And
miracles following . . .
by Mike Oettle
“SILVER and gold have I none; but such as I have I give thee: In the
name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” So spoke Peter at the
Beautiful Gate in the often-quoted example of the miracles performed by the New
Testament saints. There were many others, of course, but nowadays people aren’t
so sure that just any Christian can perform miracles – or at least, that was
the way things were when I was a boy.
Father Francis McNutt, in his
book Healing, tells a rather sad tale of himself as a newly ordained
priest: he was asked by a Protestant friend to pray for his son, who had been
born partially blind. “I did believe in the possibility of healing,” he writes.
“But only saints could do such things. And I was no saint. What was I to do?”
Well, in the end he fobbed his
friend off by giving him the names of two members of his Order he thought were
holy. Since then, Fr McNutt has come to realise that while he is “no saint,
certainly not with a capital ‘S’ ”, God does use ordinary men like himself, and
his books witness to the fact that he has an active healing ministry.
But why then the idea that only
saints can do it? The Gospel gives us no justification for such spiritual
discrimination. The last words of Jesus recorded by Mark are: “These are the
signs that will be associated with believers: in my name they will cast out
devils; they will have the gift of tongues; they will pick up snakes in their
hands, and be unharmed should they drink deadly poison; they will lay their
hands on the sick, who will recover.” What’s the word he uses there? Not
apostles, not saints – just believers.
The book The History of
Christianity suggests that the superficial conversion of large numbers of
pagans in the time of the Emperor Constantine had something to do with it:
their belief in, and veneration for, the mother goddess (in her various forms)
and the many local gods and their shrines, was accommodated by placing special
emphasis on Mary and the shrines of local martyrs, and while worship of such
people was strictly forbidden, the idea grew up that it was all right to pray
to them in the hope that they, in turn, would intercede with Jesus or the
Father.
At any rate, by the Middle Ages
it was a well-rooted idea that, particularly if one were ill, one should pray
to a saint (especially a martyr), and that any cures that took place were
counted to the credit of the saint concerned – so much so that official
recognition as a saint became reserved for those for whom such posthumous miracles were claimed. If you’ve ever read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1399) you will recall the words of the Prologue, which opens: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/ the droghte of March hath perced to the roote” (when April, with its sweet showers, has pierced to the root the drought of March) and, after describing the glorious weather, remarks:
Than
longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . .
And
specially, from every shires ende
Of
Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The
hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That
them hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
(Then folk long to go on
pilgrimages, and especially from every shire of England they head for
Canterbury to seek the blessed holy martyr who had helped them when they were
sick.)
The martyr in question was Thomas
Becket (died 1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, who had become extremely
popular by Chaucer’s time.
While he was of national
importance, his cult was naturally encouraged by Rome as a counterweight to
royal predominance in the Church – which in the end led to his undoing, because
Henry VIII and his successors could hardly encourage enthusiasm for a prelate
who had defied his king in favour of the Pope.
Since the Reformation, the
Christian world has almost split into two camps – on the one hand the Orthodox
and Catholic, which still actively seeks miracles from deceased saints through
prayers requesting intercession with the Lord; and on the other the Protestant,
which holds that through Christ we have direct access to the Father without any
need for others (even Christ's mother) to intercede for us.
John writes (1 John 2:1) that “we
have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”, while Paul
writes in Romans (8:26) that “the Spirit Himself intercedes for us”. The Book of Common Prayer – largely the work of Thomas Cranmer[1] Archbishop of
Canterbury under Henry VIII and burnt at the stake in 1556 under Mary I – uses
the Protestant expression “Jesus Christ, our only mediator and advocate”.
(Cranmer appears on the calendar on 21 March.)
Yet even today the intercession
of saints makes an impact on our lives: every time a move is made in the Roman
Catholic Church to recognise some deceased holy person as a saint, great
emphasis is laid on authenticated miracles. Americans, in particular, have
become expert at obtaining the kind of evidence required, and a significant
number of recently beatified and canonised persons have been American. But even
in Southern Africa this is happening – many people will recall the ceremonies
in Lesotho in 1988 during which Pope John Paul II proclaimed the French
missionary priest Father Joseph Gérard to be Blessed.
