John 4:46-54 So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine. And there was a certain nobleman… The evangelist evidently intends us to connect together the two miracles in Cana. His object may, possibly, mainly be chronological, and to mark the epochs in our Lord's ministry. But we cannot fail to see how remarkably these two miracles are contrasted. The one takes place at a wedding, a homely scene of rural festivity and gladness. But life has deeper things in it than gladness, and a Saviour who preferred the house of feasting to the house of mourning would be no Saviour for us. The second miracle, then, turns to the darker side of human experience. It was fitting that the first miracle should deal with gladness, for that is God's purpose for His creatures, and that the second should deal with sicknesses and sorrows, which are additions to that purpose made needful by sin. Again, the first miracle was wrought without intercession, as the outcome of Christ's own determination that His hour for working it was come. The second miracle was drawn from Him by the imperfect faith and the agonising pleading of the father. But the great peculiarity of this second miracle in Cana is that it is moulded throughout so as to develop and perfect a weak faith. Notice how there are three words in the narrative, each of which indicates a stage in the history. "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe."... "The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way."... "Himself believed and his whole house." We have here, then, Christ manifested as the Discerner, the Rebuker, the Answerer, and therefore the strengthener of a very insufficient and ignorant faith. I. First, we have here, our Lord LAMENTING OVER AN IGNORANT AND SENSUOUS FAITH. At first sight His words in response to the hurried eager appeal of the father, seem to be strangely unfeeling, far away from the matter in hand. "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe." "What has that to do with me and my dying boy, and my impatient agony of petition?" "It has everything to do with you." It is the revelation, first of all, of Christ's singular calmness and majestic leisure, which befitted Him who needed not to hurry because He was conscious of absolute power. It is also an indication of what He thought of most importance in His dealing with man. It was worthy of His care to heal the boy; it was far more needful that He should train and lead the father to faith. The one can wait much better than the other. And there is in the words, too, something like a sigh of profound sorrow. Christ is not so much rebuking as lamenting. Why? Because to their own impoverishing, the nobleman and his fellows were blind to all the beauty of His character. The graciousness of His nature was nothing to them. They had no eyes for His tenderness, and no ears for His wisdom; but if some vulgar sign had been wrought before them, then they would have run after Him with their worthless faith. And that struck a painful chord in Christ's heart when He thought of how all the lavishing of His love, all the grace and truth which shone radiant and lambent in His life, fell upon blind eyes, incapable of beholding His beauty; and of how the manifest revelation of a Godlike character had no power to do what would be done by a mere outward wonder. Are there not plenty of us to whom sense is the only certitude? We think that the only knowledge is the knowledge that comes to us from that which we can see and touch and handle, and the inferences that we draw from these; and to whom all that world of thought and beauty, all that Divine manifestation of tenderness and grace is but mist and cloudland, Intellectually, though in a somewhat modified sense, this generation has to take the rebuke: "Except ye see, ye will not believe." And practically, do not the great mass of men regard the material world as all-important, and work done, or progress achieved there as alone deserving the name of "work" or "progress," while all the glories of a loving Christ are dim and unreal to their sense-bound eyes? And on the other side, is it not sadly true about those of us who have the purest and the loftiest faith that we feel often as if it was very hard, almost impossible, to keep firm our grasp of One who never is manifested to our sense? Do we not often feel, "Oh I that I could for once, for once only, hear a voice that would speak to my outward ear, or see some movement of a Divine hand." The loftiest faith still leans towards, and has an hankering after, some external and visible manifestation, and we nee I to subject ourselves to the illuminating rebuke of the Master, Who says: "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe." II. And so we have here, as the next stage of the narrative, our Lord TESTING, AND THUS STRENGTHENING, A GROWING FAITH. The nobleman's answer to our Lord's strange words sounds, at first sight, as if these had passed over him, producing no effect at all. "Sir, come down ere my child die." Almost as if he had said: "Do not talk to me about these things at present. Come and heal my boy. That is what I want; and we will talk about the rest some other time." But it is not exactly that. Clearly enough, at all events, he did not read in Christ's words a reluctance to yield to his request, still less a refusal of it. Clearly, he did not misunderstand the sad rebuke which they conveyed, else he would not have ventured to reiterate his petition. He does not pretend to anything more than he has, he does not seek to disclaim the condemnation that Christ brings against him, nor to assume that he has a loftier degree, or a purer kind, of faith than he possesses. He holds fast by so much of Christ's character as he can apprehend; and that is the beginning of all progress. What he knows he knows. He has sore need; that is something. He has come to the Master; that is more. Ah! any true man who has ever truly gone to Christ with a sense even of some outward and temporal need, and has ever really prayed at all, has often to pass through this experience, that the first result of his agonising cry shall be only the revelation to him of the unworthiness and imperfection of his own faith, and that there shall seem to be strange delay in the coming of the blessing so longed for. And the true attitude for a man to take when there is unveiled before him, in his consciousness, in answer to his cry for help the startling revelation of his own unworthiness and imperfection, the true answer to such dealing is simply reiterate your cry. And then the Master bends to his petition and because he sees that the second prayer has in it less of sensuousness than the first; and that some little germ of a higher faith is beginning to open, He yields, and yet He does not yield. "Sir, come down ere my child die." Jesus saith unto him, "Go thy way, thy son liveth." Why did He not go with the man? Why, in the act of granting, does He refuse? For the man's sake. The whole force and beauty of the story comes out yet more vividly if we take the contrast between it and the other narrative, which presents some points of similarity with it — that of the healing of the centurion's servant at Capernaum. There the centurion prays that Christ would but speak, and Christ says, "I will come." There the centurion does not feel that His presence is necessary, but that His word is enough. Here the man says, "Come!" because it has never entered his mind that Christ can do anything unless He stands like a doctor by the boy's bed. And he says, too, "Come, ere my child die." Because it has never entered his mind that Christ can do anything if his boy once has passed the dark threshold. And because his faith is thus feeble, Christ refuses its request, because He knows that so to refuse is to strengthen. Asked but to "speak" by a strong faith, He rewards it by more than it prays, and offers to "come." Asked to "come" by a weak faith, He rewards it by less, which yet is more than it had requested; and refuses to come, that He may heal at a distance; and thus manifests still more wondrously His power and His grace. "Go thy way; thy son liveth." What a test! Suppose the man had not gone his way; would his son have lived? No! The son's life and the father's reception from Christ of what he asked, were all suspended upon that one moment. Will he trust Him, or will he not? Will he linger or will he depart? He departs, and in the act of trusting he gets the blessing, and his boy is saved. And look how the narrative hints to us of the perfect confidence of the father now. Cane was only a few miles from Capernaum. The road from the little city upon the hill down to where the waters of the lake flashed in the sunshine by the quays of Capernaum, was a matter of only a few hours; but it was the next day, and well on into the next day, before he met the servants that came to him with the news of his boy's recovery. So sure was he that his petition was answered that he did not hurry to return home, but leisurely and quietly went on the next day to his child. Think of the difference between the breathless rush up to Cana, and the quiet return from it. "He that believeth shall not make haste." III. And so, lastly, we have here the absent Christ CROWNING AND REWARDING THE FAITH WHICH HAD BEEN TESTED. We have the picture of the man's return. The servants meet him. Their message, which they deliver before he has time to speak, is singularly a verbal repetition of the promise of the Master, "Thy son liveth." His faith, though it be strong, has not yet reached to the whole height of the blessing, for he inquires "at what hour he began to amend," expecting some slow and gradual recovery; and he is told "that at the seventh hour," the hour when the master spoke, "the fever left him." And all at once and completely was he cured. So, more than his faith had expected is given to him; and Christ, when He lays His hand upon a man, does His work thoroughly, though not always at once. Why was the miracle wrought in that strange fashion? Why did our Lord fling out His power as from a distance rather than go and stand at the boy's bedside? We have already seen the reason in the peculiar condition of the man's mind; but now notice what it was that he had learned by such a method of healing, not only the fact of Christ's healing power, but also the fact that the bare utterance of His will, whether He were present or absent, had power. And so a loftier conception of Christ would begin to dawn on him. A partial faith brings experience which confirms and enlarges faith; and they who dimly apprehend Him, and yet humbly love Him, and imperfectly trust Him, will receive into their bosoms such large gifts of His love and gracious Spirit that their faith will be strengthened, and they will grow into the full stature of peaceful confidence. The way to increase faith is to exercise faith. And the true parent of perfect faith is the experience of the blessings that come from the crudest, rudest, narrowest, blindest, feeblest faith that a man can exercise. (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine. And there was a certain nobleman, whose son was sick at Capernaum. |
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