--so to say--beaten by their sufferings, by their hunger, by storms, and by circumstances, the love of God was obscured. People clutched at charms, and luck, and quackery, and hypnotism, The Redeemer, stimulating courage, enlightening the reason, kindling love, led us again into the fight against our foes. The fire-brigade, the lifeboat, the orphanage, the hospital, arose out of His inspiration, and are among the greater things that He promised us because He was to go to the Father. By such means, the waste of life is gradually reduced. Pain and death are brought into line with the Divine purpose. Our opportunities in this world are won back for us; and it is not by violence, nor prematurely, that we pass beyond, but by orderly process, as Lazarus or the little maid, in His words, went to sleep, Death, with its terrors, becomes a gentle drawing of the curtain at nightfall, as when a child goes to bed to dream of the dawn.
In rendering special help, He was at times deliberate--as when He waited three days before coming to Lazarus; and at other times He was prompt--as when in a minute or two He raised the widow's son at Nain. In some cases, people made appeal to Him, but not in all. He it was who discovered the lame man at the pool of Bethesda and raised him to his feet; it was a definite, selective act. Yet there was no injustice to the great multitude of impotent folk--blind, halt, and withered--who received no assistance They saw Him, they heard Him, but they did not desire anything of Him, preferring "the moving of the water " to the moving of His heart. They made their choice. A man who had faith was healed, but on superstition no blessing was bestowed.
It was not Bethesda, but Christ's presence at Bethesda, that brought the miracle. And if there are wonders at Lourdes for those who credit them, I would say--it is not Lourdes that heals, but only Christ, and He can heal us anywhere. Nor, for us who are Protestants, is there special help in any particular church or chapel, or in the preaching of any particular clergyman or minister. The only thing that matters to us, when we need help, is that we should see Him; and when He leaves Bethesda, whatever Bethesda may be, the place becomes once more a mere pool--no more sacred than the Thames or the Ganges.
The Divine Procedure
Again: He limited His help strictly to what was actually required of Him. The leper was cleansed, but the priest had to certify the fact. The paralytic was cured, but he had to be brought by his friends, and he was told to carry back his bed. When the temperature of Peter's wife's mother became normal, so did her household duties. He awakened the little maid, but they had to give her something to eat.. He summoned Lazarus from the tomb, but his friends unwound the grave-clothes. He did not shatter God's laws of nature and duty. On the contrary, He taught us that God's laws are God's will, a personal rule, maintained from moment to moment--not by dull routine, but by His good pleasure. In thus interrupting the routine of nature, He disclosed the Authority behind it.
To our Redeemer there came at last the supreme question whether He would or would not invoke the Divine prerogative on His own behalf. The human race lay under the shadow of death; would He, as Son of Man and Son of God, exercise His power, so escape? When He knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane, this was one of the issues--not, I think, the only one--that wrung from His brow the moisture, like drops of blood. He had not known one day of illness, one pang of pain, but the actuality of suffering was no secret from Him. He knew, in advance, what would be the agony of head, of hands, of feet, and of heart, and His whole being craved for deliverance--"Let this cup pass from Me." But only on conditions. If He was thus to avoid the cup, it meant, either that we also must escape, or that, in our suffering, He must be separated from us. Having loved His own, He loved them unto the end. In all our affliction He must needs be afflicted. He had already foreseen that His followers would suffer many things and even lose their lives for Him. His question was already answered. "Not My will," said He, "but Thine be done." It was not, as some have thought, that He had no will apart from His Father's. His will was free as ours, but He surrendered it. He used no miracle to save Himself.
For Soul as well as Body
That decision has shaken the world. Many are the people who, in every age, cry out to be healed. Our Lord's disciples counted it all joy to suffer with Him what He had suffered for them. As He refused deliverance for their sakes, so do they refuse it for His sake. In the Hebrews, where the tests of faith mount up to a climax, the height of heroism is--not stopping the mouths of lions, not victory over the armies of aliens, not triumphs over fire, but torture that was not stopped, mocking and scourging, temptation and the sword--the not receiving of the promise. As Jesus prayed three times that the cup pass from Him, so did Paul pray three times that the thorn be removed from his flesh; yet he added, like the Saviour, that God's will must be done. We see the disciples in terror amidst the tempest, and saved by a miracle. We see Paul, a prisoner, the one cool man in a shipwreck. Beautiful may have been the picture of the sick and suffering who crowded around the Christ, and were healed; but nobler far is the silence of the hospital, where in skill, in service, and in anguish His Spirit rules supreme over soul as well as body.
Whether physical miracles have or have not ceased, it is not for me to say. For all I know--for all you know--our Saviour is honoring faith by arresting disease as frequently as ever He did in the days of His earthly life. But let us remember that He has deliberately changed the situation. He is no longer present with us in the body, but in the spirit. He teaches us that the body is only sacred as the vesture of the soul. He dealt with disease as a symbol of sin. The pain which follows sin was to Him a symbol of the guilt that follows sin. In curing disease and in alleviating pain He was frankly teaching us--He said so--His power to remove sin and pardon guilt. That power asserted, it may well be that the symbol is fulfilled. I see in the Christ not only One who worked wonders, but One who refused to work them.
So far from making much of those whom He healed in the flesh, our Lord permitted them, one and all, to pass into oblivion, their very names unknown, save of a very few, like Bartimæus and Lazarus and Malchus. He chose as His Apostles not those whom He rescued from physical disease and death, but men in the prime of life, sound in body and mind, and successful in their various callings. Simon and Andrew were fishers, and more than once they returned to their trade. James and John left their father, Zebedee, in the boat with the hired servants, and were thus employers of labor. Matthew, the tax-gatherer, was rich. There is no suggestion that any of the other Apostles were incapable of holding their own in the world, The men that He enlisted were men of military age, who could pass the doctor. For them He opened up a wide career in which they were to make, not money, but history.
They were to be fishers of men. They were to know the long night of toil when they would catch nothing. The disciples were to see the Saviour in the dawn, and were to learn that He it is who fills the nets until they break-those nets which, with Him on the shore, had so often to be mended. And what worried Peter was not leprosy of the hand, but of the heart. He was like the man possessed of a demon, who begged Jesus to go away because he knew who He was. But, while he threw himself into the waters of remorse, every stroke that he struck for safety brought him, so strangely baptized, nearer to that gracious and helpful Person who was to be his Guide, from that day one ward, even unto death. To Peter and his friends, conversion meant a new landscape. It opened vistas of achievement previously unimaginable. The winds and the waves, the boat and the nets, the clinking coin, were all suddenly illuminated by a Presence, who was sight to the eyes, hearing to the ears, speech to the dumb, and life to the dead. And when, in later years, they wrote of the Redeemer, their amazement over the particular miracles that they had seen was gradually dissolved in a deeper and more reverent wonder at the glory of Him who lived in their souls, a greater Miracle Himself all He accomplished among men.