John 4:43-54

02/08/09
John 4:43-54
Hudson UMC

Well, three weeks ago, we read about how Jesus was on His way to Galilee, to avoid the negative attention He was getting from the Scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem. Finally, today, three weeks later, He gets there, back to Cana, the same town where He turned water into wine. You would think that, after being so long delayed before He got where He was going, He would stay there for a while. Perhaps He did, but He apparently did not do anything that John thought was important enough to write down. In the very next passage, which we will talk about next week, Jesus finds Himself in Jerusalem again.

Our passage tells us about a miracle that Jesus does in Galilee for a royal official. I do not think that it is a coincidence that this story appears immediately after the story of the woman at the well. Both are encounters with Jesus, both have dramatic results, but there are several differences between them as well, and I think that they are striking. The first and most obvious difference is that the woman and the official are from two very different social backgrounds. She was a Samaritan woman who was very poor; he was a royal official. Even if he was not rich, he was certainly not poor. The woman was an outcast, a well-known sinner; the official was a leader in society. The woman had a spiritual and emotional sickness and was a self-condemned sinner; the official’s problem was external to himself, his son was sick and dying. When Jesus met the woman, He was completely unknown to her, she had no idea who He could possibly be; we read that the official came after hearing that Jesus had come back, implying that he had heard about Him before. And lastly, though there very well may be other differences, Jesus came to the woman at the well; the official came to Him.

We are not going to go through these differences one by one, because they are very much intertwined and I don’t think they are accidental or coincidental. By that, I mean that I don’t think that John was just putting stories together that just happened to involve very different people, I think that he chose this story, out of all the stories that he could have told, to illustrate two extremes of the kinds of people who respond to Jesus. We will touch on these differences as we go on, but I want you to keep them in the back of your mind and mull them over as we continue.

Earlier, I said that, whereas the woman was very much poor, the man was rich; actually, I qualified that a bit and said that, even if he was not rich, he was certainly not poor. I have found that using “poor” and “rich,” especially as strict opposites, among middle class suburban mainline Protestants is problematic. The reason I find it problematic is because we do not tend to identify with either one. After all, America is more or less the home of the middle class, people who are neither the richest of the rich nor the poorest of the poor. We do not like to think of ourselves as poor because of the social stigma that goes along with it and because we don’t want people to feel sorry for us. We don’t, at least as Christians, want to think of ourselves as rich, because the Bible has some pretty heavy demands on the rich and has some serious warnings for them as well. It is comfortable to consider ourselves middle class because it is the place where we feel we can avoid the stigma of both the culture and the Bible.

It is because of this that I think it might be better to speak of “poor” and “not poor.” There are more promises given to the poor than any other group of people in the entire Bible and, most of the time, they are not simply talking about those who are poor in spirit. If we are really poor, those promises belong to us and we can claim them as our own without hesitation. However, if not, if we do not want to be considered poor, we cannot claim them and we are, in the eyes of the Scripture if not in the eyes of our neighbors, rich. Let me give you an example to illustrate this. A fellow seminary student recently had serious surgery. It was unexpected and very expensive, so he applied for assistance from the hospital and his debt was forgiven. His wife said to him, “You know what this means? We’re poor.” Though this man is middle-class by culture, though he has never really been in need before, he now knows that he is among the “poor.” When he shared this at Wesley Table, we congratulated him.

You see, God has a soft spot in His heart for the poor. Now, this does not mean in any way that God only loves the poor, but that God tends to seek the poor out. Why do you think that might be? The poor are less pretentious. They are less likely to say, “I can do it on my own,” or, “I’m too proud to accept help.” The not poor, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and “just work harder.”

We see this in how the official has a different reaction to Jesus than the Samaritan woman does. The woman had no place in society, no pride, not even much self-respect. In a way, she had nothing to lose, so it was easy for her to follow Jesus. The official, however, though he sought Jesus out, which is a good thing and an example to follow, already knew about Him, had heard stories about Him, and he even had true faith that Jesus could heal his son, but he waited until Jesus came from Judea to Galilee before he did anything. The woman at the well had never heard of Jesus before, it was pure grace that she encountered Him. The man knew that he needed Jesus but waited and waited before seeking Him out.

Now, I don’t want it to seem that I think that the official’s faith was not real or that we should not rejoice that even he came to saving faith. What I am hoping to do is impress upon you the difference between how the poor often react to Jesus and how those who are not poor tend to do so. The somber fact of the matter is that, here in the affluent Western culture of America, the Gospel is having less and less of an impact on the people. Where it is growing is among the poor. Christianity has declined dramatically in Europe. However, Christianity is not really dying overall. In Southeast Asia and the global South, Christianity is growing like you would not believe. It has been said that the average Christian in the world today is an African or Latin American woman. The poor love the Gospel and flock to it. The not poor can take it or leave it.

When I consider the differences between the official and the Samaritan woman, I wonder about a few things. First, what if Jesus had not come to Galilee at that time? He had been delayed in Samaria for two days, what if He had stayed a week or more? What would the official have done then? Would it have been too late and would his son have died? The second thing is, what if the man’s son had not been sick? If his son had not been sick, would he have sought Jesus out, or would he have continued on in his life, contentedly self-sufficient? The third thing is, what if the official had thought that he was able to bring about his son’s cure without Jesus, would he still have gone? There was no doubt that Jesus worked the healing because everything else hadn’t worked. If the doctors could have healed his son, if he had never been brought to his total crisis, would he have ever turned to God? These are important things for us to ponder, especially as people who, by and large, are far closer to the official in our culture and status than we are to the Samaritan woman.

Now, again, I don’t want it to seem like I’m saying that the faith of the official was not real; it really was. We read that, because of what Jesus had done for him, he and his entire family believed. It was a real conversion, it was a real act of faith; there was nothing fake about it. I also do not mean to present the idea that Jesus was somehow unwilling to do what He did. God loves the rich as much as He loves the poor. The reason why the Gospel focuses so much on the poor, the reason why the Early Methodists were nearly all very poor, and the reason why the Bible comes off kind of harsh toward those who are not poor is not because God does not love them nor because Jesus does not wish to bring healing and transformation to them, but because the self-perceived self-sufficiency of the upper and middle classes often teaches people that they have no need for God, that they can make it on their own. The problem is not that God does not love the rich, but that the rich all too often do not love God.

And who can blame them? God bids them to give up their wealth, He bids them to care for the poor, He bids them to give up the control that they have over their own lives; control that they have had all their lives and that they have been taught to see as a right rather than as a privilege. Who can blame those who are not among the poor for not always responding to the call of Christ? After all, this is the same Christ who told the rich young ruler that, if he really wanted to follow Him, he needed to sell all he had and give it to the poor. This is the same Christ who reminds us that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven. The Bible never declares that money is fundamentally and intrinsically evil, but it does say that the love of money is at the root of all kinds of evil. It is hard for us who live in comfort and prosperity to really take that to heart.

Nobody comes to Jesus “naturally.” There is nothing “natural” about our coming to faith. It is entirely “supernatural.” One could make an argument that not a single person comes to true faith in Christ until they have had a crisis. For the woman at the well, her entire life was a crisis; for the royal official, it was his son’s serious illness; for the man in our passage next week, it is the fact that he is a cripple who yearns for health but cannot have it. For the apostle Paul, it was a face-to-face confrontation with the resurrected Lord; for John Wesley, it was a dangerous trip across the Atlantic; for me, it was a realization that I was not nearly as good as I thought I was and that whether or not I believed in Christ was a huge deal. What is it for you? Have you ever had a crisis that drove you to the foot of the cross? Have you ever come face to face with need that you were simply unable to overcome and needed God to rescue you? Is your life a crisis? Have you ever been so aware of the sin that clings to your very nature that you have cried out, “Who will save me from this body of unbelief? Lord, save or I perish!”

I want to draw your attention to the first words that Jesus says after the official comes to ask Him to heal his son. “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” This is not a decree, a comment that shows that, in His sovereignty, God will not allow you to believe until you have seen signs and wonders. This is a lament. “Why is it that you will not believe unless you have seen signs and wonders?” It is almost as if this is one of the central ideas in the book of John, since there are fewer miracles in John than in any of the other Gospels. It is as if Jesus is saying, “What is wrong with you? Don’t you understand who I am and what I have come for? You need me to transform your life, to set you free from bondage to sin and death, to send the Holy Spirit to empower you and fill you with the very life of God, and you ask me to do a healing? Yes, I will heal your son, but do not allow this healing to blind you to what I have really come to do.”

Jesus tells the man that his son has been healed and the official leaves. He got what he wanted. He began to go home. On his way, he found out that Jesus really did heal his son. Once his crisis was dealt with, the official walked away from Jesus. He did not stay to thank Jesus, nor did he worship Him, nor did he run out, like the woman at the well did, and tell everyone else around what had happened. He clearly saw Jesus as a miracle worker, as one who could solve problems, but he did not yet know the one fact about Jesus that Jesus really wanted him to know. It was only when he got the good news that the official finally connected the dots. This man healed his son with a word. Nobody can do that, not from a distance. The only one in the universe that can do something like this is God. The fact that this man had brought such radical and complete healing could mean nothing other than that He was indeed God in flesh. Finally, he believed and shared his news with his family and it transformed their lives as well, even though they did not see Jesus face to face.

So, the official believed, but it is a different story than the Samaritan woman’s. Jesus was busy hanging out with the poor, so this man who was not poor had to go and find Him; he had to seek Him out. The man had to come to the end of himself, unable to solve his own problems, before he was willing to put his trust in this traveling preacher. Let us, as people with a post-Pentecostal understanding, not delay. Let us not wait until our world falls apart before we turn to Jesus. Let us not wait until a “more convenient time.” Let us respond now, so that we need not despair when the crisis does indeed come. Let us pray.

AMEN