Do You Believe In Miracles?

            On Friday, February 22, 1980, the United States Men’s Hockey team, made up of college players, amateurs all, beat the men of the Soviet Union during the Olympics at Lake Placid, New York.  Al Michaels, then an ABC sportscaster, called the game and started a countdown with 11 seconds left, ending with the now famous line “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”  Ironically, this game was the semi-final for the right to go to the gold medal game, not the gold medal game itself.

            The question, though, is was this really a miracle?  Are miracles so easy to come by that winning a hockey game counts as a truly miraculous event?  At some level, the sense of the miraculous appears.  The odds of the United States even making it to the semi-finals were long.  The United States was never known as a hockey powerhouse and the Soviets were, essentially, a full time, professional team.  Moreover, the Soviets played together all the time and had taken 6 of the prior 7 gold medals in hockey and were a prohibitive favorite going into the 1980 games.  The United States’ victory was highly improbable.  So when something appears highly improbable we designate it a miracle.  Someone who is told they will die of cancer in six months recovers completely; a woman told she’ll never get pregnant does; a parent is told their child will never walk, but the child does; these kinds of things seem to us miraculous.

            Is highly improbable truly the standard for the miraculous?  It is highly improbable the universe could erupt out of nothing, yet many people claim this is true.  I’ve read and seen arguments that prior to the Big Bang there was nothing, but this “nothing” was unstable, which is why “nothing” blasted into somethingness.  Doesn’t this explanation sound perilously close to a miracle?  Something from nothing seems highly improbable to me but I never took physics in college so I’m sure I’m missing something important here.

            What about how life started on planet earth?  At this point, scientists really don’t have an explanation, other than the amorphous and vague belief that somehow, by some process that isn’t entirely clear, under unknown circumstances which have never been repeated in a laboratory and (obviously) weren’t observed when they happened, the right combination of information and material just happened to all coalesce at a moment in time and life started spontaneously without intervention from any outside agency.  Sounds like long odds to me, which would then make the happening . . . dare I say it . . . miraculous.  I didn’t take biology in college, either, so I’m sure I’m missing something important here.

           

            I mean if we really think the result of a hockey game is a miracle, can we not then say the formation of the universe and the beginning of life were miraculous events?  They surely meet the definition.  But, of course, if we start down that path, then we might find we must believe in other possible miracles.

            So I believe in this Jewish guy whose mother was a virgin but was made pregnant with him anyway, claimed he was God, wandered around in Judea and Galilee back when Tiberius was the reigning Roman Caesar, gathered a bunch of followers, most of whom deserted him at the end of his life, healed people of all kinds of diseases at a time when there was no medicine, told demons to leave people and the demons obeyed, raised at least a couple people from the dead, had his own religious leaders try him for heresy, died on a Roman cross but then came back to life, on his own mind you, after three days, then, best of all, went up to heaven in a cloud with a promise that he would come back at a later date to gather up his true followers and execute judgment on all who don’t believe by leading an army of angelic, otherworldly, beings, riding in on a white horse with a sword in his hand. Whoa!

            Certainly any number of the things I mentioned about this man could be considered miraculous.  But are they really any more miraculous than a universe creating itself out of nothing, or life spontaneously coming out of the primordial slime under wildly uncertain conditions?  Really?

            If our definition is that a miracle is a highly improbable event, than the existence of the universe is a miracle, as is the existence of life on planet earth.  Moreover, logically, then, much of what I believe about Jesus of Nazareth might be called miraculous, but it is no more miraculous than what people are prepared to believe about the beginning of the universe and the beginning of life.  Irony, like a cobra, rears its head again, striking at the heart of those who would scoff at the “miracles” of Jesus.

            You see, we all believe in miracles, we just don’t agree on which miracles.  Some of us choose to believe in the miracle that something came from nothing, and that something that came from nothing somehow without any rational or logical force nonetheless “caused” life to start in such a way that this life would actually transform over time into human beings.  Others of us choose to believe in the miracle that the absolutely holy God of the universe has chosen to save some of us from eternal destruction, despite our actions in denying the glory due Him.  We have all done things that violate the requirements of the holy creator God’s order of things.  Despite this, God determined to provide a way to satisfy the demands of his perfect justice through payment for our transgressions by his own son, Jesus, who died on the cross in our place.  He came back to life on the third day in order to complete the transaction and provide eternal life to all of us.

            Do you believe in miracles?  Yes, you do.  The question is which miracle?