There is a particular phrase used in the Bible to describe people who have trouble believing in the miraculous: hardened hearts. In the Exodus story, God performs one amazing, supernatural deed after another through Moses, and each time Pharaoh refuses to respond in faith, we are told, “For God hardened his heart.” (Why God would intervene to make someone not believe is a theological nut we’ll have to crack another time… or never. This is one of those places where perhaps the human voice in scripture drowns out the divine.)
In this week’s gospel story, in which Jesus strolls over on the water's surface to his disciples stranded in the middle of the lake, the phrase comes up again:
Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.
The passive tense here is interesting – were their hearts hardened by outside forces, like Pharaoh’s, or were they just hardened by life and experience and limited expectations?
Jesus often expresses impatience with the pace at which his followers do and do not “get it,” but really, he did give them an awful lot to “get.” His demonstrations of what is normal in the realm of God – feeding thousands, stilling storms, instantaneous healings, and now walking on water? – were so far outside human experience, that his followers had to constantly expand and revise their expectations.
We do too. Sometimes we don’t see the miraculous because we’ve ruled it out as a possibility. What doesn’t accord with our experience of reality cannot be real… except when it is. A big part of growing in faith is expanding our definitions of what is real in the realm of God, which is so much bigger and deeper and more powerful, and yet also simpler, than this earthly realm we call home.
In fact, I think we must undergo a rewiring to be able to receive the signal of the heavens, and that rewiring process can take awhile. We can facilitate the process, or stand in its way by staying stubbornly stuck in the “off” position, sure that the impossible remains that way, never venturing out in prayer or ministry beyond the conventional.
We facilitate the rewiring by engaging the stories of what God has done through people of faith – in the scriptures, in history, in books and videos about ministry today. We facilitate it by being alive to what God is up to around us now, noticing, asking in prayer to be shown. And we allow it to happen by testing the waters, as it were, stepping out in faith for things we think are impossible. Just as our brains create new pathways for information when the old are debilitated, so our faith circuitry becomes able to carry greater and greater power and hope as we use it.
Not everything “impossible” is manifest – I doubt I have enough faith to walk on water – but Jesus promised we would see “greater things than these,” greater than the works of power he himself performed. That’s his promise. How about we take him up on it?
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