Miracles of the Old Creation

Big idea

Summary

Lewis sorts the Gospel miracles into two broad families, beginning in this chapter with what he calls Miracles of the Old Creation: acts which do not introduce a wholly new kind of divine activity, but concentrate into a single moment something God is already continually doing, more gradually, through nature's regular processes. The miracle at Cana, turning water into wine, is his leading example: every year, ordinary vines slowly draw water up from the soil and, through countless intervening natural processes, turn it into wine; at Cana, Lewis suggests, the same divine activity that sustains that yearly process simply telescopes it into a moment.

He applies the same pattern to the healing miracles: God is already, Lewis notes, the one who heals wounds and knits broken bones through nature's ordinary, patient processes of recovery; the Gospel healings are the identical divine work compressed into an instant rather than spread across weeks. The feeding of the five thousand similarly intensifies the ordinary miracle of harvest, in which a little seed grain becomes, over a season, a great deal of bread; Christ multiplies the loaves and fishes as the same power that multiplies grain in the fields, only visibly and immediately rather than through nature's usual patient increase.

A further group — Christ walking on the water, calming the storm, and the miraculous catch of fish — Lewis reads as miracles of dominion: acts which do not merely speed up an existing natural process but display, all at once, the kind of complete mastery over nature that Genesis pictures as humanity's proper, if long-forfeited, role as nature's rightful ruler. These miracles, Lewis suggests, are less previews of a wholly different order to come and more a glimpse of what unfallen human dominion over creation was always meant to look like.

The unifying theme across this whole group, Lewis argues, is that God is not doing something utterly foreign to his usual character when he works these particular miracles; he is doing, suddenly and visibly, what he is already doing gradually and invisibly all the time — evidence, on Lewis's reading, of one consistent divine style rather than two unrelated modes of divine action.

Key points

• 'Miracles of the Old Creation' concentrate into a single moment something God is already continually doing, more gradually, through nature's ordinary processes.
• Water into wine at Cana intensifies the ordinary yearly process by which vines turn water into wine; the healing miracles intensify God's ordinary work of healing through nature's own recovery processes.
• The feeding of the five thousand intensifies the ordinary 'miracle' of harvest, where a little seed becomes abundant grain.
• Miracles of dominion — walking on water, calming the storm, the miraculous catch of fish — display, all at once, the kind of mastery over nature that Genesis pictures as humanity's proper original role.
• The unifying idea is that these miracles reveal one consistent divine character and style, rather than God acting in a way foreign to his usual dealings with the natural world.

Illustrations & analogies

• The yearly, unremarked 'miracle' of vines turning water into wine is set side by side with the instantaneous miracle at Cana to show the same divine action, only at two different speeds.
• The ordinary, gradual process of a broken bone knitting itself back together is compared with the instant Gospel healings as two speeds of the same divine work.

Related Scripture

• John 2:1-11
• Matthew 14:13-21
• Mark 4:35-41
• Luke 5:1-11

For reflection and discussion

1. Does thinking of a miracle as 'the same thing God always does, only sped up' change how ordinary or extraordinary you consider nature's regular processes to be?
2. Which of the miracles Lewis groups here (Cana, the healings, the feeding, the dominion miracles) do you find this 'intensification' reading most persuasive for, and which least? Why?