MIRACLE, Interaction of Faith and
THE INTERACTION OF FAITH AND MIRACLE
Virgil Warren, PhD
The distinctive purpose of New Testament miracles was to enhance faith. That contrasts with doing miracles to entertain, to satisfy curiosity (cp. Herod in Luke 23:8-9), to escape limitations in the natural order, to make money, to get attention, or even to heal everyone. Jesus cursed the fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22 = Mark 11:12-14, 20-26) to teach his disciples a valuable lesson. Miracles were not sheer displays of supernatural power, but manifestations that verified Jesus’ proclamation and claims.
New Testament miracles were for enhancing faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah. That Messianic purpose was relatively specific within the general purpose of miracles, which were for proving the claim of the miracle worker whatever it was. Jesus used the healing of a paralytic to confirm his claim to forgive sins (Mark 2:1-12). He appealed to his coming resurrection to prove his right to expel moneychangers from the temple (John 2:13-22). He used the predicted resurrection as the “sign” of his messiahship (Matthew 12:38-40 = Luke 11:29-30; Matthew 16:4; cp. Romans 1:1-4, etc.). He healed on the Sabbath with the side benefit of showing that Jewish compunctions against Sabbath breaking had “gone to seed” (John 5:2-17; 9;1-16-24 -40-41). Paul and Barnabas “recounted what signs and wonders God had worked through them among the Gentiles” in order to show that their not circumcising Gentile converts accorded with God’s will (Acts 15:12-13).
One important implication of miracles for faith enhancement is that the recipient’s faith is not necessary for the success of a miracle. That is obvious in cases where Jesus or the apostles took the initiative without being asked: the resurrection of the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-18), the healing of a lame man at the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:2-9) and the lame man at Gate Beautiful (Acts 3:1-10), and the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21 = Mark 6:32-44 = Luke 9:10-17 = John 6:1-13) and the four thousand (Matthew 15:32-39 = Mark 8:1-10). A particularly striking example is the healing of Malchus’ ear in the Garden of Gethsemane (John 18:10-11). That the recipient’s faith is not necessary for the success of a miracle is obvious in cases that did not benefit anyone personally: walking on the water (Matthew 14:28-32), for example. It is also obvious in cases where God’s supernatural power overrode man’s ability to enhance or destroy, as judgment miracles show—striking Elymas blind (Acts 13:8-11), striking Ananias and Sapphira dead for lying (Acts 5:1-11), or exorcising demons (Matthew 17:14- 18, etc.).
Since the recipient’s faith is not necessary for the success of a miracle, a supposed faith healer cannot blame his failure on the recipient’s lack of faith. Since faith is a degree matter, insufficient faith would always be a plausible-sounding reason for failure. But once a miracle worker attempts to perform a miracle, he shows by doing so that all required conditions are in fact present or there would be no reason to proceed. There is only one example of a failed miracle in the New Testament (Matthew 17:14-20 = Mark 9:14-29), and that failure is blamed on the miracle workers’ lack of faith (Matthew 17:19-20). Peter’s partial failure at walking on the water is linked to his losing confidence once he started out from the boat (Matthew 14:28-31). Lack of faith is a warning most often associated with unanswered prayer rather than with failed miracle.
But if a recipient’s faith is not necessary for the success of a miracle, we may ask why Jesus asked for faith before a miracle was performed: Matthew 8:13 (= Mark 5:36); 9:2 (= Mark 2:5); 9:22 (= Mark 5:34; 10:52; Luke 7:50; 8:48; 17:19; 18:42; “your faith has made you whole”); 9:28-29; 12:58 (= Mark 6:5); Mark 9:23-24; 11:23-24 (cp. Matthew 17:20; 21:21; 1 Corinthians 13:2); Luke 8:50; Acts 14:9. Why was Jesus not able to do many mighty works in Nazareth because of their unbelief (Matthew 8:58)? At Lystra how did Paul see that the crippled pagan had faith to be healed (Acts 14:9)? Before his miracles Jesus often said, “According to your faith let it be done to you” (Matthew 8:13; 9:29) or “Your faith is great; let it be done to your as you desire” (Matthew 15:28). Afterward he says several times, “Your faith has made you whole” (Matthew 9:22 = Mark 5:34 = Luke 8:48; Mark 10:52 = Luke 18:42; Lk. 17:19; cp. Luke 7:50). If faith does not contribute to the success of the miracle, why do the accounts keep saying such things?
Faith may have been a condition for healing. Saying that the recipient’s faith was not necessary to make the miracle succeed means that faith did not help cause it. Faith is not like mind over matter as if believing something strongly enough makes it happen. In Jesus’ ministry, faith may well have been required as (1) a condition for doing a miracle, but a miracle may be conditioned on faith without being dependent on faith. Presumably Jesus’ not being able to perform many miracles in Nazareth was due to the people’s lack of faith, which he typically required as a condition. He did not customarily perform miracles in a hostile environment. The home-town people did not believe Jesus was who he claimed to be.
Jesus’ calling for faith also (2) kept his miracles from degenerating into something less significant than his messiahship and related claims. They were not for astounding people, for getting attention, or distinctively even for relieving their suffering. That they were not specifically for relieving human suffering showed when Jesus left a place without healing everyone that wanted to be cured (Matthew 8:14-18). After healing many people one evening, he went out early the next morning to pray; when the disciples found him and told him that everyone was looking for him, he said, “Let’s go into the next towns so I may preach there too, for to this end I came forth” (Mark 1:32-38 = Luke 4:40-42). Performing exorcisms and healings (a) gave evidence for his claims, but at the same time (b) allowed his miracles to have positive value in and of themselves, which in turn (c) enabled him thereby to express compassion for people at the same time he was trying to convert them. The miracles focused attention and helped create trust in his motives. Since he had chosen to use healing miracles and exorcisms to prove his claims, he needed to guard against people’s interest in them for their beneficial value alone. His saying, then, that people’s faith made them whole was in a conditional sense rather than a causal one; it was only because of the faith expressed in asking, etc., that they ended up healed; and they ended up healed, not by their faith, but by Jesus whom they asked and by his choice to grant their request.
In cases where the requester and the recipient were not the same, it was most specifically the faith of the people who interceded that was decisive: the centurion who approached Jesus on behalf of his servant (Matthew 8:5-13 = Luke 7:1-10), the father at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration who asked Jesus to exorcise the demon from his epileptic son (Matthew 17:14-18 = Mark 9:14-27 = Luke 9:37-43), the sister of Lazarus whom Jesus resurrected from the dead (John 11:1-45); and Jairus, the father of the twelve-year-old girl (Matthew 9:18-19, 23-26 = Mark 5:21-24, 35-43 = Luke 8:40-42, 49-56),
The full picture combines interacting truths: (1) the miracle worker may have called for preliminary faith as a condition of his performing the miracle or at least to contextualize the healing in the Messianic enterprise; but when he went ahead and attempted the miracle, its occurrence did not result from the recipient’s faith. (2) When the miracle succeeded, the recipient’s faith was increased. The role of healing miracles then was faith enhancement; the benefit moved the degree of his faith from what it was to what it became. Where there was no faith in the first place particularly, healing enhanced faith by initiating it.
How the faith of the recipient is involved in some instances of healing may call for comment. The Acts includes two unusual instances of healing that take place indirectly through symbols. In 5:15-16 people put their sick along the road so Peter’s shadow would pass over them. Strictly speaking, the text does not say that any of them were healed in this effort, but there is also no necessary reason for supposing that they were not healed. In 19:11-12 napkins were sent out from Paul to heal certain people. In the gospels a woman with continuous menstrual bleeding was healed by touching Jesus’ garment (Matthew 9:18-25 = Mark 5:22-43 = Luke 8:41-56). Matthew gives a general statement in 14:36 that people were asking him just to let them touch his clothes.
A certain trust level is evident in all these cases. Those who lined up along the roads or were carried there had enough faith to “try” being healed by Peter’s shadow. The woman with the issue of blood took the initiative in approaching Jesus as he walked along in the crowd. Perhaps because of the kind of malady she had, she was hesitant about asking for help from a man in public. Those who asked just to touch Jesus’ clothes had enough faith at least to ask.
On the other side of some episodes lies the question of how the will of the miracle worker was involved. It is not evident that the woman with the bleeding problem was healed without Jesus’ will. Since he knew the hearts of people in other situations (John 6:64), we suppose that he realized what was transpiring. He did not ask the question to find out who touched him but to protect against her interpreting the miracle in impersonal terms, to connect the miracle with his claims about himself, to change the miracle from a secret happening to a matter of public record, or to elicit a public expression of her faith. The people who asked to touch Jesus let him know what they wanted, so he was not unaware. Paul surely chose to “bless” the aprons and handkerchiefs that other people carried from his body to the sick or demon-possessed. The account does not indicate whether he knew who was receiving these items, so we cannot say for sure that he did; but we need not think that third parties took things he happened to touch and carried them away without his awareness as if psychic energy was transported through these articles. Cases like these add physical symbols to the phenomenon of healing from afar as when Jesus’ healed the centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5-13 = Luke 7:1-10) and the nobleman’s son (John 4:46-54) and exorcised the demon from the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter (Matthew 15:21-28 = Mark 7:24-30).
Finally, New Testament miracles had an interpersonal aspect. They were not examples of psychic power. The recipient had enough faith to choose to approach; in almost all cases he asked for the benefit; Jesus chose whether to heal. The miracles were not just energy transfers that could occur aside from the will of the benefactor as perhaps the woman thought who had menstrual bleeding, as the people may have thought in trying to position themselves so Peter’s shadow would fall on them, and as the popular belief ran in connection with troubling of the water in the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:2-7). Miracles were not just magic results that came from a ritual as perhaps Simon the sorcerer supposed when he asked Peter to give him the power that whomever he laid his hands on would receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:18-24). Nor were miracles caused by a verbal formula as the seven sons of Sceva found out when they tried to exorcise a demon by invoking the name of Jesus (Acts 19:13-16). New Testament miracles were matters of power (or authority), but it was power or authority resident in a person and subject to his will to use it. The power did not lie in a form or in a term or in psychic energy: “I know Jesus and I know Paul, but who are you?” (Acts 19:15). The interpersonal character of New Testament miracles may explain why they almost never benefited the miracle worker (although Jesus evidently ate with the crowds at the feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand and with the disciples in Galilee after the resurrection).
New Testament miracles were matters of “faith,” which, as the term implies, means persons were involved. The faith of persons was frequently a condition for miraculous benefits, and the faith of persons was always the purpose of miracles because they were done to enhance faith.
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