There are miracles. And there are miracles (Note 1).
And then there is the Greatest Miracle Of All Time (GOAT / GMOAT), to wit:
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the Earth. If it did not happen, well, not so much.
Think it might be worth considering whether it happened or not?
Since the Incarnation, if it is a fact, holds the central position in God’s plan, and since we are assuming that we do not yet know it to have happened on historical grounds, we are in a position which may be illustrated by the following analogy. Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, ‘This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony’. Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and ‘pull them together’. Nor would we be likely to go very far wrong. If illegitimate, no matter how attractive it looked at first glance, the new passage would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered it. But if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we would find it settling down, making itself more at home and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had heretofore overlooked.
Selah.
#Advent
Adapted from Miracles, C.S. Lewis
Note 1: The biblical definition of a miracle is an event that involves the direct and powerful action of God, transcending the laws of nature and common expectations of behavior.