Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Gospel for today, a group of rather learned folks ask Jesus to “show them a sign from heaven.” And Jesus refuses.

Now it might seem weird that Jesus would refuse—wasn’t it completely within his power (and divine prerogative) to provide such a sign? Of course it was. It was also within his power (and divine prerogative) to deny it. But isn’t Jesus interested in making disciples? And wouldn’t a sign from heaven (whatever that might be: a voice? A light show?) seal the deal for lots of folks? Perhaps. We know Jesus is relatively unimpressed with demands that he perform parlor tricks, even when it might seem that parlor tricks would catalyze faith. And we also know, given the miracles Jesus does in fact perform, that these miracles either flow from and confirm faith (as in the synoptic Gospels) or catalyze it (as in John).

But a miracle is not a parlor trick. Being in the thick of someone’s pain enough to heal them or their loved ones is about relationship, about the sort of trust and belief we call faith. Jesus’ miracles aren’t about self-consciously providing data that can used to prove a particular case for or against him (though they’ve been used/seen that way throughout time). After all, what does the Great I AM need to prove about the Divine identity that is in any way separable from the very BEING of the Divine; or what can be discovered about that Being that is not imparted through real encounter with it? So a miracle doesn’t create a proof that was missing previously, it confirms or establishes the faith from which and to which the miracle proceeds and leads.

Moreover, Jesus’ miracles are majestic and awesome and wonderful...but they’re not extraordinary. Which may sound like an odd thing to say, but what I mean is this: a miracle is not opposed to ordinary life, not outside or contrary to the possibilities of ordinary life. A miracle is not about the divine order superceding or negating the world or defying the laws of one thing or another. A miracle is about the restoration of the world, restoring a life; it’s about healing the world, healing a life; it’s about revealing the real nature of things because it reveals the desire of God regarding those things. A miracle is a window onto the Kingdom of Our God that is and is coming to be in the Body of Christ.

All that being said, maybe it’s a little easier to see why Jesus wouldn’t provide a sign from heaven. It’s because: heaven itself is the sign. More than that: all of creation is the sacramental revelation of God. All of creation is a symbol (and I hope to talk more about this on Sunday) not because it represents or stands in for an absent God, not because it “means” God in a semantic sense, but because with all that is, with every molecule and atom of its being, it “expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests the ‘reality’” of God—I’m quoting here Schmemann’s essay “Sacrament and Symbol” in For the Life of the World (p.168). Schmemann goes on to say that the creation does this to the best of its ability, which is to say, in a finite, incomplete, and imperfect way, complicated by the Fall and the various consequences of human sinfulness. But the important, wonderful, majestic and even miraculous thing is: it does it. With all of its limited being, the finite creation communicates the infinite God.

This word “communicate” is important here—it implies participation and relationship. We don’t learn from creation more stuff about God, but through and in creation (as Saint Bonaventure would insist), we come to knowledge of God…and by the sacramental nature of all things that are, a nature which grace wonderfully guarantees and fulfills in the Holy Eucharist, we come to participate in and with God in God’s very own life.

Perhaps Jesus’ refusal to give a sign can be more fully understood by looking at Saint Bonaventure’s closing words of the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum:

“If you should ask how [union with God should] come about, question grace, not instruction; desire, not intellect; the cry of prayer, not pursuit of study; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the wholly flaming fire which will bear you aloft to God with fullest unction and burning affection.”

Beloved Friend, what we need, in other words, is not more information, not more proof, not more intellectual clarity, not more signs, in part because all of that suggests that God is merely the object of our religious discourse and not the subject of our lives. What we need more of is prayer, desire, relationship, wonder, faith, hope, love and the grace that makes all things possible. How else would we be able to recognize our lives as miraculous? How else would we recognize the miraculous when it occurs in our lives? And how else will we recognize with awe-struck joy the Author of Miracles when he comes to us as our Savior, our Food, and, at the Last Day, our Judge?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+