The Great Gospel of John
Volume 2
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
First journey of the Lord: Kis - landing place at Sibarah - Nazareth
- Chapter 31 -
Jairus" talk about the effect of miracles.
Says Jairus thereto: "Yes, indeed, mighty Cyrenius, you are fully right in saying about yourself that you are now in the clear; because I too and surely each one of us is so and is able to grasp the sheerest eternal necessity for this incontrovertible truth from its foundation as to how things are and how man should be constituted. But what can be done? Mankind has sunk too deeply, - it does not comprehend a gentle, free doctrine, and to be honest, one would waste the time, because one would go into fruitless effort, hardly bringing forth thistles and thorns for vainest fruition! Hence through gentle means no results are possible, at least not with the Jews I know!
2
To teach the people through signs however is doubly wrong, because persuaded through miracles to receive the truth, man is under judgement and bonded, believing the words reinforced through miracles not on account of the truth but solely on account of the mighty wonders, and not from inner conviction and consequent self-determination; hence becoming active in accordance with such word out of slavish fear of some sudden punishment. If someone cleverly dissuades him against the miracle, he shall also be the first to say a glad goodbye to the world with the accompanying faith! And secondly, the doctrine supported by miracles is bad also because the miracle as such cannot have a duration in itself, and cannot move forward to generations to come as more than a told and not experienced one, unable to serve more than as a children's tale.
3
If a miracle could be made to last, or empower all teacher's hearing these truths to work signs perpetually, then such lasting wonder would be relegated only too soon to natural daily occurrences by the human intellect, losing the force of its significance. A miracle that can be worked by all teachers of truth at all times would also secondly become mundane like the commonplace magic of the troubadours, which certainly I am not able to emulate, neither seeing how and by what means they are effected; but because one sees such only too often, it loses the attribute of the wondrous, sinking to the commonplace and unusual.
4
Is not everything that daily surrounds us wonder upon wonder? That which we hear, see, feel, smell, taste - is nothing but wonder upon wonder! Yet because it endures and always proceeds in the same order, it loses the attribute of the miraculous and hence does not bond man's feeling as does judgement but merely engages the attention of some scientist. These put the ear to the ground, desperately trying to hear the grass grow; but notwithstanding all their efforts they achieve little or nothing, not being able to find out how the grass does grow, they in the end put on airs of comprehension. Not being able to make the grass grow, others learn ancient and worn out bits of magic to confound those blind and therewith make the seeing laugh at how harmlessly the blind let themselves be talked around.
5
It is therefore certain that miracles basically have either very little or as is usually the case nothing whatever for reforming mankind because of what I rightly just said about miracles; they indeed normally arouse the idle curiosity of the onlookers, but with all due effort they nevertheless don't loosen the sinister heart-strings of the soul, the miracle-gapers remaining as they were and at most ask each other usually as foolishly as possible - "yet how the magician got it going!" - but the still more foolish ones don't see anything about the wonder-man other than devils and their spooking anyway.
6
However, if so few desirable fruits emerge from the sphere of the miraculous and even fewer and inferior ones by legal coercion, according to Your most lucid presentation Oh Lord and Master, hardly five in a thousand people being open to free learning, then I believe myself not wrong in asking what in the end is one to do as teacher? Miracles harm and so do harsh laws - whilst only sporadically is any man capable of freely absorbing instruction from Your divine wisdom depth! How can one effectively free oneself from this dilemma? How can one steer the ship past the world-renowned Scylla and Charybdis in order not to be swallowed by either the one or the other?"