Before I was a Christian, miracles never bothered me. I
didn’t believe in them because I didn’t believe there was a God to do them, but
I could see that if someone did believe in God it would be consistent for them
to believe that miracles could happen. And sure enough, once I became a
follower of Christ, I saw that it was natural to believe the written accounts
of His miracles. In changing water into wine, healing lepers, giving sight to
the blind and even rising from the dead, Jesus was simply demonstrating the
divine power which He claimed was His.
There is one miracle in the gospels, though, which troubled
me, and it takes a prominent place at Christmas. That’s when Mary, before she
is married to Joseph, becomes pregnant and gives birth to Jesus “by the Holy
Spirit”. Even today people are usually too polite to point out the problem here,
but it was a source of great disquiet to me, and I’m sure it is to others too.
Well, when there is a problem, I think it’s better to drag it out into the open
snarling and kicking, rather than remain too polite to mention it, so that’s
what I’ll do here.
Basically the problem for me was this: a young unmarried
girl being pregnant isn’t usually considered a miracle! It’s not even all that
uncommon. There’s an alternative natural explanation which is damaging to the
Christian case, embarrassing to individual Christians, and quietly assumed to
be the real explanation by everyone else! And that word “embarrassing” really
gives the game away. I can imagine an unbeliever saying “Hah! You don’t really
think that was a miracle do you? How naïve! People in those times may have been
easily taken in by Mary’s story, but these days we aren’t so gullible!” I can
easily imagine hearing those words, and they hurt; I don’t like being on the
receiving end of them, even in my imagination.
So there’s my problem, and it turns out that it’s not a
question about whether miracles can actually happen. It’s my pride which is
threatened, not my understanding. After all, this is nowhere near being the
most amazing adjustment of the properties of matter in the New Testament:
changing 120 gallons of water into wine involves altering far more molecules
than switching the state of one cell in Mary’s body. No, rather than having an
intellectual difficulty, I’m just afraid of being ridiculed for gullibility and
naivety. Dragging the issue into the open has enabled me to realise this. Paul
tells me that Christians have to be willing to be “fools for Christ” and that
sounds OK, until someone else calls me “fool”!
But my imaginary critic back there overplayed his hand.
Everything he said was reasonable apart from one thing which, when you think
about it, is clearly false. “People in those times may have been easily taken
in…” No, actually I’m pretty sure that people at the time of Jesus knew the
Facts of Life just as well as we do, and wouldn’t have been taken in any more
easily than us. So, then, how did some of them become convinced about the
virgin birth?
Most of the detail about Jesus’ conception and birth is in
the gospel of Luke. Once we go there with that question in mind, I think it
becomes clear that Luke shares our problem. Luke was actually a doctor, and for
that reason he shows a great interest in Jesus’ healing miracles. He isn’t the
kind of person who would be gullible about conception. Now that I’ve raised the
question I think I can hear him gritting his teeth as he writes his
introduction: “… since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the
beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,
so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” He
follows this introduction not by starting where we might expect by writing
about Mary, but by diverting to Zechariah and Elizabeth and their easier-to-believe
miraculous conception of John the Baptist; here it’s only their age which makes
it a miracle for them to have a baby. Only once this first miracle has smoothed
the way for us does Luke turn to the message of the angel Gabriel to Mary.
Matthew is also troubled by the whole thing in his gospel.
He doesn’t have the medical specialism of Luke, but he notes that even Joseph saw
the problem: “Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did
not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her
quietly.” Joseph initially jumped to the conclusion we all do, but somehow he
became convinced that Mary hadn’t been unfaithful to him after all. (We might
think of asking why Joseph is called Mary’s “husband” there. It’s because, although
they weren’t yet married, they were betrothed. At that time this meant more
than a modern engagement, and breaking the betrothal would constitute a
divorce).
So, if both Luke and Matthew found this claimed miracle
uncomfortable, why did they include it? After all, the gospel writers all made
selections from their material, as they had to. (John admits, “Jesus did many
other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that
even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”)
Leaving out the virgin birth was a perfectly possible
approach: Mark starts later with John the Baptist and John starts with
theology. There’s only one possible explanation. Luke and Matthew had both
become convinced that the miraculous birth was true and important; it couldn’t
be left out without abandoning something vital about their message. That
something was their determination to report honestly, even including details
which might damage their case.
(Matthew even records that Gabriel appeared to Joseph “in a
dream”. Are you mad, Matthew? Don’t say it was a dream! Just leave Joseph out
of it entirely… but no, Matthew writes this because as far as he’s concerned
it’s what happened. He’s recording what happened, not composing a story.)
So then, how could people at the time have become convinced
that this miracle happened and reject the obvious natural explanation? And how can
Christians today follow them and get their heads around it too?
As the gospel writers all try to show us, the miracles
associated with Jesus weren’t one-off amazing events. Any single miracle taken on
its own is very hard to believe. “They poured all that water into stone jars
and then it turned out to be wine? Really? Did anyone keep an eye out for
trickery?” “The paralysed man picked up his mat and walked off? Are you sure it
was him?” “Jesus appeared to his followers alive? Oh, maybe He didn’t really
die on the cross?” The intention of each written gospel is to show us that all
these miraculous signs fit a pattern. That pattern also fits with the things
Jesus said about himself. “I am the light of the world”. “I am the resurrection
and the life”. “I lay down my life only to take it up again”.
To anyone who is struggling to believe the miracle of
Christmas I would therefore say this: don’t start there, start at Easter. There
is consensus among Bible historians that Jesus was a real person, that he was
baptized by John the Baptist and that he was condemned to death by Pontius
Pilate. But every written reference to that death also describes him coming
back to life! Jesus’ triumph over death is the conclusion that all four of the
gospel writers deliberately lead to, and the quality of the historical evidence
supporting it is such that, if it wasn’t a miracle, historians would assure us
it happened. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John give us so many different details
that it’s clear they never cooked up their stories together, yet they are all
consistent and give us a clear picture. Letters by Paul and James back them up.
Even non-Christian historians like Josephus mention the event.
All the miracles and sayings of Jesus in the gospels,
including the miracle of His birth, lead towards and are consistent with His death
and resurrection. That resurrection is the culminating miracle which all the
forgoing ones support in a clear pattern. So there’s not really any reason to
pick just one part and say “you have to be gullible to believe that bit”. The
pattern needs to be seen whole, and accepted or rejected as a whole. There is
no need to let fear of ridicule push us into chipping off just one corner,
when in fact the whole pattern makes sense with it in place.