TWENTY-ONE verses of John’s Gospel make an ambitious dollop for a Sunday morning. The lection divides neatly into two halves: (1) the feeding of the five thousand; (2) Jesus’s walking on water. They are both “signs”, although only the first is explicitly called so (v.14). It takes place in the sight of a huge crowd, whereas the second is a private sign for the disciples, and (arguably) with no benefit or blessing to any of those who witnessed it.

There are various well-tested strategies for interpreting such signs. One is pietism: “It is not for the likes of lowly mortals like ourselves to question how this happened. The more supernatural it appears, the more we must accept it as a miracle.” Another is minimising scepticism, which can still affirm the truth of the miracle but in a way that robs it, as far as possible, of any supernatural component. Thus the five thousand must all have received a token fragment of bread and fish, and the disciples, in their panic, thought Jesus walked on the surface of the water when actually there was a solid footing just below the surface.

There is a third way, but it is not an option for Christians: outright rejection of any miraculous element in the signs. This would mean that the feeding of five thousand men, women, and children was a fraud, a sharing of scanty resources made out to be something more fantastical. The walking on water would also be a lie. It never happened. Or Jesus tricked the disciples into thinking that they saw him do this. Or the disciples exaggerated an experience of Jesus’s having come to them at a dangerous moment into a cause-and-effect saving of their collective bacon.

Seeing a trick or fraud exposed can be emotionally as well as intellectually satisfying. When I read Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Strong Poison (which I warmly recommend), one of the characters deployed techniques of charlatan spiritualism to extract information from another character: I enjoyed learning how such tricks were done. After finishing a more recent crime story, I turned to Google to find out how other supposedly supernatural tricks, like levitation, might be achieved.

I mention these by way of contrast, because I cannot see a single shred of evidence pointing to the fact that Jesus, or any of his disciples, or John the Evangelist, was trying to deceive anyone, either by inventing such stories or by “improving” them to make them more extraordinary.

There is a feature that I have learned to look for in any narrative that asserts as fact something that is difficult to reconcile with modern understanding of how the world works, and that is the introduction of a “strategic doubter”. There are a few such characters in scripture and other early Christian writings, such as the Protevangelium of James, which introduces us to a sceptical midwife. Unconvinced that Mary had given birth while still preserving her virginity (for that virginity was conceptualised in physical rather than moral terms), she inserted a hand to check the birth canal. Her hand shrivelled up, until Mary’s prayer restored it.

Another example comes from Matthew’s version of the Passion (27.63-64). The Evangelist anticipates sceptical attacks on the fact of the resurrection by bringing forward, as his strategic doubters, the “chief priests and the Pharisees” to demand a guard be set beside the tomb in which the Lord’s body was laid. This “independently” reassures readers that there can have been no hocus-pocus with the tomb or the corpse.

No single explanation will reassure Christians about every one of the miraculous signs that Jesus did. Some, such as his calming of the storm, need have been nothing more than good luck and fortuitous timing (Mark 4.35-41); but still I trust. Pietist explanations are worthless, given that they demand the switching-off of our God-given human intelligence. Minimising explanations get rid of the problem, but throw out the salvific Lord with the miraculous bathwater.

One detail in Jesus’s walk on the waves helps me to find confidence to trust: namely, that the disciples are terrified by what they see (v.19). If the story had been written to pull the wool over our eyes, they would surely have been confident, triumphant. Their terror is (at the very least) some reassurance: that Jesus, our brother and our friend, is also the mighty Son of God.