Define miracle.
Go ahead. What event or series of events qualifies as a miracle?
Google thinks it's an extraordinary event that defies natural law and is often attributed to divine intervention.
That's a pretty good definition, I think. The world chugs along, after all, according to specific and understood rules, ones that bear equations and formulas that are provable and repeatable. This is a good thing. It helps us maneuver through life. Even if we didn't make the rules, at least we can predict them. A dropped rock, for instance, will always fall down, not up or sideways, on planet Earth. An action causes an equal and opposite reaction. Energy is not created or destroyed. But you know all this.
Jesus, however, got famous partially for breaking these rules and we call these instances his miracles. He healed people who just touched his clothes. He brought dead people to life. He made food appear from nowhere. It's interesting, though, to consider the first and last of his miracles - the miraculous bookends in his manipulation of physics.
You probably easily remember the first - the changing of water to wine at a wedding feast. As his miracles go, this was a pretty innocuous one. No one was spectacularly cured or brought to life or magically fed. It was just a favor he did for a friend of his mom's.
But fast forward three years and move the venue from a party to an upper room, from public frivolity to a hideout. There's a cup in front of Jesus that is already full of wine and what does he do with it? He declares it to be his own blood. Not actual blood, mind you. It still smells and tastes like wine. But the declaration broke a law nonetheless - not a material law this time, but a supernatural one.
At this point in his human experience, everything is escalating. The Cana incident at the wedding was easy to understand for anyone there who knew what was going on. In this world, water cannot spontaneously become wine. It defied physics. But the second incident involved much more. The wine in that case became blood not in the natural realm but in the supernatural one. It no longer nourished the body but it fed the soul. Each result was appropriate to its need. The wedding guests had something proper to drink and the disciples, who shared the cup of consecrated blood, had something of their teacher that was uniquely their own and would sustain them over and over until they, too died.
In many ways, these two incidents, the first and the last transformations Jesus enacted during his human life, became perfect bookends - the second as the completion of the first, almost as if he'd planned it that way from the beginning.
Oh, yeah. He did.
Images: How Stuff Works, Etsy
