The Miracles of Jesus – Part Four
When Jesus began his ministry, he astonished those who followed him by performing a series of miraculous feats that defied all conventional understanding. When he turned water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, he achieved something that conventional thinking believed to be impossible.
Those who witnessed these “miracles” considered them to be evidence of the fact of his divine status. They considered Jesus to be a God because what he did seemed impossible to ordinary men and women. Yet Jesus stressed the fact that other people could do what he did. In fact, they could do even greater things.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do he shall do also; and greater works than these shall he do.” (John 14:12) According to Jesus, if you had the necessary faith, nothing would be impossible.
“If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20)
According to Jesus, anyone could perform a miracle if they had the two necessary requirements. The first essential ingredient was “faith”, and the second was “personal power”.
The essence of faith, as we have seen, is the ability to “believe”. For Jesus, “belief” was not the soft interpretation that we give to the word today. Belief is not something that is mere hope, such as in the statement that “I believe I will win the lottery”.
The essence of belief is “conviction”. If we wish to perform a miracle, we have to possess the utter conviction that what we want to happen will happen. We have to believe this with every fibre of our being.
Conviction is like jumping off a building. Anyone who tries to do such a thing “knows” with complete inner conviction that their bodies will crash to the ground due to the force of gravity. This is what Jesus means by “faith”. It is the complete inner certainty that what you believe in will actually occur.
The great enemy of conviction is “doubt”. Doubt is the counter-force to faith. It is the power that robs the mind of its ability to achieve miracles. When the disciple Peter tried to imitate Jesus by walking on water, only to sink beneath the waves, Jesus responded: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt”. (Matthew 14:31)
Although the ability to perform miracles needs a strong mind, it does not require an advanced education. In fact, throughout history, those who have been the greatest miracle-workers have had little formal education.
It simply requires the ability to focus the mind completely, without allowing any negative thought to interfere with the desired outcome. For this reason, those who are among the most highly educated in every age and society have always had the greatest difficulty in believing in the reality of miracles.
Because they have been trained to believe that miracles are impossible, they invariably fail to be convinced that they can happen, no matter how much evidence is presented. As the ancient Rishis pointed out, those who do not believe in miracles make it certain they will never experience one.
This was true of the time of Jesus. It is true of life today.
