Is Christ a Magician?

Don’t laugh.

Over the past sixty years, such questions were taken quite seriously. In the 1970s, Christ was depicted as a clown in a runaway-hit Broadway musical, Godspell, and as a hippy guru in Jesus Christ Superstar. These strange renderings became de rigueur in not a few Catholic parishes. All these enormities were not to be outdone by the Dominican (now Anglican) Matthew Fox with his bestselling book On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear, presenting the Savior as a drug-addled sage in hallucinatory stupors. 

Those times seemed apocalyptic.

But, to our more serious question above. We should preface these words by God’s: “It is a wicked and perverse generation that asks for signs and wonders” (Matthew 16:4).

To Catholics of every stripe, those words of Our Savior are unsettling. Why is God here so very dire? Isn’t the wish of most Catholics that Our Lord will show us favor by manifesting “signs and wonders”? Even in the Church’s better days, a preponderance of Catholics looked in their prayers to Christ for prodigies of explicit gifts?  

While Christ did indeed enjoin us to “ask” and to “knock,” we must not mistake that for the essential mission for which His Father dispatched Him. For that we look to St. Matthew: “For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  

As it states in the Nicene Creed, which we pray fervently each and every Sunday, repeating over and over again: “for us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven.” Of course, we plead before His throne for every one of our needs, great and small. But our greatest need is salvation from our sins. This has become déclassé in these past few decades, with sermons spilling over with calls to self-realization, equity, and “mutual listening.” This is understandable, considering how much more of a labor it is to change our lives than posture about the woeful status quo.  

Making the matter of “salvation” even more remote is the near disappearance of insisting upon the state of sanctifying grace for the reception of Holy Communion. If the Communion rail (oops, I meant to say the Communion line—it’s so tiring to remember the flattened and desacralized argot), is merely a welcoming line for the friendly display of inclusiveness, then salvation from sin has become not only a fossil but an insult.  

Even once reflexive Catholic bullet phrases like “poor sinners” and “saving your soul” have become incomprehensible, almost taboo. Christ’s salvific mission has become reconfigured. He has come to save us from environmental depredation, impolitic talk of “right and wrong,” “right-wing political structures” (read: conservative government), or, worst of all, the unreconstructed pre-Conciliar liturgy. 

It appears that more than a few of the Church’s shepherds are leading Catholics into a Brave New World, but not a Christian one. The once dazzling world of Catholic mystery, with its whole topography of exquisite art and architecture, has slowly vanished. Is this what Hegel meant by the “fury of disappearance”? Even a benighted philosopher like him spoke truth once or twice. It appears that more than a few of the Church’s shepherds are leading Catholics into a Brave New World, but not a Christian one. Tweet This

Adding more force to Christ’s words is St. Paul’s own in 1 Corinthians 1:22: “For both the Jews require signs; and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified; unto the Jews indeed a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness.” 

Even when Our Lord did perform miracles, it was only as a recognition of Faith and often accompanied by a stern admonition to tell no one (Mark 7:36; 8:26; Luke 5:14; 9:21).  

But, alas, herein lies the raison d’être of Christ’s divine work: that men would have Faith in Him:

• Matthew 8:10—“When Jesus heard it, he marveled, and said to them that followed, verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith in Israel.”
• Matthew 9:22—“Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.”
• Matthew 17: 20—“If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place: and it shall remove: and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”
• Luke 17:5—“And the apostles said unto the Lord, increase our faith.”
• Luke 18:8—“Nevertheless, when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”

Faith is defined as that unshakeable certitude in the truth of what God has revealed because He has revealed it. St. Thomas teaches that this theological virtue is a perfection of the intellect because it concerns the amplitude of knowledge. Faith does not preclude a thirst for greater understanding. In fact, we are obligated to spend our lives deepening our knowledge of the Faith through greater study, for its riches are so vast.  

So it is that Cardinal Newman wrote regarding the Faith, “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” Difficulties regarding the Faith are inevitable for probing and fertile intellects. How else will our minds revel in the full beauty of the Faith except by its perpetual unveiling through our questions? But this intellectual quest is a virtue, as opposed to doubt. Doubt is a moral failure, the rejection of the Church’s prerogative to teach the salvific truth.

Still, why is Our Savior so frightful about those seeking “signs and wonders”’? For these are the demands of those men who seek the compensations of this world rather than the rewards of the next. It is the downfall of men who have wearied of things supernatural and find their only interest in the titillations of the here and now. When the enthusiasms of the culture become the new Religion of Man, then man has truly lost God. The estimable scholar Daniel J. Mahoney calls this the worshipping of the Idols of the Age. In his book of the same name, he writes pungently,

The religion of humanity in its dominant forms is not productive of community. Good works, humanitarian works, are welcomed, of course, but one can love Humanity through a vague and undemanding sentimentality. Loving real human beings is another matter altogether. It involves the exercise of the cardinal and theological virtues, which have little or no place in the new humanitarian dispensation. In its own way, humanitarianism is neither politically nor morally demanding. It makes the avant-garde of humanity feel smug and self-satisfied, needing neither grace nor the full exercise of the moral or civic virtues. It creates a world that has no place for either magnanimity, the supreme virtue of Plutarch’s heroes, or a Churchill or a de Gaulle, or humility, the defining trait of Mother Teresa or Saint Francis. Secular humanitarianism posits a world without heroes or Saints, a world in which the capacity to admire what is inherently admirable is deeply undermined.

Dr. Mahoney continues with an almost damning apocalyptic force when he expertly exegetes the final temptation of Christ in the desert,

He resists the demonic temptation to become a “servant of power” and to bend to the requirements of a Kingdom that loses sight of almighty God and his purposes for humanity. Christ’s Kingdom is ultimately not of this world, even if the seeds of the Kingdom (like the “mustard seeds’” of the parables) are announced in multiple ways through Christ’s preaching and miracles. Unlike Barabbas, Christ is no ‘”robber,” no “zealot,” no freedom fighter. The salvation the Son of Man offers is not a political liberation, not emancipation in this world from the terrible challenges of sin and death. His is a call to repentance and not a project to promote political liberation. Pope Benedict is quite taken by the 19th century Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir Soloviev’s portrait of the Antichrist, who announces with great fanfare the need to give priority “to a planned and organized world.” Soloviev’s Antichrist is a thoroughgoing humanitarian…one who promises humankind a perverse “secular salvation” and a Kingdom without Christ the King.  

Lucifer’s intentions are clear in Christ’s temptations in the desert. He wants Him to be a magician, pulling out of His hat “signs and wonders.”  

Turn stones into bread! How the crowds will shriek.  

Jump off that high building! How their jaws will drop.  

Even on Calvary, “if Thou art the Son of God, come down from that cross.!”  This would be a feat that would awe them.  

But all He shows is a man led like a sheep to his slaughter. The world wants “wonders.”  

All the Savior gives is Heaven.

In a classic 1944 article, “The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude,” the philosopher Aurel Kolnai crowns Dr. Mahoney’s words with a similarly anguishing cameo of a world without the supernatural grace of Christ,

Man does indeed stand in great need of religion: wherefore, whenever the traditional religion of a civilization is weakening, and irreligious patterns of thought acquire ascendancy in men’s minds, a secondary appearance of semi-religious or para-religious attitudes can be observed. We are faced with a heretical watering-down of the traditional religion, arbitrary qualifications of the humanitarian creed, semi-scientific fads and fashions, autochthonous or imported superstitions actually believed or flaunted as a matter of diversion and political ideologies assuming a religious tinge and fervor.

Do we not witness this in the Church today? The endless drone of political things, not supernatural ones. The shocking encouragement of “accompanying” sinners rather than changing them. The sophomoric exercise of “listening” to the world, not teaching it. The saccharine summons to be happy just the way we are, not the sharp call to die to ourselves. Or the sweet invitations to make accommodations to the self, not the unsavory call to carry one’s cross.

This impatient craving for “signs and wonders” represents a troubling collapse of the Church’s doctrine of Divine Providence. The balm of this doctrine lies in the acceptance of events as permitted by Christ for our purification; purification for our sanctification; and sanctification so we can do great things. No doubt we suffer daily the appalling plunder of our Church and civilization, but to waste a moment of time interpreting their trajectory or seeing them as premonitory is as vain an exercise as the ancient Romans inspecting the entrails of animals to predict the future.

Our only “wonders” are the supernatural ones of our Faith. The wonder of ordinary water and a priest’s words making clean the soul of an infant in Baptism. The wonder of being washed of sins in the sacrament of Confession, or the presence of Calvary each time Holy Mass is celebrated. What of the wonder of possessing the Incarnate God reigning in our tabernacles, announced only by the flickering, red sanctuary lamp standing like a perpetual sentinel.

It is easy for even the best of Catholics these days to hanker after “signs and wonders.”  

That is the stuff of magicians, not the Thrice Holy God.