One day as I was visiting the Library of Congress in Washington, I noticed an exhibit on “Thomas Jefferson’s Bible.” I was very intrigued to see this relic, looking forward to what margin notes the founding father might have written. Instead, I found that what Jefferson had done was to take the Bible from different languages and then literally cut it all to pieces so as to save only those parts that he thought “actually happened.” Not making the “cut” were all of the miracle stories, including today’s gospel. The result was a book he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” Disappointed, I realized that this “bible” was really no Bible at all. It wasn’t even “good news.”
You see, Jesus wasn’t just some moral teacher who’s life we could imitate on some intellectual level of appreciation. You just can’t take the “teaching” of Jesus and then ignore all those parts about being God and doing things only God can do. Perhaps even more than anything he taught, it was doing the miraculous that most attracted people to Jesus. Miracles revealed not ideas, but a person; they revealed who Jesus really was.
Given the important role that miracles played in attracting the first Christians, how strange would it be to think that we could come to know and follow Jesus without miracles. A lot of people today tend to think of the miracles of Jesus as something of the past, or just unnecessary, or even fake like Jefferson. Maybe this is why we don’t experience them as much. We don’t expect miracles, so we often don’t see them and, worse, we don’t even ask.
In today’s homily, I look at the first reading and the Gospel, both just your average “raising from the dead stories” (ho hum) and then even consider a time that I prayed for a miracle and God sent me an angel.