Why did Jesus perform miracles?

What the Bible says

In the Gospels the miracles are not a side attraction. Mark's opening chapters are crowded with healings and exorcisms. So what were they for? The Gospels themselves give three answers.

First, the miracles are signs that the kingdom of God has come. When John the Baptist, in prison, sent disciples to ask whether Jesus was "the One who was to come," Jesus did not answer with a title. He pointed to what was happening.

Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.

Matt 11:4-5

The words echo Isaiah's promise of a day when "the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped" (Isa 35:5). About the casting out of demons he said the same thing in other words.

But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Luke 11:20

The miracles are a foretaste of the coming kingdom of heaven. Sickness, death and evil giving way show what the world will look like when God rules.

Second, the miracles came out of compassion. A leper knelt and begged, "If You are willing, You can make me clean." Mark writes:

Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” He said. “Be clean!”

Mark 1:41

A leper was someone no one touched. Jesus could have healed with a word, yet he laid a hand on him. At Nain, when he saw a widow burying her only son, "He had compassion on her" and raised the boy (Luke 7:13). At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John writes simply, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).

Third, the miracles point to who Jesus is. John calls them signs, and says of the first, "He thus revealed His glory, and His disciples believed in Him" (John 2:11). He also says why the book was written.

But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.

John 20:31

Yet Jesus did not use miracles for display. When the Pharisees tested him by demanding a sign from heaven, he "sighed deeply in His spirit" and refused (Mark 8:12). He called such a demand the mark of "a wicked and adulterous generation" (Matt 12:39). To the crowd he had fed he said, "it is not because you saw these signs that you are looking for Me, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill" (John 6:26).

The church's witness

The Fathers saw both the mercy and the authority in the miracles. Why did Jesus touch the leper when a word would have been enough? Chrysostom answers that it was "to shew that He gives health, not as a servant, but as the Lord" Chrysostom. Of the wedding at Cana he says, "The effects of the miracles of Christ are more beautiful and better than the productions of nature" Chrysostom.

Matthew Henry reads the leper's story as an invitation to trust: "Christ readily wills favours to those who readily refer themselves to his will" Matthew Henry. He also notes that "Christ would have nothing done that looked like seeking praise of the people" Matthew Henry. On John's question he says that "Those things which men see and hear, if compared with the Scriptures, direct in what way salvation is to be found" Matthew Henry.

On John 20:31 Henry says the signs were written down "that all might believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah, the Saviour of sinners, and the Son of God" Matthew Henry. The Nicene Creed confesses the Son as truly God, and the church reads the miracles inside that confession: the love of God made man, shown in flesh The Nicene Creed.

In the original languages

John's favorite word for a miracle is sēmeion (σημεῖον), "sign." A sign is like a signpost: it matters because of where it points. That is why, in John, the trouble is not that people see no signs but that they see them and do not believe the one they point to. The other Gospels often say dynamis (δύναμις), "power," which stresses that God's strength was really at work.

Mark 1:41's "moved with compassion" renders splagchnizomai (σπλαγχνίζομαι). It comes from the word for the inner organs and names a pity felt in the gut. One honest note: in Mark 1:41 one ancient Greek manuscript (Codex Bezae) and some Old Latin copies read "being angry" instead, and some scholars prefer that as the harder reading. Either way the verse shows a holy feeling against the leper's suffering, and Jesus' hand on him.

Common objections

"Ancient people were credulous, and miracle stories grow as legends." In its strongest form: the ancient world was full of miracle stories, other religions have them too, and without strong evidence we rightly trust the regularities of nature (this is Hume's argument Hume, Enquiry 10). There is truth in this. No story deserves uncritical belief. But ancient people also knew that the dead do not rise, which is why the people in the Gospels are astonished. The miracle tradition runs through several layers of the sources, and most striking is the reaction of opponents. The scribes did not deny the deeds. They questioned their source: "He is possessed by Beelzebul," and "By the prince of the demons He drives out demons" (Mark 3:22). Josephus describes Jesus as a doer of astonishing deeds (most scholars think a core of that passage is his) Josephus, Antiquities 18.63, and later critics, the pagan Celsus and a Jewish tradition preserved in the Talmud, put them down to sorcery. None of this proves the miracles happened. But that Jesus was known as a worker of extraordinary deeds is very hard for historians to dismiss. If God exists, there is no ground for ruling miracles out beforehand; see Are miracles possible?.

"If it was compassion, why did he not heal everyone? Why not now?" This question hurts. According to the Gospels Jesus healed many but not every sick person in the world, and those he healed, and Lazarus, eventually died again. So Scripture reads the miracles not as the final answer but as a sign: the kingdom has begun but is not yet complete. The day when sickness and death are gone has not come. This may not satisfy someone in pain. The question gets its own essay: Why doesn't God heal everyone?.

"He refused signs yet performed them. Is that not a contradiction?" What he refused was a sign demanded as a test. The Pharisees asked for a sign from heaven not out of a wish to believe but to trap him (Mark 8:11). Yet the same Jesus said, "If I am not doing the works of My Father, then do not believe Me. But if I am doing them, even though you do not believe Me, believe the works themselves" (John 10:37-38). A miracle performed to prove something on request is one thing. A miracle done because a suffering person has moved him is another. Jesus refused the first and did the second.

Going further

The miracles tell us two things. God is not indifferent to those in pain, and what is broken in the world will one day be mended. But the Gospels also admit that seeing a miracle is not the same as believing in Jesus. The miracle points to the door; the one who stands inside is Jesus himself.

You might ask yourself: what am I asking God to show me? Is the demand born of a wish to know, or of a search for a reason not to believe? What does it mean to me that Jesus weeps at the grave of a friend?

To read further, see Who is Jesus? and Is Jesus the Messiah?.