The miraculous elements in these stories alert us to the need to look at them more deeply.
These are not factual accounts, but are they still facts that need to be told?
Are they "signs", with a deeper meaning, as John's Gospel calls them, or
only later additions to endorse the standing of Jesus in a gentile world, or
do they conceal the actions of a radical movement in coded terms,
that we, and the authorities of the time, fail to understand?
Perhaps these tales of healing cover the reality of conversion,
a healing of the despair of a conquered people, or of spiritual malaise.
Maybe they report people converted to a new allegiance to the Kingdom of God;
where they can escape from the poverty of a peasant life, to new hope and to revolution.
However, to many, miracles may still seem to be a fundamental part of the religious package,
as they were to the competing religions of the gentile world in the first century AD. Supernatural intervention may seem the key to the answering of our prayers.
Removing the magic may threaten the authority of the priestly hierarchy;
even deny the divine conception of the empire of the church.
A more realistic explanation of these stories
is often not welcomed!