There are relatively few miracles in the Old Testament and they vary in quality in that some are artistically rendered and so provide lasting images, like the Burning Bush, or seem just a trick, like Daniel in the lion’s den, that simply occasioning surprise in that he simply survives rather than the miracle conveying meaning on its own, as happens when Lot’s wife turns to a pillar of salt when she looks back to see the destruction of Sodom, and so indicates that people ought not to turn back on their lives lest they become frozen or transfixed in that reverie rather than move on to new events. That particular miracle is deep, something more than a violation of physical nature. It is about the actuality of social and psychological nature. When Joshua stopped the sun so that his army had time to win the battle, it was a sense that a long and bloody afternoon kept on and on until this battle was done, as if it were that the sun had not been allowed to set. The Bible is replete with this imagery, only some of them considered miracles so as to make a point and also to show that God, one way or another, intervenes in things. It would have been not at all that surprising for a spark to set off a burning bush. Its significance was in that a voice was associated with it and so is in keeping with the very deep Hebraic insight that God appears in voices as a kind of event rather than in other events, like catastrophes or places that are holy in themselves.
The miracles in the Gospels, for their part, are of high artistic quality because they each have a dramatic quirk and also a meaning or appeal to something emotionally and intellectually deep, and so indeed moves the fundamentals of the world. Otherwise, an Eleanor Roosevelt type figure could have accompanied Jesus on his travels, had applicants who filled out index cards with pertinent information, lined them up, and then passed them before Jesus, one by one, where with a minimum of announcement of a client’s claim on a miracle, Jesus could have economically made a gesture or an utterance that made it happen, and then moved quickly to the next client. If Eleanor had used Jesus just for an hour a day, so that He could get on with doing other things, a lot of people would have gotten their miracles, a good crop of accomplishments for a someone equipped to do that. But that is not the way miracles happen.
Think of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Jesus does not do so just to show He could and to display superabundance. Providing enough food to the marriage feast was an act of graciousness and generosity as might be offered by a guest to a wedding and it also showed how abundance was an idea where for a brief moment we saw the prospect of people without privation, which is what happens in many a wedding feast when people save up to splurge and go on a honeymoon that gives the a materialistic heaven for a week or two that they might not be up to for many a year while the young couple struggles with money. So this miracle is like ordinary life as well as a prospect of an expanded and more enlightened way of life which someday will reign when people will in general not be deprived.
Here is another miracle in the Gospels that is illuminating rather than just surprising. Mark presents Jesus as an itinerant miracle worker who arrives at Tyre and is called upon to expunge a demon from a woman’s daughter. Jesus says that the children should be fed first lest the dogs get the food. The woman says that the dogs only eat the crumbs left under the table. Jesus says that the demon will be raised because of that and the daughter is cured after Jesus leaves. What does this mean? There is an ambiguity in the miracle. The miracle might be caused by Jesus or maybe it had only been recognized as would happen because the woman had led an organized household, in that the dogs knew their place, and so the demon was sure to leave because it could only fester in disorder-- or, at least, sometimes would be the case and the miracle was that a clean home would have its rewards. Do people make their own miracles happen and Jesus is appreciating that or is He alone or like his ilk the true miracle workers?
Yet in the very next story, there is a simpler miracle. Jesus cures a man of his deafness, the only point of which is that Jesus enjoins his beneficiary to keep quiet, lest others find out about what Jesus is doing, but that doesn’t make sense because Jesus is on tour doing miracles wherever he can. Maybe Jesus is ambivalent about the major authorities finding what He is up to and that it is more than miracle making. But the event itself does not convey significance, which suggests that some miracles are artistic and some are not, some miracles mentioned just to add up the count,
The mightiest of miracles, of course, is the Resurrection. Think how artfully it was done. The women find that the tomb was empty. That was their discovery: that the tomb did not have the body of Jesus seeing himself as being revivified, perhaps even observed in death assmelling sweetly even after rotting in the grave, as was attributed to the first days after Goethe died. Instead, there is the image of loneliness, of Jesus not among us, even as a corpse, and so suggesting, as is true of many deaths, that people miss the people who have died. Only later does Jesus show himself to some of his followers who have gathered to meet him in the Upper Room so as to authenticate witnesses for him having been reborn, but the first message is that he has gone from the tomb, perhaps his corpse taken away by some other follower. For the moment, there is just a mystery reported only by women, an unreliable bunch, and we are to see what will happen, which is that Jesus was reborn, and so the mystery of whether Jesus had been reborn is extended, rather than just a momentary revelation. Miracles are therefore and not only here mysteries to be solved in that there is more of the story that has to be told, as happened when the parting of the Red Sea just opens the possibility of what will happen to the Israelites, that they will conquer Canaan as that is what happened by the time those who wrote “Exodus” had already known was to happen, rather than the miracle of the dividing sea was the end of it, no following laurel wreath, while people just pondered what had happened before succumbing to the Egyptian resurgence and the Israelites just drifting off into one among the nameless peoples of the desert.
Because present day people have not much of a taste for miracles, it is easy enough to fall into a weak or merely metaphorical meaning for miracle, which accurately refers to a suspension of natural events through supernatural means, whether curing a leper or dividing the Red Sea. Other extended uses of the term apply to the miracle of birth, which is a transformative event whereby a fetus emerges and becomes a human being, and makes one wonder how much before that the foetus could be sid to have the spark of life, or the miracle of sunset, whereby the levels of the pollution in the atmosphere make the reds and oranges bright and give an aesthetic sense of how beautiful is creation, though I would think that aliens watching very foreign sunsets with perhaps purple double moons and ammonia clouds between them and the sun might also think it an awe inspiring sight because that is the one that they have seen. What is only a little bit heightened seems beautiful and mysterious and therefore a kind of miracle. A third sense of miracle is whatever happens that is unexpected or unlikely. The arrival of the cavalry at the nick of time is considered a miraculous deliverance from death administered by the Indians. Or that a surgeon is able to repair a badly frayed heart is considered a kind of miracle, however many people recognize it as simply superb skill backed with a little luck, in that there is a strand of flesh that can be sewn to another strand of flesh just where one needs to. A third miracle is a set of coincidences which add up to a kind of meaning if one cares to notice the concatenation of events, omens read in the fact that a messenger comes to corroborate what some radar signals have suggested only ambiguously that the enemy would be soon upon them.
Notice that miracles occur when there are moments of great stress when some clarity would be very helpful. The vision of Lourdes was associated with the troubles of the First World War just as the impending end of days is associated with turbulence, such as forest fires or earthquakes or political unrest so as to show it is time for that to happen, as was the case with the crossing of the Red Sea, though we might think that it would be grand if God allowed for transforming miracles to take place only once the social world had become serene and even pleasant for most people, stable rather than unstable, so that a final apocalypse was a surprise, an add on, an extra benefit, rather than the solution of a crisis.
There is little taste in miracles in the Old Testament until we get to the Hellenistic influence in Daniel. Notably, Noah did not do miracles. He just got the idea out of his mind that he should build an ark and carry it out even if other people, if they heard of it, thought it nonsense. The only miracle was that he persevered. The rainbow was not a miracle. It is an event that may well have occurred in nature before the Flood and had been rededicated now as a memorial or reminder that God would not do a flood again. A miracle might have happened if Noah and his family and his animals had been transported to an island high enough not to be flooded and so thereby survived. Miracles are passive; they are done onto you, like the visitation whereby Mary is conceived, rather than she sent out to get herself a child from someone chosen for the purpose, as happens in the Terminator series. That was no miracle even if it was miraculous in the sense of the event being weighty. Nor is Joshua keeping the sun from setting to be seen as more a metaphor than a miracle, even if skeptics point out that stopping the sun would make the solar system collapse. What did the ancient authors know about celestial mechanics? This was just a particularly parabolic way of expressing that a long afternoon continued so that the killing had enough time to finish, just a literary flourish rather than a miracle.
I remain puzzled about “Exodus” and the miracle the parting of the Red Sea, all the parts of the book so exquisitely composed and all its parts put together to provide a grand epic, complete with the birth and development, adulthood and old age for the singular figure of Moses, who is neither a prophet or only very sometimes a miracle worker who, indeed, is chastised for having gotten water from a stone, but rather a political organizer, reminding us how such lowly occupations can accomplish great things, as they did with Martin Luther King, Jr. Think also in “Exodus” of the multiple complications in the story, such as the conflict with the priestly Aaron, and the introduction of the Law as a concept unto itself, whether law was a miracle or a discovery or the gradual cultural evolution of a people? All these jumbled together events quite aside from the freeing of one dependent group from its rulers. “Exodus” works as a whole while “Genesis” works as an accumulation of short stories that together also constitute a civilization to be compared, for its own spirit and customs, to those of either the Sumarians or the Egyptians. You might think that something very different was being created, something as panoramic as well as united, as had been the case by Homer.
Catholics are unwilling to give up the idea of miracles because they want to retain a lively interchange between the supernatural and the natural, innumerable moments which spark the transaction between the unseen and the seen, however much in practice the authorities have limited bursts of illuminated inspiration so as not to cater to the gullible, turning Lourdes down before embracing it, now regarding the Shroud of Turin as a measure of piety, and so commendable, rather than a fact of untruth, and so to be forgotten. Catholics still insist that there are miracles that show that people have arisen to heaven and so to be regarded as saints even if the number of miracles has been reduced from two to one and no longer insist that a miracle cure of health has to be immediate and complete to be considered a miracle. Perhaps Catholics might take to hear Nicolas Malebranche, the French Catholic who was the last of the great systematic philosophers, in that he thought that every cause was associated with a divine spark, an additional religious push, that made one thing happen after another, and so everything and always there was a miracle happening in life, but that may be to Protestantize the idea, Protestants having abolished the supernatural world so as to see the invisible forces of good and evil and spirit working themselves out through the natural world, and so Malebranche is doing one of those miracles that aren’t, which is pointing to the wonder of things, that events eventuate other events, rather than a true miracle or abundance of miracles. Whatever the case, miracles seem to me to be a literary device of great power in the Gospels even if not having sustained itself. “Miracle on Thirty Fourth Street” is just Macy’s cooperating with Gimbel’s while Edmund Gwen sparkles and we all discover the very young Natalie Wood.