Sermon Archive
Miracles
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Matins on 23 June 2002
You may have seen reports last week about some new statistics on the number of mistakes made in hospitals. That hospitals make mistakes, of course, isn't new information. Disciplinary hearings or court cases, involving a surgeon who cut off the wrong leg for example, or a junior doctor who gave an adult dose to a baby, have been reported from time to time in the media; and for some time now the medical press has been saying that airlines, for example, are much better at handling potential mistakes than hospitals are, and that hospitals need to do more to prevent mistakes. Collecting statistics on hospital mistakes in fact was an attempt to do this: if hospitals knew more about the kind of mistakes which typically were made, then they could devise better procedures for preventing them.
Well, the statistics were duly gathered from 28 NHS trusts, and they revealed over 20,000 'adverse incidents' over six months. If that sample is representative, it suggests over a million mistakes a year in the NHS as a whole. The media reported this with a variety of 'shock-horror-scandal' headlines, and when the Department of Health explained that it was rather more complicated than that, it was accused of a cover-up. But the Department had a point. It was not known, for example, how many of these 20,000 'adverse events' actually put anyone at risk; information from other countries suggested that there might actually be fewer mistakes in the NHS than elsewhere; and if getting health workers to report their own mistakes was the way to avoid them, subjecting health workers to blaming and shaming was unlikely to encourage that. The Department might also have said, though I don't think it did, that some accidents may be unavoidable, however many precautions are taken. Totally risk-free health care is no more feasible than totally risk-free transport, or sporting activities, or any of the other activities of modern society. We can minimise risks, but never entirely exclude them.
That life can be totally risk-free, however, seems to be one of the unexamined assumptions of much public debate today. Modern Western society has achieved so high a degree of rational control over nature and human error, that we begin to assume that perfection is possible. But when we examine that assumption in the light of the facts, we begin to see that things are more complicated. In particular, our unexamined assumption that there are rational explanations and technical remedies for everything begins to look distinctly shaky.
But let's look at this question of unexamined assumptions in a quite different context. Assume, for a moment, that you are someone whose knowledge of the Christian religion is limited to what you learn from the media. You then read or hear the stories told in this morning's second lesson, about the feeding of the five thousand and the stilling of the storm. What do you make of them? Almost instinctively, I suspect, you will think: 'If the early Christians didn't just make up these stories, they probably exaggerated events for which there must be a perfectly natural explanation.' If a biblical scholar then suggests (as some have done) that 'when Jesus started handing out the bread and fish, others began to share food they had hitherto been hiding' or again that 'just before the storm blew itself out, Jesus approached the disciples? boat on a causeway, submerged just below the surface of the water', that will probably sound less unlikely than that these events were miracles - transgressions of the laws of nature, as David Hume called them. That there must be a 'perfectly natural explanation' for everything indeed seems so obvious to many people today as to go without saying.
But is it quite so obvious? If miracles are in fact 'transgressions of the laws of nature' then by definition there can be no miracles. But to prove that a particular apparently miraculous event is a transgression of the law of nature, we would first need to be sure that we fully understood all the laws of nature at all levels. Yet such full understanding is something currently and perhaps permanently beyond our reach, not least because we are within, not outside nature, and because we ourselves are also part of what we need to understand.
To claim that there is a 'perfectly natural explanation' for everything in terms of 'the laws of nature' as we actually or potentially understand them, thus is far from obvious and in fact is an act of faith. As an act of faith moreover it may be misguided, since what it claims, essentially, is that everything can be completely understood in objective terms - in terms, that is, of the kind of knowledge that gives us complete intellectual control over objects or things in the world. But the problem with that, of course, is that ?everything? with which we have to do, includes not only objects or things but also other people - and we cannot have the same kind of intellectual control over other people as we have over things, because other people can answer back for themselves, challenging our understanding of them.
To understand 'everything', in other words, we need to seek not just objective or scientific knowledge. We also need the kind of understanding we come to when, in conversation with other people whose view of the world may be very different from our own, we take those other people?s views as seriously as our own, and try to see things from their point of view as well as our own. To take a current example: the present conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is not going to be permanently resolved by rational solutions devised from our more objective European or American view of their situation. It will only be resolved, if it ever can be, by Israelis and Palestinians themselves entering into conversation with one another?s very different interpretations of their situation, and by each risking their own deeply held views in an effort to come to a shared understanding of what is in the best interests of both of them.
To understand the world then, and certainly to change it for the better, we need not just more accurate objective knowledge, but also to put our own views at risk by entering into conversation with others whose views differ from ours. And this, I suggest, is true not just in relation to people who are alive now, but also to people in the past. The problem about 'explaining away' what we read in today?s second lesson as something that ?must have a perfectly natural explanation?, is that it refuses to enter into conversation with the point of view of the early Christians, on the assumption that a scientific or objective viewpoint is nearer to the truth than whatever the early Christians themselves were trying to say. But if the rational and objective modern view is only one aspect of the truth, that cannot be right; and if we want to know as much as we can of the whole truth, we need also to enter into conversation with people like the early Christians, and allow their ancient views to question our modern ones.
I have perhaps already said enough to indicate what this might imply. The weakest aspect of our modern view is the widespread but largely unexamined assumption that there is a rational explanation for everything and a technical solution for every problem. This assumption rests on the further assumption that an objective or scientific view will tell us all there is to be known about everything. But the worldview of the Gospels question such assumptions. It suggests that to understand the world and ourselves we need not only the scientific method of doubt, but also the religious attitude of trust, which goes beyond the evidence.
To go beyond the evidence is risky. The risk, of course, may be no greater than the risk of applying the method of doubt to everything, and thus of failing, for fear of error, to understand truth which can be found only beyond the evidence. But the evidence often enough is all-too-heavily weighted against going beyond it in faith. Our Old Testament reading today speaks movingly of that, in terms that might be repeated wherever the victims of nature and man suffer today: ?From out of the city the dying groan, and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God pays no attention to their prayer.?These words are spoken by Job, himself a victim who had every reason for bitterness and little reason to go beyond the evidence. Yet Job does go beyond the evidence: 'I know', he says, 'that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has thus been destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.'
How does Job know this? And how does that other victim Job prefigures, who according to the gospels fed five thousand and stilled a storm - how does he know what he knows with the confidence that allows him to stand firm when all men?s hands are turned against him? There is no modern rational, objective way to explain this, nor are ancient reports of miracles capable of convincing doubters. Nevertheless these two men, across the gulf of centuries, call our modern rational views into question. Job and Jesus, representatives of victims everywhere, challenge us by staking everything on their faith, that the heart of the universe is not cold and impersonal, but alive to all suffering and on the side of all victims. Were they right? There is only one way to find out. ?Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. Only then can you discover whether 'That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.'
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