Why Miracles?

The Church has been made by Christ and must live accord­ing to Christ.

[Christ] comes to destroy [sin­ful pas­sions], and give [men] His grace, so as to make of them all one Holy Church. (Pas­cal, 783) 

As Pas­cal reminds us, our pas­sions keep us apart from God. It is through the death of these pas­sions, which Christ put to death on the cross with Him­self, that we are able to embrace the gift of God’s grace. In this series, we’ve returned again and again to the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Christ. This is the gospel. This is what we must hold on to, even when we think we have it. We are con­tin­u­al­ly putting our sin­ful pas­sions to death on the cross. Unlike Christ, who rose again to life, our sins do not rise. They are replaced by the grace of God and his free gift of salvation.

In this death, repen­tance, and sub­mis­sion, we received the free gift. It is not of our­selves, as Paul reminds us, but is a free gift of God. Yet, where do we go from here? Pas­cal tells us this too: We become part of the one Holy church.

Chances are good that you’ve heard of the church as either “one holy and apos­tolic church” or “one catholic church” before. The focus Pas­cal makes is that it is “one Holy church”. One Holy. One.  Through the ulti­mate plan of the Father, the works of the Son, and the direc­tion of the Spir­it: We, the church, the many, have become one. As the Father, Son, and Holy Spir­it are one. Out of the many: one.

We are start­ing to return to where we began. Have you noticed that? We start­ed our jour­ney with Pas­cal with one man, one truth, one God. We quick­ly ven­tured into search­ing out the infi­nite God, and have returned to the one. The infi­nite God has made us one.

I love the con­nec­tion between the num­ber one and God. All num­bers tend toward the num­ber ‘one’, just as all cre­ation tends toward God. Out of all of the infi­nite num­bers, they are com­posed of the fac­tor ‘one’. We use fan­cy ver­sion of the num­ber ‘one’ to make frac­tions get along, and solve for unknown vari­ables. There is no end to what a good alge­bra stu­dent can do with the num­ber ‘one’, just as there is no end to what you can do with the One God!

Do you doubt? Test the things taught by Pas­cal with the truth of math­e­mat­ics and the mir­a­cles from history.

The two fun­da­men­tals; one inward, the oth­er out­ward; grace and mir­a­cles; both super­nat­ur­al. (Pas­cal, 805)

Jesus Christ has ver­i­fied that He was the Mes­si­ah, nev­er in ver­i­fy­ing His doc­trine by Scrip­ture and the prophe­cies, but always by His mir­a­cles. (Pas­cal, 808)