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The Miracle to Come
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It’s not hard to see why people want to believe in miracles like the resurrection of the dead; otherwise, they face certain extinction. But not to worry: Christians can look forward to eternal life when Christ returns. Of course, all that depends on whether Jesus is indeed the Son of God, which in turn depends on other miracles, starting with the wedding at Cana, where he is supposed to have turned water into wine. According to the gospel account, the wine at the marriage feast had run out, and Jesus’ mother prevailed upon him to do something to save the occasion. He had been reluctant to show his hand but ordered servants to fill large jars with water and take some of the contents to the banquet steward. The steward expressed surprise that the groom had saved his best wine for last, but otherwise no one realized what had taken place. The miracle at Cana was a harbinger of bigger things to come.
The term “miracle” is variously used to describe events that are contrary to the laws of nature, events that are highly unlikely but not contrary to the laws of nature or events that might be manifestations of natural laws as yet undiscovered. There are fierce debates over whether God would violate otherwise immutable natural laws that he himself had ordained and, if so, whether they can properly be considered natural laws. Events that are merely unlikely may or may not be regarded as miraculous, depended on one’s predisposition toward such things. As for undiscovered natural laws, much of what is now recognized as scientific fact would have been regarded as supernatural in earlier eras. Clarke’s Third Law, promulgated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, holds that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Laws of nature and miracles are a false dichotomy -- or at least would have appeared so to many of the discovers of those laws, who saw them as confirmation of God's hand in the workings of the world. Even Einstein, who did not believe in a personal god, was astonished by the fact that the universe was comprehensible, by which he meant that it conformed to precise mathematical laws. Is not that a kind of miracle, against which most of the events that pass for miracles would seem rather humdrum? “The one miracle which God works evermore is in Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted in “The Sovereignty of Ethics.”
We might say that water-turned-into-wine is a miracle, but what of water all by itself? On the one hand, nothing is more ordinary. Water is one of the most plentiful elements on our planet, covering three-quarters of the globe and making up 60% of our own bodies. Water has few intrinsic properties of its own; it is formless, colorless and odorless. Yet no element is more protean, taking the form of a liquid, solid or gas -- if not all three simultaneously. I remember tramping along the Mattabesset River near my home early one winter’s morning with my camera and tripod. There was not another living soul nearby to see what had been laid before me. It had snowed during the night, and the trees were laced with white. I stopped along one of the river’s tributaries, transfixed. The sun was just up over the fringe of trees ahead, and the sky was a pale salmon color. The sun’s bright golden reflection was congealed in a thin layer of ice forming on the surface of the stream below. I planted my tripod on the snowy bank of the tributary and began shooting. Here was water in all its forms: free flowing, iced over, crystalline and clouded up, all within the frame of a single picture. This most ordinary of elements had shown itself to be anything but. Which just goes to show: you can wait a lifetime for some great miracle to come, or you can open your eyes to the ordinary miracles that arrive without fanfare at every turn.
John 2:1-11
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