[A sermon delivered to the Oxford Unitarians congregation via Zoom on Sunday 7th of February 2021]
(Readings: Isaiah 40:21-31 and Mark 1:29-39)
Back in the days before such things as Modernity and the Enlightenment had come about, if you had enquired of minister where the evidence was for the existence of God or Christ’s divinity, there is a good chance that they would have pointed you to the miracles in the Bible as infallible or unquestionable proof of such doctrines.
However, this is not so much the case today. The rise of reason and new belief in scientific thinking and new freedom to subject religious doctrines to rational critique led to the status or miracles to by analysed and investigated by many great minds.
Among the greatest of those minds to put pen to paper on miracles was none other than, veteran of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. In an essay that is remained very influential in the Philosophy of Religion, Hume defined a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature” and challenged the idea that we could believe anyone, be they sailor or gospel writer, who had ever claimed to see a miracle – indeed he argued that we should never believe them!
Hume had several arguments to back up his claim. Some a lot better than others – his claim that miracles had their origin in “ignorant and barbarous nations” would be judged by many readers today to show more insight into the racist, colonial, and somewhat ignorant attitude common in the times he inhabited rather than shedding much philosophical light.
Yet, the argument from Hume that has had most influence and staying power down the years is that, if I told you that I had seen someone miraculously curing sick people just by touching them, you would have far more reasons to doubt me than believe me. I might not be a reliable or trustworthy person, I might be trying to deceive you, I could have been tricked into seeing something that was not there, I might have seen something and simply misunderstood what was going on, I could have got myself so emotionally worked up that I would have believed anything, I could have invented what I clamed to have seen due to some illness or mental health problem, or it might just be the set up for a prank or a joke.
All of this considered, according to Hume, you would be faced with no rational choice to accept that, in the balance of probability, there is more likely to be something wrong with the evidence I have given you than that a miracle had actually occurred.
Simply put, for Hume, there has never been a miracle preformed in front of a large enough group of intelligent, reliable, and trustworthy people for us to believe that it was more likely an alleged miracle happened. It has always been more likely that witnesses were lying, delusional, or that human emotion had simply go in the way of their ability to reason.
If you are looking for a hole in Hume’s argument, I am not certain that there is one. As a package it is logical and convincing. Should we do then simply what Thomas Jefferson did and remove the fantastical miracle stories (like the one we have heard today) from our Bibles and cast them aside as relics from a pre-Newtonian world? Is it, as the great New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann said, “impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles”?
There is one thing that Hume leaves out. He does not say if he would believe a miracle if one happened in front of him. Would he see himself as a reliable witness in that case?
As interesting as that line of thinking is, my main critique of Hume though would be his definition of a miracle.
In Hume’s defining of a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature” he leaves out the emotional response one should have to a miracle – more than this, for Hume an emotional likely counts against how valid reports of a miracle are. It is this leaving out of emotion that the theologian Paul Tillich puts back into what a miracle is with his own definition.
For Paul Tillich, to describe a miracle as something that violates the laws of nature is a grave mistake. For Tillich, God is the ground of all being. This means that if God enacts miracles via supernatural means then this would rupture the structure of being and “split [God] within himself”. So Hume’s definition is no good for Tillich.
Instead, Tillich sets out three conditions an event has to meet in order to be a miracle. Firstly, the event has to create a sense of awe in those who witness it. It has to be an event that is “astonishing, unusual, shaking, without contradicting the rational structure of reality”. Secondly it must be a sign that gestures towards something that is not exhausted in our finite world. It has to point towards something like God, or Love, or the Kingdom of God that is to come. Thirdly is that it has to be something that has happened in the world in order for it to have been experienced.
Turning to our reading today from Mark, all the gospel writes seem to have had similar experiences of Jesus healing the sick as they all comment on it most also feature an exorcism story. So, something is likely to have happened for them to experiance this. The other two conditions, relating to the nature of what happened, from Tillich are more subtle.
Many stories of Jesus healing people involve Jesus touching them. In our reading today Jesus took Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand. This is significant. Today, especially in our present times we are, quite rightly, told to be cautious of touching someone with a fever. Before the days of modern medicine, it was highly likely people were even more cautious. Add to this the idea that many sick and disabled people in Jesus’s time would have been considered ritually unclean and, if their condition was long term, liable to be social outcasts. In touching them, Jesus would have done something truly shocking an action That would have shaken up the prejudices of the society in which he lived.
We have seen similar actions in more recent times. During the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and early 90s many people were left to die in hospital alone. Such was the homophobic press fuelled fear of contracting what was know as the “gay disease” that terminally ill patients, oftern rejected by their families, did not have a hand to hold in their final hours here on earth.
Several people eventually realised this was wrong. Yes, one was famously Dianna the then Princess of Wales. But there were others all over the world. One, Ruth Coker Burks in Arkansas, held the hands of hundreds of dying HIV positive gay men over a decade long period from 1984. In so doing she gave them back the humanity and love that a deeply homophobic society had stripped from them and made them whole again.
As any disabled person knows, people are not disabled by their aliments, be that physical or mental, but are instead disabled by being excluded from the society in which they live. The sickness is in society not in those who suffer. By extending his hand, Jesus was bringing them back in, removing the stigma that surrounded them, making them whole and giving them back their humanity in freeing them from oppression. In short, he was curing them.
This is the value of touch and I am sure that, high up on many peoples’ lists of things to do again when it is safe will be to touch, hug, and hold their loved ones. We want to include our loved ones and bring them in to our lives. Touch is a natural way of accomplishing this.
This is where Tillich’s third condition a miracle must meet, being a sign, comes into play. This is what should concern most of our attention in any miracle story.
In Jesus touching and curing those who were sick he was including them with love. What is this sign pointing to? The radically inclusive love of God, The fact that God sides with and loves the oppressed, that arrival of Kingdom of God will end the suffering and oppression of all.
If we stick to Hume and his definition was miss all this. Yes, we all must defend that enlightenment won right to challenge superstition and defend reason. But what is reasonable about us when we fail to use our faith to lift up others? Our reason is restored when miracles break into and disturb the structures of our reality. That is what heals us.
