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| Miracle
Max, perfectly played by Billy Crystal, is my second favorite miracle worker of all time. |
If you don’t
know Miracle Max, you haven’t watched the
Princess Bride dozens of times. If you haven’t watched the Princess Bride dozens of times, what’s wrong with you?
To
review: Inigo and Fezzik bring Westley’s
dead body to Max for a miracle, and after Max diagnoses Westley as “only mostly
dead,” Max prepares a chocolate-coated pill to revive Westley, and sends the
three heroes off to “storm the castle.”
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| A Marvel superhero I hadn't heard of? Inconceivable! |
M is also for
Miracle Man. I don’t mean the Marvel comic superhero; I didn’t know about
him till just now, and that’s saying something, because I grew up in a comic
book family, as my brothers will attest. No, Jesus is the Miracle Man.
In
JesusQuest, my Gospels course for high school students, we color code miracles
in red. If you do this in any of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) the
number of miracles is staggering.
A few years ago, I found this
definition of a miracle, and I’ve taught it to my students ever since: An unusual event,
requiring a supernatural agent, that authenticates the message or the
messenger. (I would credit the source, but I don’t remember it.)
In plain English that means a miraculous event is not an
everyday ordinary event. It’s not accomplished by humans alone without God's
help. It’s done to reveal the identity of the miracle worker or the truth of
his message.
Of course we toss around the word “miracle” in everyday
language. That’s okay so long as we recognize that’s not how it’s being used in
the Bible. People gush over the miracle of a new baby. Um, we know what causes that. And it happens a
lot.
Now when Mary
conceived Jesus without Joseph’s
help, that was a miracle.
We also gush over the miracle of modern medicine. Believe
me, I am very thankful for the brilliant, skilled doctor who put two titanium
plates and ten screws in my right ankle in November of 2013. However, I believe
he went to medical school to learn how to do that. Now if the second set of
x-rays had revealed no fractures, that
would have been a miracle.
If everything is a miracle, then nothing is a miracle. It’s
like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “where all the
women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above
average.” If all the children are
above average, there’s a new average, and none
is above average.
So, because
of my preference for precise language, and because of my compulsion for correct
theology, I tend to be a skeptic about miracles, especially televised or big
rally miracles. Or miracles that happened to your cousin’s brother-in-law’s
paperboy’s step-grandmother. In other words, miracles that can’t be validated.
But when I know the person? And I know how sick she was? That's a miracle I can believe. I will not
attempt to recount Susan Swan’s miracle, but instead send you to her blog,
where she has four posts about it, starting with http://susanreithswan.com/2014/08/03/god-still-works-miracles-part-one/
If you made
it back here after visiting Susan’s blog, treat yourself to a this video, depictions
of Jesus’ miracles, accompanied by a calm, uplifting song.
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