Great shot? Absolutely. Miracle? Not even close. In sports we often hear references to athletes as warriors and their deeds described, when triumphant, as supernatural in nature. However these prowess athletic feats fall far short of the standard by which actual miracles are defined. So why has this language become common in our sports arenas? I think it's an indication that sports and athletes have clearly become idols in the modern age, but I also think this is a product of living in a time when most of us don't experience true miracles - thus the word has lost it's meaning.
What is a miracle? Is it something that is difficult to believe? Is it something that defies (or seems too) a natural law? Is it something that flies in the face of logical reasoning? Is it a flash of "magic," here one moment and gone the next?
C.S. Lewis describes miracle thus:
"I use the word Miracle to mean an interference with Nature by supernatural power."
He describes the integration of miraculous intervention and the natural world in this way: "It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn't. ... If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. ... The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern. ... And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalists expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in his purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature. ... The rightful demand that all reality should be consistent and systematic does not therefore exclude miracles: but it has a very valuable contribution to make to our conception of them. It reminds us that miracles, if they occur, must, like all events, be revelations of that total harmony of all that exists. Nothing arbitrary, nothing simply "stuck on" and left unreconciled with the texture of total reality, can be admitted. By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must, in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level. . .. In calling them miracles we do not mean that they are contradictions or outrages; we mean that, left to her [Nature] own resources, she could never produce them. ... In other words, there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity. ... I do not say that the normalities of Nature are unreal. ... But to think that a disturbance of them would constitute a breach of the living rule and organic unity whereby God, from his own point of view, works, is a mistake."
So for Lewis, miracles are not a disruption of natural laws and they are not contradictions to what we consider "normal" occurrences of life. Rather, miracles are acts of God, instances when the divine interacts with the world He has created. And they certainly are not, again according to Lewis, momentary in nature; instead, miracles, once they occur, are carried on by nature, creating a new reality. This is what has occurred on the Cross, whereby Jesus battled sin, defeated it, and in a miraculous created a new reality, one in which we are, by faith alone in Christ alone, children of God and heirs with Jesus to the Kingdom of God. That is reality. That is God's law. And that is without question a miracle.
For a great discussion about the nature of the miracles of Jesus and how they differ from miracles offered by other religions, see The Meaning of Miracles by Bob Deffinbaugh.
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