Over the years, the Jernigan family in Raleigh, North Carolina, has tried to help friends cope with sorrow, with sickness, the death of a child, the draining of hope. They know what it's like to fall on their knees and scream in prayer, listening for an answer and hearing only an echo. But they will also talk about miracles and how they can happen, not just long ago but at any time. Their miracle is named Elizabeth.
What a problem, what a promise, miracles present to people of faith. These morsels of grace, offered by a merciful God willing to meddle with the laws of his universe, can be blessed and dangerous things. Every religion has its holy moments, its Easter, its Passover, its visions and prophecies. But only in Christendom, a faith built around a core of miracles, is the fight over their meaning so fierce.
"Why does this generation ask for a sign?" an angry Jesus asked, wondering about the hunger for miracles in his own time, though he might as well ask it of ours. Touch me, heal me, the crowds demanded of their Messiah, and so even as he went about touching and healing, he acknowledged that miracles, if produced on demand, could sabotage the faith they were meant to strengthen. For the truly faithful, no miracle is necessary; for those who must doubt, no miracle is sufficient.
Those warnings bear remembering in these days before Easter, when Christians are invited to dwell on the deepest mysteries of faith. Far from being resolved by centuries of scholarship and devotion, the paradox of miracles seems only to deepen. Certainly they occupy a strange place on the spiritual map of America. When Time asked in a poll last week whether people believe in miracles, 69% said yes; and the fastest-growing churches in America are the Charismatic and Pentecostal congregations whose worship revolves around "signs and wonders." Tens of thousands of people gather in a pasture in Georgia or a backyard in Lubbock, Texas, because of reports that the Virgin appears in the clouds.
Yet just when the faithful are so eager to embrace the possibility of miracles in everyday life, prominent American theologians are working furiously to disprove the miracles in the Bible. Last month, just in time for Lent, the rebel scholars of the self-appointed Bible tribunal called the Jesus Seminar gathered once again, this time to vote on the most explosive question of Christian faith: Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? That such a vote would even take place says a lot about current Bible scholarship; that the result, by an overwhelming majority, was to announce, No, he did not, shows clearly the chasm that has opened between some professors of Scripture and the true-believing flock.
All parents may be forgiven for viewing their children as miracles, but none more so than Betsy and Leonard Jernigan Jr. One day when their baby Elizabeth was about four months old, her right eyelid began to weaken a bit; the pupil seemed slow to respond to light. Such small signs, and they came and went; she seemed happy and healthy, so her parents expected that the problem would clear up by itself.