Some years ago it was fashionable to seek human explanations for the miracles of Jesus. For example, according to this kind of thinking, there was not really a miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes when Jesus fed the five thousand. What happened was that Jesus persuaded the crowd to be unselfish and to share what they had already brought with them.
But this hardly squares with the reactions of Jesus’ disciples, or of the crowd. The people recognised the Messianic power of Jesus to provide in plenty and wanted to make him king by force, so that Jesus had to escape from them. Clearly, the crowd’s strong reaction is not the consequence of a mere exhortation to share on Jesus’ part; it is the response to something tremendous which actually happened, something so tremendous as to provoke their extreme reaction.
These expectations of the Messianic age are to be found in the Old Testament long before Jesus’ time. The people of Israel expected that, when the Messiah came, there would not be only miracles, but a complete transformation of the earth as they knew it: “…waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.”
This is something far more than the human miracles with which today’s Old Testament reading begins. It is nothing less than the restoration of Paradise, the Garden of Eden, replacing the hot, sandy deserts which were are still the familiar surroundings of the Middle East. It is the vision of a new earth, a new creation. God does not just restore to Israel its kingdom; he returns earth to the condition in which it was before the Fall.
In Jesus, this becomes a new heaven as well as a new earth. John, in the book of Revelation, sees this in a glorious new Jerusalem; he sees it, in fact, as a wedding, with the new Jerusalem as the Bride and the Lamb, Jesus himself, as the bridegroom. Heaven is joined to earth in Jesus, and God lives permanently amongst men, their light in place of sun and moon, their Temple in place of stone buildings.
In Jesus, the miraculous cannot be limited to the kind of little human gestures described in the first paragraph of this reflection. God has as his vision the transformation of the whole creation into something new. He will transform our hearts, too, making us fit to live in this new creation. Let us take heart, then. God is not about to make a few little adjustments in order to make our present world a better or nicer place; he plans a new world, a transformed world, a world so beautiful and good that it is beyond our powers to imagine it.
Fr Phillip
