Miracle You Believe
Everything God does is a surprise. First, creation. There is no need for this. It is an utter superfluity.
Creation of all being out of nothing.
Not merely imposing new form on old matter but imposing existence on nonexistence. For in creation, the God who is everything and needs nothing acts as if He needs everything. He comes out of Himself and creates a universe that is infinitely less than Himself and yet real, beings that are not Being Itself, real things that are really other than Reality Himself.
God is not reasonable, in any human, expected sense. It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable.
Creating other spirits was crazy enough, but then He went on to create us: spirits that are also animals: angels that breathe and breed, organisms that think, mortal spirits, immortal animals. Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, “I am.”
There’s much more to God’s craziness. He then went on to give these “rational animals,” free will and let them choose between Himself and Satan, Heaven and Hell, light and darkness, life and death. It is no charade: if we choose the Enemy, He lets us do it, and respects our freedom—forever. How can He act so dangerously? We wish He didn’t. We wish He had put up snake fences around Eden. So He let us make the most moronic choice in history, buying the Devil’s apple advertisement.
So what did God do next? The craziest thing of all, the deed no sage, no saint, no philosopher, no mystic, no man, no angel, and no devil ever even dreamed of: He became a human zygote, fetus, baby, boy, teenager, man, and then corpse. To do this, He first sent His angel to meekly wait for a girl’s consent to be His mother.
God is such a gentlemen that He asked permission from His mother to be born! And God Almighty, infinite Spirit, the Second Person of the eternal Trinity, acquired a set of animal organs—forever. (For the Ascension was not the undoing of the Incarnation.)
And then He gave Himself to our mouths and our stomachs as well as to our souls. That thing that looks like a little piece of bread—that’s Him. I certainly sympathize with most Protestants, who do not believe that. It is nearly unbelievable. The priest puts God into your left hand, and you pick up God Almighty with your right thumb and forefinger and you swallow God Almighty, and He falls into your stomach. That is crazy—as crazy as the Incarnation.
This is 99.9999999999 percent unbelievable. Like the Incarnation. This baby who can’t even speak until his parents teach him, this man who has nerve endings all over his body and gets hungry and tired and bloody and gets nailed to a cross and dies—that is the “holy God, holy strong one, holy immortal one,” the eternal Word of the eternal Creator Who spoke all time and space and matter into being.
How can we believe this? Only because He Himself gives us the grace to believe it.
Not only is the fact a miracle, our faith in it is also a miracle. It is a miracle that an honest and intelligent Christian believes a truth that is nearly unbelievable.
There is no miracle in dishonest faith, fake faith; nor in unintelligent faith, stupid faith, misunderstood faith, which confuses Christianity with something easily believable, like “God exists and Jesus is nice and we ought to love one another.”
But honest and intelligent faith in Christianity is literally a miracle. “Faith is a gift of God.” God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.
For how could we ever believe such a thing all by ourselves unless we were deranged?
How was it possible that anyone would think that God would love man; that the God who needed nothing would act as if He needed man; that the blessed God Himself, the perfect One, would care so much for man that He would become man and let Himself be murdered by man in order to save man? If God gave no sign, how could we ever suspect that? It is inconceivable, incredible, impossible, unimaginable, and crazy.
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