Are Signs and Wonders Still Happening Today?

Near the end of Mark's Gospel, after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the eleven disciples and gives them a commission that has never been recalled:

Later, Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven, and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.

Mark 16:14–20

Read that last line again slowly: the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.

The signs were not a reward for the apostles. They were the Lord's confirmation of his own word. They accompanied the spreading of the Gospel. And as long as the Gospel is still being spread, which it is today in every language and on every continent, one has to ask: where are the signs?

Before getting to why we may not see them, it is worth being precise about what was actually promised. Because the passage above is not describing something Jesus would do. It is describing something believers would do.

Read it again, one sign at a time:

• In my name they will drive out demons.
• They will speak in new tongues.
• They will pick up snakes with their hands.
• When they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all.
• They will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.

Mark 16:17–18

The subject of every one of those sentences is they. The disciples. The believers. The people who went out and preached. People like you and me.

This is not a description of what God would occasionally do as a dramatic exception. It is a description of what would accompany ordinary people who believe and go. The signs are not separate from the mission; they travel with it. And the mission has not ended.

So the question becomes: where are the people performing these signs today?

This is a question Christians have wrestled with for centuries, and it deserves honesty rather than easy reassurance. Here are three positions people hold.

The first: there are fewer signs today because there is less faith today. When Jesus returned to his hometown of Nazareth, something remarkable happened, or rather did not happen:

And coming to his hometown, he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James, Joseph and Simon, and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” And they took offence at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honour except in his hometown and in his own household.” And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.

Matthew 13:53–58

That final phrase, because of their unbelief, is worth sitting with. Not because it is a comfortable answer, but because it is an honest one. If signs accompanied the faith of the early Church, it is worth asking what our own expectant faith looks like today.

The second position: the signs were given specifically to establish the Church in its first generation. Once the Gospel was planted across the known world and the Scriptures were complete, the miraculous signs diminished by design. Their work was done. This is a serious theological view held by many. It deserves respect, even by those who do not share it.

The third position, and the one this platform is built on: the signs are still happening. Every day. Everywhere. They are simply going unrecorded.

What has always struck me about the great witnesses in history is how ordinary they are.

In the early 1980s, six young people in a small village in the former Yugoslavia reported seeing the Virgin Mary. One of them, Mirjana Soldo, later wrote this about herself and the others:

“None of us were particularly pious compared to other children in the village, and we each had our own unique strengths and weaknesses.”

Mirjana Soldo, My Heart Will Triumph, p. 30

Medjugorje remains under evaluation by the Church, and I am not here to argue its case. What I take from that line is something simpler: these were not saints. They were disciples. And discipleship, it turns out, is exactly what we are all called to.

Saints, too, are ordinary people. Think of Carlo Acutis, a teenager from Milan who died of leukaemia in 2006 and was beatified in 2020. He spent his short life cataloguing Eucharistic miracles on a website. There is a kind of wisdom in the idea that saints are not people who never struggled, and sinners are not people without a future. Carlo Acutis had a Game Boy, a love of football, and a direct line to God. The two are not incompatible.

In my own small life, I have heard accounts that stayed with me long after the room went quiet. A testimony from a Youth 2000 retreat, someone describing a miraculous physical healing, told with such down-to-earth ordinariness that it was almost funny. The person joked about imagining the moment happening with a loud pop. That silliness, that humanness, is exactly what made it stay with me.

I have also heard, from someone close to me, an account of healing that I will not describe here, because it is theirs to tell, not mine. I hope one day they will.

These stories exist. They are real to the people who lived them. But they are told in whispers, in small groups, around tables after Mass. They do not travel far. The world is very loud, and the still small voice of grace does not trend.

That is, in part, why this platform exists.

There is a particular kind of faith that the New Testament seems to require for miracles to take place: not just belief that something could happen, but the active, present expectation that it will. Peter walking on water is the image that captures this most precisely:

Shortly before dawn, Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It's a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear.

But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid.”

“Lord, if it's you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”

“Come,” he said.

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

Immediately, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

Matthew 14:25–31

Peter walked on water. That is the part of this passage that gets remembered. But Peter also sank the moment his attention shifted from the one who called him to the conditions around him.

What if that is what happens to us? What if a miracle is already in motion, and we overthink it, rationalise it, lose our nerve, and miss it?

I am not willing to accept that we have simply given up on expectant faith. I am not willing to concede that what Jesus promised, signs accompanying those who believe, has been quietly archived, as though it applied only to people who lived two thousand years ago in a different language.

The Gospel does not say the signs accompanied the apostles. It says they accompaniedthose who believe. That is you. That is me.

And the signs themselves are specific. They are not abstract blessings or interior consolations, though those matter too. They are concrete: casting out evil, healing the sick, speaking in ways that cross barriers. These are acts performed by people, through faith, in the name of Jesus. Not by priests alone. Not by saints alone. By anyone who believes and goes.

But we can only see what we are paying attention to. And we can only pay attention together if we are sharing what we have seen.

That is what this platform is: a place to share what you have seen. A record. A collection of the quiet and not-so-quiet ways God is still at work in ordinary lives, in healings, in rescues, in the inexplicable coincidence that turned out not to be a coincidence at all, in the prayer that was answered in a way you did not expect but recognised immediately when it came.

Jesus said it plainly. It is his word, and it stands:

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.

John 14:12

Maybe we are not praying with enough expectation. Not just faith in the abstract, but the active, present expectation that signs will accompany this word today, because Jesus said they would, and his word stands. Without that expectation, we risk ending up like Peter: bold enough to step out of the boat, then watching the waves instead of the one who called us.

If you have a testimony, something that happened to you, something you witnessed, something that changed the way you understand what God is doing in the world, please share it. Not because we can verify it. Not because the Church has confirmed it. But because someone, somewhere, needs to hear that the signs are still accompanying the word.

They are. I believe it. And I am willing to be proved right.