What is a Miracle?
June 30, 2024 Two types of miraculous healings take place in today’s Gospel reading: the raising to life of the daughter of Jairus, and the healing of the woman with a continuous haemorrhage. W hat is it about these events or others like them, that make us recognise them as miracles? Usually, when we talk about miracles, we speak of something science-defying or awe-inspiring. But suppose science discovered some explanation for some of our Biblical miracles, - like a geological explanation for the ‘parting of the Red Sea’, or that Jesus had instinctively used or had learnt to use, what we would today call CPR techniques and was therefore able to ‘raise from the dead’ the daughter of Jairus and, in another story, the son of the widow of Naim? Would we then consider those events as miracles? For most of us, probably not. This may seem like a theoretical question, but we will notice that in the two miracles narrated to us in today’s Gospel, there is a necessary element of faith tha
