The story we’ve just heard is one of the many healing miracles
which the Gospels record Jesus doing. There are a lot of them and it’s is easy
and to think that they are all pretty much the same. Someone is ill; Jesus
makes them well again. A blind man sees, a deaf man hears, a woman bent double
by disease is enabled to stand tall again; all very wonderful for the people
concerned, but isn’t it all a bit repetitive? Do we really need so many similar
stories? And anyway, how could such things happen? Centuries of scientific
thinking mean that we tend to think healings like this are impossible, and many
people feel that they make Christian faith look outdated or incredible?
But as with much of the Bible we need to realise that our
questions are not the questions of those who first heard these stories. We
might hear the same words they did, but we don’t hear the same meaning in them.
So we need to work a little harder if we are going to get at the heart of their
message. In the world of the first century pretty well everything was regarded
as a miracle, from the sun rising in the morning, to the ups and downs of human
life. It was all in the hands of the Gods, or Goddesses, or whatever spiritual forces
you happened to believe in. They ordered the world as they wanted. So our
ancestors weren’t nearly as bothered about how something extraordinary
happened as we would be. If you had lived then what would have mattered to you
was why those divine beings had
made whatever choices they had, and more to the point, how could they be
persuaded to make things happen the way you wanted?
I’ve started by pointing all that out because otherwise we risk
dashing off on a complete wild goose chase as we look at this story, or any
other Biblical miracle come to that. We’ll never succeed in explaining, or
explaining away, these stories – they come from a thought world too different
from our own. What we really need to ask is what these stories meant to those
who first heard them, people who were not asking how apparently
miraculous healings happened but why they happened. If we look at this
miracle with that in our mind, I think we will discover that it is far more
relevant to our own lives than we might imagine.
So – introduction over - what is happening here, in this
story of the healing of the centurion’s slave? What might its message be to us?
Let’s start by getting inside the story. Imagine we were
going to act it out. How many characters would we need to play the parts
involved as the Bible tells it? There would be Jesus, obviously. And some
Jewish elders, the ones who come to plead for Jesus to heal the slave. Then
later on there would be some friends of the centurion, sent to tell Jesus that
he need not come any closer. And there would be a motley crowd of bystanders,
just curious to see how things panned out.
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But that is the point that Luke is making. This centurion is
at a distance, not just physically but in other ways too, and he knows it. It
is a rather odd situation when you think of it. He’s a Roman official, part of
the army which is occupying Jesus’ land. He’s a Gentile, not Jewish. He seems
to have developed an interest in the Jewish faith and made Jewish friends, but
he’s still an outsider. He sends others to Jesus with his message not because
he thinks it is beneath him to come himself, not because he has some
high-handed sense of entitlement to Jesus’ help, but because he feels he has no
entitlement at all. That becomes clear later in the story. When he hears that
Jesus is on his way he sends another message to him to stop him “Lord, do
not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof…”
He knows that many Jewish rabbis would be wary of
associating with a member of the occupying army – it might look like
collaboration – and he knows too that the fact he is a Gentile means that many
would consider him unclean. He would pollute them ritually and they would have
to go through special ceremonies to cleanse themselves again. He takes elaborate
care not to put Jesus in a position where he might be compromised, even if it
means he can’t make his appeal directly.
There is something immensely touching about this. This man
could have tried to pull rank, throw his weight around, but he doesn’t. He puts
himself at Jesus’ mercy, and not for his own sake, but for the sake of a slave,
albeit one who is dear to him. He has no doubt that Jesus has the power to
heal, the question is, will he want to? The centurion doesn’t know, and can’t
insist. All he can do is ask, from a position that he knows is weak and
vulnerable, an outsider whom Jesus has no reason to feel he should help, as far
as the centurion can see.
The Jewish elders who come to bring this message obviously
think it’s unlikely that Jesus will want to help this man either. They seem to think
this man is one of the good guys, but why should Jesus care about the slave of
a Gentile soldier? That’s why they throw in some special pleading of their own.
“He loves our people”, they say, “and he built our synagogue…” Some things never change. Receiving gifts
from people tends to make us feel we owe them something in return, and these
synagogue elders clearly think that this is the moment when a debt is being
called in. There’s no evidence that this is in the centurion’s mind. There’s no
evidence that this makes any difference to Jesus either, but they clearly think
this is the game-changer that will persuade Jesus to help.
It seems to me that it is the contrast between the
bargaining of the elders – however well-meaning – and the centurion’s own
absolute refusal to try to manipulate, his humble acceptance of his
powerlessness in this situation, which so amazes Jesus when he praises his faith.
The centurion knows he can’t buy God’s help. He just asks, out of pure human
need. He knows how much he loves this slave, how he would do anything in his
power to help him and he trusts that any God worth worshipping would care at
least as much as he does for him. That might not mean the slave will be healed,
but whatever happens the centurion starts from the assumption that both he and
his slave are safe in the hands of God, even though they are outsiders, even
though many at the time would have regarded them as unclean.
And that, I think, is where this story comes home to us. It
isn’t about miraculous healing, whether it happens and if so how. It is about
the simple act of asking for help – from God or from one another. That’s
something that many people find difficult. It makes us feel vulnerable, by
definition help-less, and who wants to feel like that? Knowing that we need
help brings to the surface the suspicion, deeply held by many, that they don’t
really deserve it, that they need to make some special pleading, that they are
not really worth, or worthy of, the time, attention and love of others or of
God.
At that point, what happens?
Some people just deny their need and pretend to be
invulnerable.
Some people bluster their way through, insisting on their
rights in the assumption that if they don’t they won’t get help at all.
Some people manipulate, ingratiate, work obsessively to put
others in their debt and employ emotional blackmail. “How many
passive-aggressive people does it take to change a lightbulb?” “Don’t mind us,
we’ll just sit here in the dark…”
Some people try to buy their way to favour. I am sure many
people did build synagogues in the hopes of winning the blessing of God, as
these elders assume the centurion has done, just as in the Middle Ages wealthy
people built churches and bought indulgences in the hope that it would get them
into heaven more quickly, just as now businesses and individuals sponsor
charities to improve their public image.
I don’t know whether you have recognised your own preferred
style of trying to make things happen the way you want, but we are all probably
in there somewhere!
But the message of this story is that none of our anxious
attempts to rig the odds, in the end, will bring us what our hearts truly
desire, and what is most precious of all. Money can’t buy you love, in the
immortal words of the Beatles, and nor can it buy you protection against all
the world’s ills. You can’t manipulate or bluster your way to ultimate
security. The centurion knew he couldn’t force God’s hand, and he didn’t try
to. But he also knew, somehow, that this God whom he had come to honour and
worship loved his precious slave just as much as he did, and that whatever
happened, he could trust that love. That’s the true miracle in this story – the
faith that amazes Jesus - and it is a miracle that can transform lives now just
as it did then, allowing us to drop our anxious attempts to manipulate and
control life, the universe and everything and let ourselves be held in the
hands of God instead.
Amen
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