Signs and Wonders Quotes

“we can de-couple the idea that people who are disabled deserved to be so, since that is not what early Judaism or Jesus taught. Jesus does not ask the hemorrhaging woman, “Did you do something sexually immoral such that you are bleeding?” (I have heard sermons go in this direction; do not go there). He does not ask the blind man whether he was punished for having been a Peeping Tom (one student, seeking a cause for blindness, connected the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida to the Sermon on the Mount, where after condemning adultery Jesus states, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away”) [Matthew 5:29]. Some intertextual connections are not helpful.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus

“We can take Jesus’s weeping as a sign of humanity, but we should not be limited to this view. To make emotions the major indication of humanity vs. divinity is to turn the God of Israel into the classical “unmoved mover,” to take away any sense of divine fatherhood, care, or love, and to strip out the Old Testament from the Christian Bible. For Jesus to weep does not, for the Christian, take away a sense of his divinity. It adds to it. And when we weep, as Jesus and God weep, we show our divine passion as well as our human emotion.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus

“we should be able to look at nature as part of God’s creation, as given to us in trust, as testifying to the divine while it is not itself divine. We get all this and more when we look at the nature miracles the Gospels record. Each one tells us something about Christ, but each one also tells us something about understanding the Scriptures of Israel, and each one also tells us something about ourselves.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus

“The Hebrew term for “create,” bara, has the sense of “create as only God can create”; the only time the Bible uses the term is in relation to divine creativity. For example, Isaiah 41:19-20 depicts God as stating, “I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created [bara] it.” This and the dozens of other verses that speak to God’s creative activity do not disrespect nature; to the contrary, nature testifies to divine creation.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus

“For a miracle to work, it should change those who receive it. The task now, and the joy, is to see how the miracle stories can work on us.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus

“we should resist the tendency, which is part of the rhetoric of the Gospels and their reception, to associate disability with sin.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus

“if a woman healed a person with a combination of herbs she learned from her mother, it was called witchcraft or at best “folk medicine,” but if a man, with a medical degree, using the same herbs, healed a person, it was called medicine.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus