Matthew's miracle of the coin in the mouth of a fish (Matthew 17:24-27)

-

"Go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” (Matthew 17:26-27)

This little gem of a miracle story appears only in the Gospel of Matthew. It's important in part because it helps us see beyond the common but inadequate definition of miracles as suspensions or interruptions of "natural law," of the law of cause and effect, which assumes that the universe is a closed system into which God must, somehow, break into from outside in order to act in the world.
This notion of natural law stands in contrast to the view of Scripture. We see this for example in the Book of Hebrews which describes rather a process in which Jesus "sustains all things by his powerful word" (Hebrews 1:3), and in Ephesians 4:6 which portrays God as being "over all and through all and in all."
In this little story in Matthew, which parallels the kind of miracles God usually does when answering our prayers, no obvious interruption or suspension of the normal course of things occurs...except that Jesus knew:
One day a coin is inadvertently dropped over the side of some boat.  Then, in the natural course of things, a fish, seeing something shiny, snaps it up so that it get lodged inside. Later the same fish sees the line put out by Peter and, as fish are want to do, takes its bait, Peter pulls the fish out of the water and unwedges the coin that Jesus said would be there and then he goes and pays the tax.
And so in line with Ephesians 4:6 we understand from this little miracle story that God is really free to move and act, often, as it were, incognito, over, through, and in all things in order to meet the needs of his people, It is not a question of "breaking" natural law. Indeed what some call natural law, we would call God's ordinary way of sustaining all things by his powerful word.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Timeline of David Alexander, Celebrity Ex-Evangelical Convert to Mormonism

-
Image
"...my 47 years in evangelical Christianity." See here ( 20:20) Here, as best as I can gather, is the religious background of the celebrated ex-evangelical convert to Mormonism David Alexander.  Alexander features his evangelical background as the platform from which he defends Mormonism and opposes evangelicals.  Questions have been posed about the extent of Alexander's evangelical involvement.  How one answers these questions will depend on (1) whether one considers the Twelve Tribe group in which Alexander (as "Duresh") belonged for what appears to be most of the last 20 years, should be counted as evangelical or not, and (2) whether the great number of churches Alexander reports having passed through during the previous 27 years, some of which could undoubtedly be counted as evangelical, represents typical evangelical experience.   I leave it to my readers to decide the answers to these two questions for themselves. Where possible I have relied on Alexand
Read more

Sex & the Spiritual Teachers: Spiritual Sexual Predators in the SBNR Community

-
Image
Recently added items:  " Sexual Ethics and Healthy Boundaries in the Wake of Teacher Abuse ," Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Guide (Winter 2023): 63-77. Buddhadharma  is a spinoff of Shambhala Sun , which was founded by the notorious womanizer Chogyam Trungpa.  I was very interested in seeing whether the article mentioned Trungpa and his son Sakyong Mipham, since both of them represented poor examples of the problem described in the article.  And as it turns out they are mentioned later in the article.  They don't note, however, that Sakyong Mipham, whose sex-scandal goes back to 2018, laid low for a year or so and then went right back to teaching. They do mention that "Osel Tendzin, the American dharma heir of Chögyam Trungpa, had engaged in unprotected sex with a number of his students despite knowing he was HIV positive. One student later died of AIDS, as did Tendzin." But they don't address the charge by Stephen Butterfield, a member of the gro
Read more

Four Key Differences between the Essenes and Jesus

-
Image
1. Oil Defilement: The Essenes regarded oil as a defilement, such that “ anyone who accidentally comes into contact with it scours his person” ( Jewish War 2.123, cf. Damascus Document xii.16).   Jesus urged those who were fasting not to “ look dismal, like the hypocrites,” who “disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting,” but rather to “put oil on your head and wash your face.” (Matthew 6:16-17).   2. Hierarchy:   The Essenes were in general very big on hierarchical ranking, especially in their separated communities. If a higher-ranking member so much as touched a lower-ranking one he had to bathe, “as after contact with an alien” (Josephus, Jewish War 2.150, cf. Damascus Document XVI.5-6 and 4Q279, Community Rule III.19-25).   This naturally also affected who the Essenes in their various rankings would sit down and eat with and who they would not (Community Rule [1QS] V.10-19). Jesus, in contrast, rejected such ranking, insisting that his disciples
Read more