Meditations on Matthew

This winter when I was in Champaign I read a book that touched me so deeply, bringing together in my soul questions that I had hardly dared ask aloud. It was a book called 'Things Unseen', written by a Vancouverite named Mark Buchanan, and the chapter that stuck with me the most and had me thinking this week is about Jesus and John the Baptist.
The story in Matthew goes like this: John the Baptist, the incredible prophet who understood who Jesus really was more than anyone else ('the greatest of these was John'), was languishing in prison, an imprisonment that would eventually culminate in his death. He sent his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect another?"
Jesus answered back by detailing all the miracles he had performed- the lame were walking, the blind were seeing, the dead were raised... but then at the end of it, he spoke a cryptic sentence that pierced to the heart of John's question.
"Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."
I've read that verse before but skipped over it because I didn't really understand it's significance. But the author of this book gives it his interpretation.
Here was John in prison, surely he didn't need to be educated on the miracles Jesus was doing. Of course we all know about them. Have you heard about people being healed of cancer in Africa? Have you heard of the revivals in South America where the dead are being raised? Have you heard the stories of those who were miraculously given jobs when they prayed, whose cars kept going when they should've died, whose mothers got saved on their deathbeds?
So then why is our friend Kathy, who has a 6-year-old son, why is she suffering from breast cancer? So then why is my sister Hannah still disabled? Why am I still praying for friends to become christians when I am seeing their lives fall apart over and over again? If Christ can do those miracles, why isn't he doing them for me? Why wasn't Jesus doing something for John, the great prophet, while he rotted in prison? Why hasn't Jesus done something for me?
"Blessed is the man who doesn't fall away on account of the One who does all this for others, but who sometimes leaves you- you!- in your prison, with death just outside the door."
"The answer must be", the author says, "that those who never see, never touch, are being forced by a divine austerity, by a God who remains elusive, to grasp the substance of faith..... Jesus calls miracles 'signs'. The writer of Hebrews calls them 'shadows'. Miracles are meant to point to something bigger, more real, more alive, than themselves.... they are fingerprints of God, a clue to his presence, but they are not His hand."
"Blessed are those who don't need the sign, the shadow..... they have not fallen away on account of Jesus. They have grasped that a relationship with Jesus is different from a bargain or a contract with Him... they have understood that a miracle is as much a veil as a shrine, that it conceals God as much as it discloses Him, that it can become not the 'sign' that points to God, but the diversion that keeps us from Him."
And I believe Jesus is saying the same question to us today. Are you going to fall away (to become 'scandalized') because you have heard of God's miracles- and yet never seen them in your own life? When your deepest prayers remain unanswered and your most painful wounds are struck again and again, are you going to fall away from God on account of One who does something like this? Or are you going to embrace his invitation to believe in him- not in spite of his lack of miracles- but because he does not exist to satisfy us with his mere fingerprints- but rather the very substance of himself?
Blessed are you if you do not fall away on account of Jesus Christ.