Miracles

“Christ displays little interest in miracles; He is more concerned with the matter of our salvation”…Faith based on miraculous works alone is insufficient for salvation; this kind of incomplete faith quickly turns to scorn should the miracles cease (John 19:15).” (Dynamis 8/13/2023, Orthodox Study Bible, John 4:48)

“The work of God’s providence surrounds us at all times, though our hearts are frequently out-of-tune with the eternal hymn of its working. We are deeply aware of every offense against goodness, every tragedy, every rumor of evil, while we constantly ignore how we are preserved in health, delivered from danger, and overshadowed by God’s brooding goodness. In the math of good and evil, the miracle of our very existence seems to be factored as a zero.” (Father Stephen Freeman) 

“There are seven miracles before the Resurrection which John has selected to write about at some length, which he calls “signs” (sēmeia in Greek). In all these miracles, the focus is not so much on the mighty works of God as on what these works signify—what they mean. He selected so few because with each one he wants to emphasize much more than Christ’s miracle-working power. The eighth miracle is the Resurrection itself. All the signs point to Jesus as the divine Messiah, and are “written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20: 31).” (Dr. Mary S. Ford)

“The Lord is often silent out of love. But the question arises: Why don’t miracles happen to everybody? How many sick people and their relatives entreat God and the saints with faith for healing! But we don’t always see miracles happening to them! Why is that? There can’t be a definite answer to this question. God’s ways are unfathomable. For who has known the mind of the Lord? (1 Cor. 2:16), the holy Apostle Paul asks. The Lord alone can give an exact answer to this question. It is very hard to explain Divine Providence, God’s will and silence. We can’t say that “the faith of this person is stronger than the faith of that one” or that “the Lord loves this person more than that one.” As the Almighty Himself says through the holy Prophet Isaiah: For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (Is. 55:9). Of course, the following should be noted here. The Lord is often silent out of love for people. God allows a person to undergo severe temptations for his salvation. In His omniscience, the Lord sees perfectly clearly that temptation, illness, or pain will lead a person to salvation.” (Metropolitan Nektarios Antonopoulos)

“It is interesting to note [in the Gospel] that the people who witness Christ’s miracles still have to make sense of them. The miracles are not self-interpreting, but the people have to decide what they mean. Theirs is a very religious society, but they are not sure that what Jesus is doing is godly! Many didn’t just accept the miracles with joy, they puzzle over whether His miracles mean He is good or evil. The people marvel – but it implies they don’t quite believe in Christ but rather aren’t sure what to make of Him. And the religious leadership is opposed to Christ, so they interpret His actions in a negative way, finding fault with Jesus (He heals on the Sabbath!), and even attributing Christ’s power to Satan…the people ultimately glorify God for what they see, but they will temper their thinking based upon what the religious leaders tell them. So much so that at Christ’s trial, the people are willing to chant to crucify Jesus. No matter what we experience in life, we have to interpret the experiences. This is apparently according to God’s own plan. We can see the hand of God in events, or experience the world as being all there is but having no further meaning.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“The miracles of Christ are a sign that God’s Kingdom is breaking into this world, or perhaps more accurately, that this world is related to God’s Kingdom and needs only a reorientation to recognize this truth. In this thinking, miracles are not so much things that overturn the order of nature, as they are signs of what nature was originally meant to be. They are nature doing the things God had imbued it with in the beginning, but which were lost as the consequence of the Fall…” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“The contention that miracles by necessity involve an interference and a suspension of the laws of nature by God has been the main objection in the acceptance of the possibility of miracles. Augustine contended that God’s will is the ultimate source of all things, and nothing can be “contra naturam” which happens by God’s will. Everything is natural to God. Miracles, Augustine continues to say, are not “contra naturam,” but they may be contrary to what is known to us as nature. (de Civ. Dei, XXI, 7f). The miracles performed by Christ do not interfere with the laws of nature, but rather restore the laws that were broken.” (Bishop John of Amorion)

“But what of miracles? If the whole world is a miracle, then what of those things that are commonly described as miracles? First, they do not belong to a separate category. That someone is instantaneously healed of a disease does not belong to a category of exception: it is a miracle among miracles that happen in a way such that we see the truth that might otherwise seem hidden. The danger in miracles for the modern mind is to think of them as exceptional. In doing so, we imagine the world as divided into the miraculous and the ordinary.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“The new gullibility of our particular time is not that of the man who believes too much, but that of the man who believes too little—the man who has lost his sense of the miracle—the man capable of believing that creation is in some way an automatic or commonplace thing, or even that man himself, physically and psychically can be dissected into neat packages susceptible to complete explanation.” (Robert J. Wicks)

“The Holy Spirit comes and dwells in us (so to speak) as a spark, as a seed. And a seed can lay dormant for years, even for a lifetime. The Holy Spirit is a spark in us that can easily be ignored, as our conscience can be ignored, ignored to the point of being deadened or seared, seared as with a hot iron (or so St. Paul tells us). But when we begin to pay attention to this spark, when we start to nurture the seed, then a strange miracle begins to happen. A new and strange reality opens inside us, a reality that cannot be expressed by the words and concepts we have spent a lifetime learning, words and concepts that are all we have to express this glorious miracle we are becoming aware of within us.” (Fr. Michael Gillis)

“Quite simply, the events…usually spoken of in terms of God’s “special” action may be seen, not as the product of some kind of divine interference with the world, in which the laws of nature are set aside or manipulated. Rather, they may be seen as the outward manifestation in this world of something that is already present but hidden within it: what we can properly call its “natural” state. The miraculous is not, in this perspective, the result of something being added to the world. It is, rather, the wiping away from that world of the grime of its fallen state, in order to reveal it in its pristine splendor.” (Christopher C. Knight)

“…the purpose of Christianity is not to do miracles – making natural events or things into supernatural events or things – but to reveal the miraculous nature of creation (each things natural goodness) which God intended for it and us when God called all things into being. Dualism is rejected as all of the created world is both physical and spiritual. There is one reality with many dimensions, and they are all held together in Christ. Our goal is to open our eyes so that we can once again see creation as God intended it to be. (Read John 6:26-27 in which Christ reproves the people for seeking more miracles/magic to benefit themselves in this world but failing to see these things as signs of God’s Kingdom.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

 “The Incarnation of Christ teaches us not just that God became a man, but that the earth has a capacity for the heavenly. It not only has a capacity for the heavenly, but is so constructed that it cannot be rightly understood and lived in unless and until we see and regard that heavenly which is hidden within it. God has purposely hidden these “treasures” from us so that we might become the kind of persons who know how to see and find them. So, we lost paradise and came “into this world” (St. Basil’s language for the Fall). But having come into this world, we only return to paradise when we find it hidden here (where we are). That finding is the fruit of an inward repentance and the acquisition of the Spirit. I would say, carefully, that by “repentance,” I am describing turning away from the “not seeing, not seeking” way of life.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“Christ the creator Logos has implanted in every created thing a characteristic logos, a ‘thought’ or ‘word,’ which is God’s intention for that thing, its inner essence which makes it distinctively itself and at the same time draws it towards the divine realm.” (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware)

“If, instead of stopping short at the outward appearance which visible things present to the senses, you seek with your intelligence to contemplate their inner essences, seeing them as images of spiritual realities or as the inward principles of sensible objects, you will be taught that nothing belonging to the visible world is unclean. For by nature all things were created good.” (St. Maximos the Confessor)

“...the crowds do not swarm Jesus when He commands repentance (Matthew 4:17), but only when He begins to heal and work miracles. This fact shows that the people misunderstand the true nature of His Kingdom.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Matthew 4:23-25)

“Asking for miracles in order to believe betrays a sort of smugness on our part; it’s like asking for an expensive gift from a potential friend before considering his overture of friendship." (Abbot Tryphon)

“True faith is a life of repentance of sins and participation in the grace-giving sacraments of the Church. True faith is humble, never making a show of anything, especially not miracles.” (Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick)

“Faith is a divine gift, but it is never forced upon us. And it doesn’t happen through convincing proof or by witnessing miracles.” (Lynn Anderson)

“Love is more important than all the spiritual gifts exercised in the church body. Great faith, acts of dedication or sacrifice, and miracle-working power produce very little without love. Love makes our actions and gifts useful. Although people have different gifts, love is available to everyone.” (Life Application Study Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13)

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