Miracles of Christ
by Lore Sjöberg

Money in a Fish
Needless to say, the ability to find money in fish is not one of Christ's more well-advertised miracles. To begin with, coming up with cash money sounds insufficiently Christlike. "Arise, my child, for you are healed" sounds like something Jesus would say. "Hey look, a quarter!" does not. Secondly, the whole thing is just a little too "News of the Weird." D

Driving Out Demons
This is a good one. Jesus comes across a guy possessed by not one, but bunches of demons, which I imagine feels something like scabies only with the smell of brimstone and a much deeper voice to go along with it. For some reason the demons, realizing their infernal number is up, beg to be sent into a nearby herd of pigs. So Christ complies and the pigs -- all two thousand of them -- charge down and drown themselves in a lake. I'm sure it's all very symbolic. C+

Water Into Wine
According to John, this is the first miracle the Son of God performed, and I have to say it's a good one to start the show with. It's impressive, it's elegant, and it carries more obvious benefit than, say, changing a beet into a rutabaga. And He performed it for the benefit of guests at a wedding, which shows that God loves even those too lame-brained to call a caterer. A+

Healing En Masse
"[T]he multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see. [Matthew 15:31]" This is an important miracle because it shows that Christ has organizational skills. A lesser messiah might have gotten all confused in the turmoil and then the multitude would have witnessed the crippled seeing, the blind walking, the dumb made whole and the maimed speaking, and then the wondering would have been more along the lines of "What the hey?" B+

Walking on Water
It's interesting to me that so many of Christ's non-healing-oriented miracles involved water, fish, or both. Water into wine, fishes and loaves, walking on water, the aforementioned money in a fish, and so forth. But it's probably just as well that all this miracle-working took place by the shore in the middle east, because not only is the ability to walk on tundra much less impressive, but it would look pretty silly to have the faithful attaching little outlines of caribou to their cars. A-

Withering a Fig Tree
You might want to look this one up, because if you haven't read it you're not going to believe me. It's in Matthew 21:18-22. Christ is hungry, he sees a fig tree, but there are no figs, so in a scene reminiscent of "The Fox and the Grapes II: The Revenge" he curses the tree so that it will never grow fruit again. Weird. Eerie. Disturbing. C-

Tip of the props to Mister Pants for the divine inspiration.