The Saint 77
happy to administer the shove. What Northrop Frye says about the
miracles of Jesus is often true: they “depended on the belief of the
recipient. A real miracle is an imaginative eff ort which meets with
an imaginative response. Jesus could give sight to the blind and ac-
tivity to the paralyzed only when they did not want to be blind or
paralyzed; he stimulated and encouraged them to shatter their own
physical prisons” (81–82).
Granted, the Gospels show Jesus performing miracles that seem
super natu ral. He walks across the water with equanimity. He raises
Lazarus from the dead. But around such a fi gure, it is inevitable that
legends will accrue. Jesus’ most revealing miracles are miracles of
perception and love. What do they reveal? They reveal a new way
of being in the world, based on compassion, love, and the forgive-
ness of sins. One emphasizes Jesus’ miracles of spirit, rather than
of matter, under the belief that they open the door to a State of Soul.
To this way of thinking, the miracles of matter lead only to more
superstition and to the closing off of human possibility. The objec-
tive of these refl ections is not to identify the true and only Jesus, but
to focus on the Jesus that leads us from Self to Soul, the Jesus who
is the spiritual brother of Buddha and Confucius.
Does Jesus literally turn water into wine when he attends the wed-
ding in Ga lilee? Maybe. Maybe he does. But it’s a lso tr ue that when
one is stimulated by the com pany of a young man about to bring the
good news to the world, the water may taste more than a little like
wine.
When Jesus sees a group of men about to stone to death a woman
supposedly caught committing adultery, he doesn’t resort to magic
to stop them. He simply tells them to look into their own hearts and
know themselves as the sinners that they (and we all) are. We can
dissolve guilty feelings in ourselves by transferring them to another,
then punishing her. But that gives us only temporary reprieve and
creates more guilt in its turn. Better to face our own reservoir of guilt