What Is a Miracle, Anyway?

Back when Johnny Carson was the host of The Tonight Show he interviewed an eight year old boy. The young man was asked to appear because he had rescued two friends in a coalmine outside his hometown in West Virginia. As Johnny questioned the boy, it became apparent to him and the audience that the young man was a Christian. So Johnny asked him if he attended Sunday school. When the boy said he did Johnny inquired, “What are you learning in Sunday school?” “Well, last week our lesson was about when Jesus went to a wedding and turned water into wine.”

Johnny asked, “And what did you learn from that story?” The boy squirmed in his chair. It was apparent he hadn’t thought about this. But then he lifted up his face and said, “If you’re going to have a wedding, make sure you invite Jesus!”

Today’s Gospel is about that wedding reception in Cana where the hosts ran out of wine.

Now you have to understand what a big deal weddings were for Jewish families in that day. The festivities lasted for as long as a week. We’re told that the newly married couple often kept open house for this occasion. They wore crowns and dressed in fine wedding garments. They were treated like a king and queen. Sometimes they were actually addressed as king and queen, and their word was treated as law.

It was customary to have so much food and wine at the wedding that there would be leftovers. Running out of food or wine was considered a cardinal sin. In some instances, the offending family could even be fined. So, if you ran out of wine, it was more than an embarrassment. It was a serious problem.

We’re all familiar with this story where Jesus turned water into wine. But there are some lessons in this simple story, lessons we can profit from. Here is the first one: The purpose of miracles in the New Testament is to show that Jesus is who he says he is. Now miracles don’t happen just because Jesus has compassion on someone. Jesus has compassion for everyone. If that were the only qualification, we would all experience miraculous occurrences all the time in our lives. Nobody would be sick or poor or lack anything essential to life. We would simply ask God for a miracle and He would grant it. But life doesn’t happen that way.

Albert Einstein was right when he said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” That is, God created the natural order and He pronounced that it is good.  What a magnificent planet God has given us. It is perfectly balanced – just enough light, just enough darkness, just enough moisture, just enough dry land, just enough heat, just enough cold to sustain the lives of billions of people.

God seems to be reluctant to interfere with the wonderful mechanisms of the natural order. Even the miracles that Jesus performed conformed to God’s natural laws. A perfect example is the turning of water into wine.

Water is being changed into wine in vineyards around the world, in grapevines and then through the process of fermentation. It is a natural process in perfect harmony with the laws of nature.

In his book titled Miracles, C.S. Lewis points out that in every one of Christ’s miracles Jesus remained true to the laws of nature. He simply short-circuited the natural process. For example, it takes a long time to produce wine from water using grape vines and fermentation tanks. Jesus simply did instantly what Mother Nature does over a longer period of time. But Jesus did it all within God’s natural order. In no instance did he break God’s natural law.

God seems reluctant to interfere with the wonderful mechanisms of the natural order. For example, if you step out in front of a speeding car and pray that the laws of gravity and momentum will be suspended momentarily so that you will not be crushed, you will probably be disappointed. Can you imagine the chaos that would result if the law of gravity were suspended even for one second? Airliners would be flung far into space.  All the dishes would fly out of our cabinets.

Even God does not play havoc with the wondrous laws of nature. If you wonder why God does not perform more miracles in our lives, this may be part of the answer.

This is not to say, however, that extraordinary miracles do not happen. The testimony of Scripture is that they do. But they are within the boundaries of God’s law and their purpose is to remind us of God’s presence in our lives.  People of faith will always have beautiful things happen in their lives that they cannot explain. After all, God is at work in our lives and He is in control of the natural order. He does not break His laws, but He can certainly work through His laws.

Patricia Laye tells of visiting a businessman’s office, and while they talked, she noticed that he constantly twirled a small paperweight with a dime in it. Curious, she asked him about it. And he told her a story of a miracle.

He said that when he was in college he and his roommate were down to their last dime. They were the first two members of their families to ever attend college, and their parents were extremely proud of them. Each month their families sent them a small allowance to buy food. That month, however, their checks hadn’t arrived. It was a Sunday, the fifth one of the month, and between them they had one dime left.

They used the solitary dime to place a collect call to the businessman’s home five hundred miles away. Obviously this was many years ago when you could make a call for a dime from a pay phone. When his mother answered he could tell from her voice that something was wrong. She said that his father had been ill and out of work, so there was simply no way they could send money anymore. He asked his mother if his roommate’s check was in the mail. She said that she had talked with his mother. They couldn’t raise the money either. They were sorry, but it looked like the two boys would have to come home. They had put off telling them, hoping for some solution. The two students were devastated.

This is when the miracle occurred. The businessman said that when he hung up the telephone, they heard a noise . . . and dimes started pouring out of the pay phone. He said they tried to return the money. He called the operator back and told her what had happened.  She said that she would talk to her supervisor. When she got back on the line she said that the boys would have to keep the money, because the company wasn’t going to send a man all the way out to the school just to collect a few dollars.

The businessman said they laughed all the way back to their dorm room. After counting the money, they had $7.20. They decided to use the money to buy food from a nearby grocery store and to go job hunting after class.

When they told the manager of the grocery store what had happened as they paid for their purchases with their dimes he offered them both jobs beginning the next day. Their money bought enough supplies to last until their first paycheck.

To make a long story short, the businessman and his friend were able to finish college – the first in their families to do so. And they traced their accomplishment back to that miracle in a phone booth which this man believed was an act of God.

Was it an act of God? I’m not wise enough to know. All I can say is that many of us have had experiences that seem to have no other explanation. People of faith are particularly prone to these kinds of things.

Have you seen miracles? I hope so, for that means that you are attuned to the presence of God in your life. Most miracles occur within the events of everyday life within the confines of God’s natural order. That is the way God has chosen to work, but He does work. So keep your eyes open and, my guess is, you will see a miracle or two.