The Miracles of Christ Generally

“If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not. But if I do, though ye believe not Me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in Me, and I in Him.”—John x. 37-38.

The passage: Jesus says that if He does not do the works of His Father, people should not believe Him. But if He does them, then even those who do not believe Him should believe the works, so that they may know and believe that the Father is in Him and He in the Father.

Last Sunday I compared the method we usually think the cleverest for defending the Gospel and refuting its opponents with the method St. Paul used in his speech at Athens. I showed that the two are not merely different but directly opposed. Neither the Apostle’s greater gifts nor our eighteen centuries of inherited blessing can account for it. If we are right, his inspiration only led him wrong. If he was right, the measures we take to secure the treasures he proclaimed show how little we value them.

I have argued that the cause of this departure from the precedent we profess to honour is that he and we mean quite different things by Revelation and Manifestation. These are favourite words of his, and whole Epistles, not just single passages, depend on them. That is natural, since he says in Galatians that the revelation of Christ to him is what enabled him to preach to the Gentiles. His conversion, which we consider this week, and the message he delivered to the nations are therefore bound up with his idea of Revelation. The more you follow the word through his letters, the more you will find him exact in its use. It always means the unveiling of a Person, the ground and Archetype of men and the source of all their life and goodness. The unveiling is not to the eye but to the man himself, to the Conscience, Heart, Will, and Reason God made to know Him and be like Him. In the bolder language we considered last Sunday, it is the revelation of Him “in whom we live and move and are” to creatures who are “feeling after Him, if haply they may find Him.”

Suppose this idea of Revelation is exchanged for its opposite. Suppose we mean by it certain communications God makes because His own constitution of us makes us incapable of knowing Him as He is, so that He cannot be unveiled to us in nature, character, or purpose. Then we must view and present the whole subject in a way that appears nowhere in St. Paul or in the Old and New Testaments. We are then like men fighting with great zeal for the authority of books whose contents, once taken off the shelf, overturn the hypothesis on which our defence rests. In proving the necessity of a Revelation, we have done our best to refute the Revelation these books bear witness to.

Once this theory is fully developed, it finds, like jealousy, proofs strong as holy writ, even drawn from holy writ. The rage for apologetic literature has always fostered it, while the faith, practical life, and sufferings of Christians have protested against it. Our Lord’s miracles have been made to serve it above all. They are, it is said, strange, exceptional acts, recorded to make Christ’s mission credible. Admit them, and you cannot doubt that He spoke with unique authority. Accept that authority, and you must receive whatever the book says, however it clashes with your heart and reason. I am not asking now how successful this argument has been, or whether it has kept numbers from the faith it recommends. I am not asking whether appeals to the intellect about miracles fit with the later demand that the intellect be suppressed. I only ask what the works of Christ are for, if not for this. I will not answer, as these apologists answer in every other case, that we cannot penetrate the designs of an infinite Being. Scripture and the Church have given the answer. The miracles were for the manifestation of Christ’s glory. That is John’s own word for the miracle at the marriage-feast, and it is why the Church chose that story and others for the Sundays after Epiphany. On this view the miracles are not arguments telling the understanding to stand aside. They unveil to the whole man the nature, character, and mind of the Son of Man, and therefore, as the passage of my text shows, of the Father who sent Him.

I. Our Lord says, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.” Did St. Paul’s words at Athens seem inconsistent with some current notions? These are more startling. We are constantly told it is irreverent, and shows ignorance of the limits of our minds and the distance between God and us, to ask whether some act has a divine or an undivine quality. I believe those who say this contradict themselves. I know they call many acts attributed to Siva, Vishnu, and the gods of classical mythology evil and hateful, with nothing divine in them. Where did they learn that language? From the book that tells them God is righteous, just and without iniquity. They learned it from God’s reasonings with His creatures about the folly of worshipping stocks and stones and pouring offerings to false and evil beings. They learned it from the chapters of Isaiah we are reading these Epiphany weeks, where God sets forth His true Image of perfect gentleness and meekness to confound the dark images men have made of Him. Yet when doubters of our own land say that some word, act, or habit of mind should not be attributed to a Divine Being, we do not ask whether the Holy Book actually represents Him so, or whether the objector has understood it, or whether it really outrages his conscience. We deny his right to inquire at all. From some lofty tribunal we pronounce that man has no test for right and wrong in One who claims to be above man. He may use all his faculties to judge whether a book probably comes from an infinite and omnipotent Being, and none to judge what manner of Being it comes from. Might not the disputer answer, “All that may be true; it strengthens my growing atheism. But why did your logic and theology fall asleep when you talked about Vishnu, Siva, and Jupiter?”

To all this contradictory talk I oppose not my own reasonings but the words of Christ: “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.” This is a plain appeal to something in man that can recognize whether the works are the Father’s. Christ made that appeal through His whole life on earth, in works He Himself called good, which we have turned into mere exercises of irregular power and violations of the order He Himself established.

Take the work at Cana, which the Church set before us last Sunday. John, who must have witnessed it, says Christ in it manifested His glory to His disciples. He means us to remember his own earlier words, “We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,” full of grace and truth. A Man sat among them, sharing their joy, and showed Himself to them as its source. A change wrought calmly and secretly, unknown to those it would have startled most, gave them a sense of creative power such as they had never had. The occasion was common and earthly, and the gift was an ordinary thing, though one that symbolized life and gladness. But a universe reveals its laws in little things, and the unfolding of a flower may teach us more of the birth and growth of all things than reflecting on the whole Cosmos. In this one act those fishermen may have been awakened more deeply than all kings and prophets before them to the sense of good things coming down through a Brother from a Father. It may have delivered them from material conceptions of Creation. If not at once, then through the discipline of later years working on that one event, they may have risen to the perception of a Word who gives life.

That, I think, was truly a manifestation, and we may confidently apply our Lord’s test to it. If it had not come to the disciples as a work of the Father, they would not have believed on the Son of Man. They might have believed in a great enchanter who could play with the powers of nature. They would not have believed in a Lord of their hearts and reins, a King of nature and of man, One of whose fulness all received, and grace for grace.

Take also the acts of healing in today’s Gospel. The first was for a leper who met our Lord as He came down from the Mount. The people who heard His discourse there said, “He speaketh as one having authority, and not as the Scribes.” He spoke like a King who knows the Law and the Lawgiver, not like one spelling out the meaning from books. The leper confessed the same: “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” He was saying, “Thou hast authority; thou art King over men, over me. And thou hast spoken of a Father who cares for His children, even the unthankful and evil. Wilt thou not then regard even an outcast who proclaims himself unclean? Others may cut him off, but wilt thou?” The answer, “I will; be thou clean,” certainly asserts the authority the leper ascribed to Him, a kingly right over the man’s body to restore its health. Yet far from separating that healing from the order of God’s government, Christ sends the man to the priest, the appointed judge in cases of leprosy. He is to prove by the recognized outward sign that the inward cure has happened, and to offer the gift the law prescribes. So Christ is not a new King installed for the first time. He is the manifestation of Him whose goings-forth have been from everlasting, and from whom all powers and methods of healing derive. He is thus strictly fulfilling His words. If my works are less regular, orderly, and inward than those of Him who governs all things and renews life day by day, believe me not. If they are not works of grace and truth, bearing witness to a Father who is not the destroyer but the restorer of men, pursuing them into every secret place of sorrow to make them right, believe me not.

This manifestation prepares for the next, the Centurion’s, of which I have spoken more than once. I will not dwell on how his Roman training taught him obedience, government, and the power of words to hold multitudes in subjection. I speak of it as the typical case of healings that demanded faith and evoked it. Our notion of miracles leads us to suppose this faith was in a Person visible to the eye, able to do unprecedented marvels. Our Lord chooses as His instance of lively faith a man who cared nothing for sight or touch, who confessed an invisible might, and who believed his servant would be healed if Christ spoke the word. May we not say without hesitation that the highest blessing Christ gave to palsied, leprous, blind, deaf, and dead men was awakening in them a trust that raised them above what they saw, above themselves? Was not the difference between the nine who went their way and the one who returned to give glory to God just this? All received a bodily cure equally perfect, but he was saved out of selfishness and ignorance of God, because he saw that Jesus was doing His Father’s works. I think this has been the reading of earnest readers, almost the traditional interpretation of Christendom. If we held it consistently, and counted the lessons these miracles have carried to suffering and lonely people everywhere worth all the apologies ever written, we should be less afraid to take the Son of God’s words as they stand. We should not think it dangerous to apply His own test to His own works.

I reserve the restoring of the man possessed with devils for next week, because it bears directly on one of the main reasons for inventing another test than our Lord’s. The Church links that narrative with the crossing of the Lake of Galilee, when Jesus said to the storm, “Peace, be still.” There is great beauty, as all readers feel, in joining tumults in nature with tumults of the human spirit, and deep practical benefit in considering how they are alike and different and why one monarch must rule both. I would gladly use next Sunday’s Gospel for that, but since I want your minds fixed on the cure of the demoniac for its own sake, I touch the first story only briefly, as another illustration of “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.” Our Lord’s acts of power gather up, wonderfully, the functions that seekers after God, feeling after Him, had assigned to separate divinities. The Jews scarcely knew the names Dionysus, Æsculapius, Demeter, Phœbus, but like all peoples they felt that some distinct benefactor must be behind wine that gladdens the heart, common bread, bodily health, sickness, and the light of the eye or understanding. As the disciples were to preach to all nations, acts that testified to a union of powers were the best preparation for entering the faiths of different races and asserting the unity of which their own faith was the witness. To realize by one instance in whose hand was the trident of the seas was surely part of that discipline, which they would appreciate later. They could appreciate it only later because the impression made on them at the time was not of a wonder-worker exhibiting power and causing sudden excitement. It was of a calm Ruler, the upholder and restorer of peace and order. The work revealed Him who fixed the bounds of earth and sea, and beneath the Creator of the world it revealed the Father of men.

II. The first part of my text is negative: “If I do not, believe me not.” The second is positive, full of instruction and, I think, encouragement: “But if I do, though you believe not me, believe the works.” Generally the order was reversed. The Galilean fishermen first recognized Jesus as the Teacher they craved, to whom the prophets and John, the last of them, had pointed. Then the works became fuller manifestations of His nature and dominion. The Centurion had learnt his need of One who could command men by a word, as he commanded his soldiers, and the power that sent away his servant’s palsy seemed the fitting endowment of such a Ruler. But our Lord speaks of cases where belief in the works may come first and lead to belief in Him. The works, He says, may lead men to know, actually to know, that the Father is in Him and He in the Father. What! To know this? Is it not the deepest mystery of the Christian faith? Must it not be received as a dogma from other ages, galling to reason, which cannot object because it has no capacity for the Infinite? I can only repeat our Lord’s words. He says that men who believe the works to be His Father’s, even before they believe in Him, may come to know this truth. Suppose it is a truth, and this mystery does underlie the universe as our creeds profess. Suppose the Church is right to treat these works as divine manifestations. Must it not then be so? Could they be divine manifestations and not manifestations of this divine relation? Could men feel them as divine, as the expression of the highest grace and truth, and as human, coming with all human grace and truth, and not confess a Father and a Son, with an inward certainty no mere dogma or tradition ever earned or claimed to earn?

And yet, brethren, we fear to let the miracles face the trial Christ claimed for them, to which such a promise is attached! We think it safer to stifle all inquiry into their moral character, lest we endanger the authority of the documents containing them! Oh, poor and heartless policy, which must have the results of all policy not based on truth! No doubt, if you invite men to say whether the miracles bear the marks of grace and truth, and are such signs as a Father would give His children, you let them state their doubts, difficulties, and suspicions. Do you not wish them to? Do you not know there is incalculable danger in their suppressing these and not bringing them into the light? Some doubts are merely idle, prompted by scorn. But are there not some God has awakened in order to satisfy them? Dare you crush those? Can you tell the tares from the wheat? Can you not trust God to do it? Commonly, the truth must be said, our modern way of meeting objections feeds and justifies the pride and contempt behind the worst of them, and only hinders from coming forth those that really demand an answer, and that will find one if there is any moral standard or moral sense in man.

While we consider the effect on others, let us not forget the reaction on ourselves. History, not speculation, gives us an awful warning. We know from the Evangelists and Apostles that there were religious men, eager to crush all doubt about the authority of Scripture and ready to confess miracles that were merely miracles of power. These men refused our Lord’s test. They would not ask whether His works were good or came from the Father, since they did not believe they had faculties for the inquiry. So they denied both the Father and the Son. They came to believe that He healed the sick, stilled the winds and waves, and preached glad tidings to the poor under the inspiration of Beelzebub, the Prince of the devils.