‘Were loaves and fishes put under a basket, for Jesus to lift up 
in a sort of “Hey presto!” way?’

A former bishop once compared the resurrection to ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. But what exactly might we mean when we say ‘miracle’? James Barrett considers

Recently I took a family trip to see a close-up magic show at the headquarters of the Magic Circle, near Euston station. In the interval there was an opportunity to look at the museum, which featured books hundreds of years old that, despite their age, described tricks very similar to those we had just seen.

The magicians were really impressive! I had no idea how the tricks were done and what we saw seemed to entirely defy rational explanation – and yet we knew they were tricks.

Of course, significantly, I didn’t think they were miracles. It struck me that across human history there have always been magicians (the ancient books in the museum testified to it) and while nobody could explain how the tricks were done, everybody knew that they were, in some way or another, tricks.

A little while ago I read a biography of Charles Darwin, who is described as having had the best ever idea in biological science. I think that comment is quite right, really. His theory is so simple that it can be explained in one or two sentences. But once one has heard it all, alternative, previous, explanations seem almost comically contrived and implausible and it’s hard to think of things in any other way at all. Upon reading On the Origin of Species a contemporary exclaimed: ‘What a perfect fool I was not to think of it myself!’

Most recently I re-read the description of the biblical parable of the feeding of the five thousand. It’s a curious account, I think, in that it lacks any description of how this feeding was actually done. Were the loaves and fishes put under a basket, and when Jesus lifted the basket up again – in a sort of ‘Hey presto!’ way – there was a big pile of food? The gospel accounts simply don’t say. All that is clear is that there were a great many people, with no shops nearby, and the popularly expressed belief that there was not enough food. A boy was said to have offered some of the loaves and fishes he had with him – these would probably have been unleavened bread a bit like modern day pitta bread and dried fish. Hardly enough, obviously.

I find myself wondering whether what happened that day was something more akin to when people read Charles Darwin’s work for the first time. A moment when, in some way, Jesus had everybody simply donate what they had brought with them and, in an episode of collective unity and generosity, everybody then discovered that there was plenty enough for all – and even some to spare.

If I’m right, some would say that this was not, in fact, a miracle at all. It was instead entirely explainable and something that anyone could have done. To them, a miracle needs to be something more akin to a conjuring trick.

I take another view, though. We don’t today regard conjurers as miracle workers and I don’t think people did two thousand years ago, either. We cannot explain how their magic tricks are done, we cannot do them ourselves, but we do know that what we see are tricks of some sort, no matter how good they are. I think that a miracle, a true miracle, was when people could absolutely see and perfectly clearly understand exactly how the multitudes were fed and even how they might be fed in the future. There’s no trick at all except, perhaps, that anyone might have had that idea before but nobody did. God, the light, however one wishes to describe it, lies not so much in what happened as in the entirely new way of seeing things that caused it to happen at all. A new way so simple, so clear and so easy to understand that once heard it can never again be removed, although it remains possible for us to act counter to it.

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