When John reaches for a word to describe the miracles Jesus did, he doesn’t use the one you might expect. The other three Gospels most often call Jesus’ miracles dynameis, “mighty works,” acts of power. John’s word is σημεῖον (sēmeion) — “sign.” And a sign is a different kind of thing from a display of power. A sign isn’t impressive for its own sake; it points. It’s there to make you look past the thing itself to what it means.

Think of a roadside sign. It isn’t the destination; it tells you the destination is near. You don’t admire the sign for its own beauty — you read it, and then you look where it points. That’s the whole logic of the word. When John calls the water-into-wine, the healings, the raising of Lazarus signs, he’s telling you from the very start that the miracles were never the point. They were arrows.

And in his statement of purpose, near the end of the Gospel, John says it out loud. “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe.” Far more sēmeia happened than made it onto the page — and the ones John chose to write down, he wrote down for a reason. They were selected. Curated. Aimed. Each one set down like an arrow pointing in one direction: toward belief that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

That’s why the word repays slowing down on. A whole theology of the Gospel is folded into John’s choice of sēmeion over dynamis. He isn’t asking you to be impressed by raw power; he’s asking you to read the miracle, to look through it to what it signifies. The healing means something. The bread on the hillside means something. Lazarus walking out of the tomb means something. The deed and its meaning are inseparable, and the meaning is the reason the deed got recorded.

So when you meet sēmeion, don’t stop at the wonder. Do what the word asks: look where it points. John selected his signs the way a writer selects evidence, and aimed every one of them at a single conviction he wanted you to reach. The miracles in the Fourth Gospel are not a gallery of marvels. They’re a set of arrows, chosen and notched and loosed at one target — that you may believe, and believing, have life.