Jesus said to him,
“Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”
The royal official asked Jesus to heal his son who was near death. But his request was specifically that Jesus himself would come and do the miracle before his eyes. It took some faith and humility on his part to come and ask this of Jesus in spite of his position of authority. But Jesus himself desired to provoke him to a still greater faith.
The royal official said to him,
“Sir, come down before my child dies.”
It was clear that the official was desperate to save the son whom he deeply loved. He had some idea that Jesus himself had power and would be able to help. But Jesus did not respond in the way that the official first imagined, by a physical visit, or a laying on his hands.
Jesus said to him, “You may go; your son will live.”
Here was the call to faith. Could the man accept the words of Jesus without being able to see the results already with his own eyes? This was not a trivial question, considering how deeply the official cared for his son. To leave without being accompanied by Jesus, if he did not believe the words of Jesus, would be to admit defeat. But he did believe.
The man believed what Jesus said to him and left.
His belief that the words of Jesus would prove true was new and tentative, but it was enough. It may not yet have entirely drowned out the thoughts of hopelessness and despair, but it empowered him to return home still willing to see the good he longed to see. When met by his slaves he was ready to listen to evidence of the power of Jesus at work. It would have been understandable if he assumed his slaves were coming to him in order to tell him his son had died. But he had believed Jesus, and was all the more ready to discover that his words had proved true.
He asked them when he began to recover.
They told him,
“The fever left him yesterday, about one in the afternoon.”
The father realized that just at that time Jesus had said to him,
“Your son will live,”
Maybe we too have deeply felt needs that we desire to bring to Jesus, perhaps children in need of health, physical or spiritual. We tend to insist that things happen in the way we imagine they should, tend to desire healing that manifests implicitly our control over the situation. We would prefer that Jesus come with us into the situation and perform a miracle before our eyes. But maybe instead he desires that we learn to trust his word and surrender our requests into his hands, for a result that is more hidden, but no less effective.
“Your son will live,”
and he and his whole household came to believe.
Was it the conversations with the slaves about the time of the healing that confirmed the whole household in faith? Was there perhaps something about the way Jesus chose to respond, over and above what the royal official requested, that redounded to the salvation of many? The slaves were, after all, now more directly invested and involved. Put another way, would the whole household have come to believe if Jesus merely came as requested? Only Jesus knows for sure, but we ought not dismiss the possibility. Often Jesus frustrates our own designs only so that he can provide something even better than we asked.
Jesus was already beginning, in answering this prayer of the royal official, to manifest the new heavens and new earth promised by Isaiah. He showed in a limited and particular way that renewal that will one day characterize all things.
No longer shall there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime;
He dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years,
and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed.
It is not just our families and other loved ones who are in need of more healing and more faith. Jesus desires for all of us to enter by faith more and more into this promised new life and new creation, living more and more as though the it, and not the fallen world, is our primary reality. From that place of faith we will ourselves have something to offer to the fallen world around us, a world desperate for the one who makes all things new.
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