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.