How to read a miracle story today?
A literary genre
Tales of miracles are not, far from it, unique to Christianity. In the Christian context, it is the miracles of Jesus, as recounted in the New Testament, which serve as a reference and a model...
However, we can identify features common to all stories of miracles, regardless of the religious traditions in which they fit:
- The expression of a feeling of power that goes beyond man.
- An experience of gratuitousness through the irruption of the extraordinary in ordinary life.
- A comfort for the unfortunate, encouraged to believe that we can overcome misfortune, fatality, the impossible.
Tales of miracles also have in common a structure, that is to say a particular form of narrative, organized into three moments:
- The presentation of the patient and his request for healing
- The act of healing
- The choir of admiration (thanksgiving)
We sometimes also try to develop typologies, that is to say classifications by type of miracle: miracles on people (healings, conversions), miracles on nature (material miracles, meteorological miracles). All miracles, however, are about people, and all, by definition, are impossible.
In fact, what characterizes above all the story of a miracle is the notion of crossing a limit reputed to be impassable (G. Theissen, Urchristliche Wundergeschichten, Gütersloh, 1974).
faith and story
The Magisterium (Vatican I, De fide, can. 3034) does not impose belief in such a miracle of Jesus, but to believe that Jesus performed miracles. The Catholic Church thus leaves to the believer the possibility of carrying out a critical study of the various stories that have come down. Indeed, a miracle story is never considered as the objective report of a simple prodigy, but an interpretation. From then on, what seemed a prodigy in the eyes of contemporaries may no longer be so in our eyes; it remains nonetheless a story of a miracle, a literary form that seeks to produce meaning.
According to Xavier Léon-Dufour, “Miracle”, Catholicisme, t. IX, Paris, Letouzey and Ané, 1982, col. 252 – 269 and
by the same author (ed.) The miracles of Jesus according to the New Testament, Paris, ed. du Seuil, 1977.
Antoinette Guise
