Satan the Miracle Worker

     If you are part of a church you probably know that Easter is not far away, just few weeks.  On Easter Sunday Christians around the planet will be remembering Christ's return from death.  

     This is the greatest of the miracles claimed by the church:  the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Some don't believe it happened, that it is something that certain people (about two billion and counting) believe in, but nevertheless a certain something that is ultimately false.  

     Others see it as something that is blindly accepted.  Now, there are those who accept the stories of Christ's resurrection blindly, but the Christian traditions generally do not.  There is plenty of evidence - so much that it takes more (blind) faith to believe that he did not rise from death than that he did.  More perhaps on that some other time. 

     Neither is Jesus' rising from the dead some sort of one-off event meant to impress people into believing in him.  It is impressive, but it is not an isolated event that God produced to begin a new religion.  Rather, it is four things (at least four).  

     First, it is God's vindication of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.  Second, it is God's vindication of Jesus's interpretation of the Jewish faith.  Third, it is a fulfillment of the pre-Jesus Jewish faith in the resurrection of the community of the faithful .  God would bring this about in due course to reveal himself to all the world as the living God of justice, grace, forgiveness and healing.  

     Fourth, it is a breaking into the world of a new thing that is yet to come, but has already begun with the resurrection of Jesus, namely the total healing of the creation, the resurrection of all persons, and the end of the reign of death over human beings (and maybe all sentient beings, but that too is another story).  

     The resurrection of Christ is the greatest of the miracles presented in the Bible.  But it is not the only one.  There are miracle stories throughout the pre-Jesus and post-Jesus parts of the Bible.  And, as might be expected, the stories of Jesus are awash in miracles.  

     These miracles are not magic tricks in the sense of making the performer look impressive.  Instead, like the greatest of the miracles, they are manifestations of the renewal that God is bringing to the human world and to the whole creation.  Hints, prequels so to speak, of what is in store for the world. 

     But here's my thing for today.  The definition of miracles that most of us work with is that a miracle is a violation of the natural order of things.  It is God interrupting the usual way the world works, his disrupting the laws of nature.   (This definition was presented by the British philosopher, David Hume, and several others.  He and people like him tend to be skeptical about a lot of things and their grumpiness towards God and faith continues to find fans today.) 

     But I don't think this is the best way to look at miracles.  Jesus did not interrupt nature when he healed those who could not walk, those with illnesses, and others who were blind or mute.  He restored nature.  

     In this way of looking at it, Jesus' rising from the dead wasn't a violation of the laws of nature which dictate death for the human body.  It was, among other things, a restoration of the natural order as it relates to the human body.  

     This means that the miracles Jesus performed are not a glimpse into the fundamentally unusual and abnormal.  Instead they reveal that what we usually take as the normal is itself fundamentally unusual and alien.  

     It is physical disease and mental illness that are a disruption of the created  world.  It is sexual abuse and addiction that are a disruption of God's natural world.  It is war and the cycles of violence everywhere that are a disruption of the proper life-affirming order of the world God has made. 

     The real miracle workers are not the Mother Theresas and the wonder-working saints of the Catholic Church.  The real miracle workers are the Adolph Hitlers, the crystal meth makers in Toronto and London, sexual predators and adventurers who could care less about the pregnancies they leave their partners to handle, terrorists (however religious they may be), and commanders of child soldiers.  Satan, not Jesus, is the real miracle worker in that he inspires and abets the continuing violation of the natural order which God has for his creation.  

     However, it is God's unstoppable intention to restore his world to what it should be.  And the resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ, is the sign-post without equal that his intentions are not in question.  One day they will overrun the creation, evicting all dark miracle workers, leaving the rest to breathe a great sigh of relief and get on with living life as God has always intended.