By the signs, wonders and
miracles He performed, Jesus manifested His
compassion for His creatures and the ultimate
reason for His coming into the world i.e., His
healing and restoration of mankind. The
Miracles of Christ concerns itself with this
vehicle of God's self-revelation.
The Miracles are studied within the framework of
the church's lectionary; that is, in the order
in which the people of God hear them read aloud
in Church as a part of the proclamation of the
Word. The book is in three parts.
Part one deals with the miracles recorded in St.
Matthew's and St. Luke's Gospels, part two with
the signs of the Gospel of St. John (most of
which are read in the Paschal Season), and the
third part surveys the miracles recorded in St.
Mark's Gospel. It is this shortest Gospel
that sharply condenses the whole story of Christ
and points repeatedly to His saving death,
burial and resurrection. The Church's
Tradition has deemed the lessons from St. Mark
as the most appropriate ones for Great Lent,
when the catechumens were being prepared for
their baptism, and when those who were already
members of the Church struggled to become once
agains what they were made when they were first
baptized.
Archbishop Dmitri
(Royster) is Archbishop of Dallas and the South
in the
Orthodox Church in America (OCA).
He is also author of
The Kingdom of God and
The Parables.
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FOREWARD
The Miracles of Christ is the
third in a series of New Testament studies by
Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas (OCA). The first
two, also published by SVS Press, are devoted to
The Kingdom of God and The Parables. Excepting
the miraculous events in His own life-His birth
of the Virgin Mary, His transfiguration on
Tabor, His resurrection from the dead, and His
ascension-the present study is a commentary on
all the "miracles and wonders and signs" of
Christ as recorded in the four Gospels.
Two basic convictions shape
the study. The first has to do with the miracles
themselves. What place do they occupy in the
life and teachings of Jesus Christ? To
Archbishop Dmitri this place is clear: any
preaching about Christ that omits His miracles
or marginalizes their significance makes for a
"defective, distorted picture" of His work as
Redeemer. The miracles reveal the truth about
Jesus' life and person, proving beyond a doubt
that He is "what He claimed to be, the Son of
God and God incarnate." Referred to as signs (semeion,
dunameis-terms used throughout the Gospels,
especially that of St. John), they point beyond
themselves to "the restoration of all things to
their pristine state," to the advent of the
Kingdom of God, of which Jesus, "attested to of
God... by miracles and wonders and signs" (Acts
2:22), is the King.
The study is a careful and at
times word-by-word commentary on the Biblical
text. It includes analyses of numerous key words
from the original Greek, highlighting of
differences in the Gospels' parallel accounts of
the miracles and relevant citations from many
other passages and books of the Bible. This
detail, however, does not obscure or diminish
the impact of the Biblical narratives.
Throughout the commentary they continue to speak
for themselves, stirring the reader toward his
or her own personal reckoning with Jesus Christ:
"The blind receive their sight, and the lame
walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf
hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor
have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is
he, whoever shall not be offended in me"
(Matthew 11:5-6 KJV).
No one is excluded from such
a reckoning. The miracles of Christ touch upon
every kind of person and situation: young people
and old; children; men, women and families;
people with all kinds of maladies and
infirmities-both physical and spiritual; people
of faith and those whose faith was far from
complete; people who brought themselves to the
Lord; people whom no one brought and for whom no
one, not even themselves, asked.
The study gives particular
attention to the healing of people possessed by
demons (the author terms such people as
"dehumanized"). These people, socially
ostracized, are frequently found dwelling among
the dead in cemeteries. Often unclothed,
physically powerful and unruly in behavior, they
are dangerous to approach. According to
Archbishop Dmitri they are "bound by Satan" for
reasons additional to the "general law" of
original sin. Their possession by demons is a
result of their own sins, of their own
abandoning of themselves to these sins and of
their own "rejection of dependence on God."
These reasons indeed raise thorny issues about
the relationships between personal sin,
affliction and divine punishment-issues which
the Archbishop addresses throughout his study.
He notes too that,
significantly, Jesus does not permit the demons
which He expels from the possessed to confess
His true identity. The Lord's "hour" has not yet
come, and in any event, He is in no need of the
testimony of demons. In one troubling episode,
read in all three of its Synoptic versions
during the course of a liturgical year, Jesus
does allow the demons He expels to enter into a
large herd of swine. To the dismay of the crowd,
the swine immediately plunge down a steep
hillside and to their death in the sea. Why does
Jesus permit such a mass destruction of
irrational creatures? Without neglecting to
examine the several difficult aspects of this
perplexing question, the Archbishop offers a
characteristically direct answer: "One thing
that the incident makes clear ...is the worth in
God's eyes of each human being, a worth far
greater than that of all the swine in the
world."
The miracles touched not only
those over whom they were performed but also the
bystanders. Many such people, seeing the things
that Jesus did, "believed on him" (John 11:45).
Other observers were left in confusion or doubt
(John 9:21-23), and still others "took counsel
to put him to death" (John 11:47-53). Affected
too by the miracles were nature and material
things such as: the weather, the sea, fish,
animals, trees, food and drink, water, and even
common earth. Indeed, in the miracles Jesus
Christ is shown to be what He is: Lord of
everyone and everything.
The study presents especially
heedful analysis of the three recorded instances
of Jesus raising the dead-Jairus' daughter, the
son of the widow of Nain, and the greatest, the
raising of Lazarus. In each of these instances
the author explains that the "last enemy,"
death, is being defeated in one of its
"successive aspects." Jairus' daughter is
raised while still on her deathbed. The son of
the widow of Nain is raised while he is being
carried to his place of entombment. And Lazarus,
the beloved friend over whose tomb Jesus wept
and whose body had already begun to corrupt, is
raised after being dead four days. These "signs"
point to the consummate defeat of death in the
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ Himself.
The second conviction shaping this study
concerns the placement of the miracles of
Christ in the liturgy of the Church, that
"special society," as Archbishop Dmitri calls
it, whose primary task down through the ages
has been to remember and proclaim, without
defect or distortion, the truth about Jesus - His
life, person, teachings and works. When are the
miracle narratives read and celebrated in the
course of a liturgical year? The Archbishop's
response regarding this matter is unequivocal:
the liturgical placement of the miracle accounts
does not reflect "random choice," but rather a
"carefully planned pattern of lessons"
connecting their content to appropriate days,
cycles and seasons within the liturgical year.
About this "pattern of lessons," or lectionary
as it is commonly known, a few words of general
introduction are in order.'
For its use in Orthodox
worship, the Gospel is fashioned as a liturgical
book. In the course of a liturgical year (from
Pascha to Pascha) all four Gospels are read in
the following sequence: John, Matthew, Luke and
Mark (with considerable overlapping along the
way). The separate readings (lesson numbers) are
selected and arranged so that each best suits
the distinct type of liturgical day for which it
is prescribed: Saturdays,
1 The Gospel lectionary is a
matter of significant discussion among clergy
and laity in both the Orthodox Church and the
Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches. For insights
into this debate, two recent articles in the St.
Vladimir's Theological Quarterly may be
consulted: Paul Meyendorff, "The Liturgical Path
of Orthodoxy in America," 40, 1-2 (1996) and
David M. Petras, "The Gospel Lectionary of the
Byzantine Church," 41, 2-3 (1997). About the
details of the lectionary, and differences
between Slavic and Greek usages, an old but
still helpful study may be found in: Eastern
Churches Quarterly, Irmgard M. deVries, "The
Epistles, Gospels and Tones of the Byzantine
Liturgical Year," X, 1, 2, 3, 4 (1953).
Sundays, weekdays, and
feastdays or days within special festal cycles.
The weekday readings are most reflective of a
lectio continua. The narratives of the Lord's
postresurrectional appearances are collected
into a separate cycle of eleven lessons which is
read through at Sunday Matins four to five times
per year.
Archbishop Dmitri notes that,
within the above-described "pattern of lessons,"
most of the miracles of Christ are proclaimed
and celebrated on Sundays, especially on those
32 which fall during the longest segment of the
liturgical year-a season known as the time
"after Pentecost." It should be noted that this
segment may extend to as many as 37 weeks when
the earliest day of Pascha is followed directly
by the latest date for this great feast. Within
the basic number of 32, however, fully 17 of the
Sunday readings are devoted to the miracles.
The author sees nothing
unusual or surprising in this development. He
explains that this segment of the annual cycle
is the time of the Church's mission to the world
- a mission renewed each year at Pentecost and
continuing until the Lord's Second Coming. The
sequence of miracle narratives appointed for its
principal days, Sundays, "reflects the content
of the Apostles' proclamation, which must be the
content of the Church's proclamation in every
age, not least our own."
The liturgical year's
shortest section, termed "of Pascha" in the
liturgical calendars, is always composed of
eight weeks. Its shape and content emerge from
the first several centuries of the Church's life
and worship, when Pascha was the primary day for
baptism. The eight weeks which followed were
devoted to the mystagogical instruction of the
newly-baptized in the sacramental-liturgical
mysteries into which they, after lengthy
preparation, had been initiated. The Gospel
readings for this season became fixed as those
from John, since his Gospel is replete with
acts of faith and belief in Jesus as Lord, and
with references to those material things and
human circumstances-water, bread, wine,
washing, forgiveness of sins, walking, hearing,
gaining sight, marriage and other semeiamost
commonly encountered and sanctified in the
sacramental ministrations and liturgical
celebrations of the Church. Such features are
especially evident in the Sunday readings of
this period "of Pascha."
The third section of the
liturgical year is a fixed period of ten weeks
of preparation prior to Pascha. In this season a
special liturgical book known as the Lenten
Triodion is employed and, in most instances, the
Gospel of Mark is read. Gospel lessons during
the Great Fast are limited almost exclusively to
Saturdays and Sundays, since Lenten weekdays
generally have no prescribed Gospel readings.
Drawing the liturgical year to a close, then,
these readings fulfill two primary purposes.
They address some of the many conflicts between
Jesus and the Pharisees and Scribes over
fidelity to the law of Moses (especially the
Saturday readings). And in the lessons about
Christ's miracles they offer an adequate summary
of the basics of the faith and the newness of
life given once and for all in baptism.
The two convictions outlined
above, along with ample citations from
liturgical hymns, sacramental prayers and more
than a dozen Church Fathers, especially St. John
Chrysostom, St. Ambrose of Milan and the Blessed
Theophylact, together offer considerable insight
into the manner in which the miracles of Christ
are received and understood by Orthodox
Christians. The miracles serve as compelling
testimony to Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God
and Redeemer, who performed them. Within the
Church's "liturgical experience," His work
continues to be remembered, proclaimed and
extended. "Liturgical experience" is an overused
and often ambiguous term, but Archbishop Dmitri
gives it clarity and scope by linking it, as the
Church Fathers did, "to baptism and the
eucharist, since it is quite clear from the Acts
of the Apostles and the epistles that these
mysteries were the preeminent elements in the
life of the early Church." And to this day they
remain preeminent in the Orthodox Church as the
sacraments of reckoning with Christ, i.e., of
repentance, conversion and communion.
A final word in this foreword
has to do with "great love and compassion" cited
numerous times by Archbishop Dmitri as the
ultimate motive behind not only every one of
Jesus' miracles but also behind the whole of
God's miraculous plan for the salvation of all
human beings and the entire world. As the
evangelist Matthew writes: "And when he saw the
multitudes, he was moved with compassion on
them, because they fainted, and were scattered
abroad, as sheep having no shepherd" (Matthew
9:36).
An analogous love and
compassion are also evident throughout this
excellent study of the miracles of Christ. They
emanate from the heart of its author, who is
himself a wise, scholarly and devoted archpastor
and teacher of the Church.
Fr. Paul Lazor December 4, 1998
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