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I just today listened to a Timothy Keller podcast from his session at the Reform and Resurge Conference. His talk was titled Doing Justice and in it he had the following to say about Jesus’ miracles:

You know, if Jesus Christ really wanted to prove that he had divine power with his miracles, he surely could have done a better job than that. We live in a culture in which spectacular special effects are done strictly to be spectacular. And therefore when we see Jesus doing miracles our first response, our first reaction, is to say, “Oh, I know why he as doing miracles. he was doing miracles to prove that he had power… to say, ‘look what I can do. See, I’m the Son of God, I can do these things.”

But honestly, to show forth power, the bread thing, is that all that spectacular? Not particularly… Feeding the hungry? As wonderful as it is to heal a cripple… That’s nice, but those of us who’ve got a little background in marketing today, we could come to Jesus as a consultant and say, “Look, if you’re trying to get your power across through miracles you could really do a much better job. We could brand you much better than you’re branding yourself. So for example, fly into the air and do some loops over the Sea of Galilee.” Couldn’t he have done that?

And they would have said, “Lord, you are truly the Son of God.” Or he could have said, “Look, nothing up my sleeve.” And suddenly a ball of fire appears. He could have done this; he stilled a hurricane, he could do this. So here’s this ball of fire and he says, “See those trees over there?” And he throws it into the trees and they incinerate and everybody would get down.

But Jesus’ miracles are never ever, ever, ever like that at all. Why not? Because the point of his miracles is never to show the naked fact of his power. The point of his miracles is always to show the redemptive purpose of his power. When you and I as modern people think about the miracles of Jesus, we think that it’s a suspension of the natural order. It’s not. God didn’t make the world originally to have blindness, leprosy, disease, death, poverty and injustice. He didn’t make it that way. These things aren’t natural. These things aren’t original. And therefore, when Jesus feeds the hungry, when Jesus heals the cripples, when Jesus raises the son of the poor widow, he is not suspending the natural order so much as he’s restoring it. The purpose of his miracles is to restore the natural order and the purpose of his miracles is to say, “I’m here to get justice done.”

I suppose I’ve never really thought about how Christ’s miracles aren’t the showstoppers that we might have made them if it were up to us. All of the Lord’s miracles, including calming the storm, were meant to show his great compassion, not his might.