TWENTY-ONE verses of John’s Gospel make an ambitious dollop for a Sunday morning. The lection divides neatly into two halves: (1) the feeding of the five thousand; (2) Jesus’s walking on water. They are each “signs”, although only the primary is explicitly called so (v.14). It takes place within the sight of an enormous crowd, whereas the second is a non-public sign for the disciples, and (arguably) with no profit or blessing to any of those that witnessed it.
There are various well-tested strategies for interpreting such signs. One is pietism: “It shouldn’t be for the likes of lowly mortals like ourselves to query how this happened. The more supernatural it appears, the more we must accept it as a miracle.” Another is minimising scepticism, which might still affirm the reality of the miracle but in a way that robs it, so far as possible, of any supernatural component. Thus the five thousand must all have received a token fragment of bread and fish, and the disciples, of their panic, thought Jesus walked on the surface of the water when actually there was a solid footing just under the surface.
There is a 3rd way, but it surely shouldn’t be an option for Christians: outright rejection of any miraculous element within the signs. This would mean that the feeding of 5 thousand men, women, and youngsters was a fraud, a sharing of scanty resources made out to be something more fantastical. The walking on water would even be a lie. It never happened. Or Jesus tricked the disciples into pondering that they saw him do that. Or the disciples exaggerated an experience of Jesus’s having come to them at a dangerous moment right into a cause-and-effect saving of their collective bacon.
Seeing a trick or fraud exposed may be emotionally in addition to intellectually satisfying. When I read Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Strong Poison (which I warmly recommend), one in every of the characters deployed techniques of charlatan spiritualism to extract information from one other character: I enjoyed learning how such tricks were done. After ending a more moderen crime story, I turned to Google to learn the way other supposedly supernatural tricks, like levitation, could be achieved.
I mention these by means of contrast, because I cannot see a single shred of evidence pointing to the indisputable fact that Jesus, or any of his disciples, or John the Evangelist, was attempting to deceive anyone, either by inventing such stories or by “improving” them to make them more extraordinary.
There is a feature that I actually have learned to search for in any narrative that asserts as fact something that’s difficult to reconcile with modern understanding of how the world works, and that’s the introduction of a “strategic doubter”. There are a couple of such characters in scripture and other early Christian writings, resembling the Protevangelium of James, which introduces us to a sceptical midwife. Unconvinced that Mary had given birth while still preserving her virginity (for that virginity was conceptualised in physical slightly than moral terms), she inserted a hand to examine the birth canal. Her hand shrivelled up, until Mary’s prayer restored it.
Another example comes from Matthew’s version of the Passion (27.63-64). The Evangelist anticipates sceptical attacks on the very fact of the resurrection by bringing forward, as his strategic doubters, the “chief priests and the Pharisees” to demand a guard be set beside the tomb wherein the Lord’s body was laid. This “independently” reassures readers that there can have been no hocus-pocus with the tomb or the corpse.
No single explanation will reassure Christians about every one in every of the miraculous signs that Jesus did. Some, resembling his calming of the storm, need have been nothing greater than good luck and fortuitous timing (Mark 4.35-41); but still I trust. Pietist explanations are worthless, on condition that they demand the switching-off of our God-given human intelligence. Minimising explanations eliminate the issue, but throw out the salvific Lord with the miraculous bathwater.
One detail in Jesus’s walk on the waves helps me to search out confidence to trust: namely, that the disciples are terrified by what they see (v.19). If the story had been written to drag the wool over our eyes, they might surely have been confident, triumphant. Their terror is (on the very least) some reassurance: that Jesus, our brother and our friend, can also be the mighty Son of God.
