Walking to Capernaum.

John 4:43-54.  (March 8, 2015)

I.

After this remarkable encounter with the woman at the well and the people of the Samaritan village of Sychar, Jesus and his disciples continue on northward, back home to Galilee.  In Galilee, they are met by many people who are pleased with what Jesus did in Jerusalem, which was basically create that disturbance in the Temple.  Galilee is famous for being hotbed of dissent, and the people must be impressed by his demonstration against the collaborationist Temple authorities.

They get to the town of Cana, where Jesus had performed his one miracle so far, the turning of water to wine at a wedding, back in chapter 2.  A royal official, probably someone who works for King Herod, seeks out Jesus to heal his son, who is gravely ill.  It is clear that when your child is dying, you do not have much concern about the politics of someone who may be able to bring healing.  The royal official does not care that Jesus is gaining a reputation as a trouble-maker.  He just wants his son to be well again.

Once again we see Jesus’ lack of concern about such extraneous distractions.  All he ever cares about when he heals someone is their suffering.  He doesn’t have any thought to things that we might think are important, like how they got sick, or their moral character, whether they deserve healing.  He doesn’t care about people’s nationality, religion, status, politics, or past history.  He only focuses on the suffering and its alleviation.  In this case, even though he has made a big public statement about his opposition to the current regime in Jerusalem, to the point of upsetting the Temple system itself, he does not hesitate to receive someone from the other end of the political spectrum, an official of King Herod.   

At first Jesus just observes with some frustration, “Unless you see miraculous signs and wonders you won’t believe.”  But when he says this he’s not talking to the man with the dying son.  The pronoun is plural.  He’s addressing the crowd of Galileans who have heard of his activities and have come out to see more.  They have come for the entertainment value of Jesus activities, demanding miracles as the price of their faith.  He’s just a showman to them.

The man, however, already has faith in Jesus.  He has come to Jesus because he knows Jesus can heal his dying son.  He says, “Lord, come before my son dies.”  He already trusts that Jesus can and will do this.

One of the issues this whole gospel is about has to do with seeing and believing.  We say that seeing is believing.  And that is true.  When Jesus did the first miracle at Cana, the text clearly says that the disciples came to believe in him because of it.  They saw and believed.  It was a revelation of his glory.  Seeing what Jesus does brings people to faith.  It inspires them to trust in him if they have seen with their own eyes who he is and what he can do.

We are rational, Modern people.  Modernity is based on a radical reliance upon what we can see with our eyes and perceive with our other 4 senses.  We depend on what we can empirically experience, measure, predict, and control.  We have faith in objectivity and reason.  Therefore, we tend to place our trust only in those things that we can see, measure, touch, and predict.

II.

But this faith is being shaken because we are slowly coming to realize that not only are a lot of very important things in life immaterial and unmeasurable — like love, joy, beauty, pain, fear, grief, and hope; but even what we think we are seeing is not necessarily reliable and objective.  People see things in different ways.  Different perspectives and points-of-view make a big difference.  Memories change.  And this doesn’t even get into the strangeness of subatomic physics where experiments come out different depending on the observer.

We now know that there is no such thing as objectivity.  There is no unbiased, unprejudiced perception.  We are all conditioned by our background and past experience, personality, desires, and so forth.

Then there is the fact that to believe only what you see isn’t faith at all.  By definition, faith is trusting in what we can’t see.  So faith in terms of the first miracle at Cana was not in the fact that the water turned to wine, it was in the identity of Jesus as the One who transforms the stagnant water of .

For this reason, the royal official who comes to Jesus in Cana now is actually more faithful than anyone who merely believes in Jesus because of the former miracle.  My point is that believing and seeing are related and reciprocal; there is a kind of circle in which what we see and what we believe are continually influencing and changing.

Jesus underscores this point when he decided not to come with the man down to him home in Capernaum.  He says, “Go home.  Your son lives.”

So the man and the crowd are not going to get to see a miracle.  Jesus refuses to be the entertainer, showing off for the spectators.  He refuses to use his powers as a way to attract followers, because then the only thing they would be following is the miracles.  Jesus is utterly opposed to any bait-and-switch marketing strategy, which lures people in with a spectacular show, and then gives them the gospel.  He knows that the medium is the message; the show would overwhelm the gospel, and create a very weak and conditional faith.  A false faith that would have to be fed with new and better magic shows every few days.

So the man has to make the long walk down to Capernaum alone, without Jesus’ physical presence, keeping his faith in his heart that Jesus can work miracles even at long distances.

This is where the man represents us.  This is the kind of trust that is required from us.  We have to hear in order to believe.  Then we have to believe in order to see, then our seeing reinforces our faith.  And that in turn changes the way we see going forward.  There is this constant interaction between what we perceive and that in which we trust.

We also have to take the long walk through life trusting and hoping that Jesus can and will do what he says.  Trusting that when Jesus says, “Your son lives,” he is telling the truth.  Trusting that Jesus can do this without actually, physically showing up.  This is the trust we have when we are driving to the hospital, or when we are sitting by the side of our sick child, or even when we watch the news about the terrible atrocities in the world.

Our whole life is a walk down to Capernaum.  And the question for is all is whether we will walk in hope or in terror, in trust or in fear, in faith or in anxiety, in the knowledge of the truth, or paralyzed and obsessed with the lies we are told and experience every day.

III.

There is a degree to which we are all “royal officials.”  That is, we are all thoroughly bought and invested in the system of falsehood, corruption, fear, and violence that dominates human existence.  We all keep the human kings, powers, principalities, authorities, leaders, bosses, in place by our strenuous efforts, for which they pay us.  We all sustain and maintain this system constantly by our implicit and explicit obedience of the rules, habits, traditions, and values that keep us at enmity with each other and God.

Faith is not just having an opinion about Jesus and proceeding merrily upon our way as if nothing else has changed.  Especially if that opinion is merely that he could do some cool miracles.  True faith has to mean actually living in a way that is in contradiction to this whole superstructure of lies that we have been indoctrinated into.  Jesus himself says we demonstrate our faith in him by keeping his commandments, which are all rooted and grounded in love.

We cannot keep his commandments and continue to live as we have always lived.  The two are contradictory.  We cannot walk down to Capernaum in faith, hope, and love, while still implementing oppression, exclusion, inequality, and violence in our day jobs as royal officials.  At the very least we have to serve as witnesses where we are to God’s miraculous, saving love, and seek to bring that love into our own work.  

So, as we make our way down to Capernaum, what is going on in our hearts is not a concern for whether Jesus can do this thing or not.  That is settled.  Now it’s not about what Jesus can do, but what we actually do as witnesses to him and as evidence of our trust in him.  That is, are our hearts filled with love, compassion, joy, life, light, and freedom?  Is it infectious?  Do we participate so fully in the cycle of seeing and believing that people can come to believe simply by seeing us?

We have to be walking to Capernaum expecting not just the healing of one boy, but the revelation of a new future, moving forward in wholeness and healing, blessing, joy, and life.  In this the sick boy represents first of all a future, as do all children.  The image of the royal official with a sick child tells us that this present regime has no future.  Our future is also at risk, sick unto death, when we devote ourselves to the perpetuation and maintaining of this present darkness.  

The human sinful addiction to greed and selfishness, violence, inequality, and exclusion, is foreclosing on our future.  We see this most urgently today as we have kicked the whole planet out of balance and are beginning to endure the nasty consequences.  

We have no other choice than to progress on to Capernaum confident in the future that Jesus gives, simply by his declarative word.  For he himself is the Word by whom God spoke the whole creation into being in the beginning, and when he says “Your son will live,” we may take that as unspeakably good news.  There is an alternative to suicide and extinction even for “royal officials” like us.

Another thing the boy represents, along with the future, is our past.  Each of us was a child once, and it is as children that we picked up the sickness that is killing us.  For it was as children that we got infected with the attitudes, practices, values, and ways of thinking that are killing us and our world.  The only way to be healed of this malady — which we call sin — is to enter the cycle of seeing and trusting in the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Just the fact that we are walking to Capernaum with hearts full of the expectation of life will itself serve to open our eyes to see that life happening and blooming before us.

IV.

So when the man finally gets home, even before he gets to his house the servants are running out to meet him!  They are telling him that his child is alive!  It turns out that the boy was healed at the very moment Jesus spoke those words, “Your son lives,” 1 o’clock the previous afternoon.  Now the man who believed, who trusted in Jesus, who followed and obeyed his word, sees.  And his faith is strengthened by seeing, and it spreads to his whole household.  This new consciousness is not limited to an individual, but it infects a whole community.

We see the spiritual growth of the royal official.  Before the story he remained in the darkness of the unconscious existence we all have in our condition of blindness and separation.  Before this story is somehow hears about Jesus, maybe from people who witnessed the way the water turned to wine at the wedding in Cana.  Maybe he is told about Jesus’ tirade in Jerusalem.  But the catastrophic illness of his son, and the fear and panic this stirs up in him, is what catalyzes this peripheral awareness of some figure doing unusual things, and turns it into a spark of trust.  So that when he hears Jesus has returned to Galilee he goes to Cana himself to meet him and ask for his help.

Then, obeying the word of Jesus, he travels back home, and finds that Jesus’ word has actually happened.  The boy is healed.  And trusting in Jesus expands to include more people who join the circle of seeing and believing.

The circle expands because Jesus’ word is truth.  What he says happens in real life.  We trust in it, we see it happen, we trust even more, and we see even more.  Until we are living in a different world, one characterized by the truth of God’s love radiating through and permeating everything.  The evidence piles up and we start to see how blind we used to be, and we grieve for neighbors who are still crashing around in the rat-race of sinful, destructive existence.  And we gather in community to support each other in keeping this vision and feeding this trust, and helping each other live in this new way, according to the commandments of Jesus Christ.

V.

Jesus’ words to the man, “Go home, your son lives,” are words we all need to take to heart.  Not because we have sons who languish close to death, though some of us do have sons who need all the help they can get.  “Go home, your son lives” means that we need to recover our participation in the world as God made it, breathed into life at the beginning, informed by the mind and will of God.  In that sense we need to come “home”, to our true home, not the counterfeit world we concoct in our fear and blindness.

Our true home is where we find healing, both of a past that left us crippled and conditioned us for an existence without hope or love, and of a future that is gasping for breath, having been brought close to extinction by diseases of our own making.

The Lord’s telling the man, “Your son lives,” should be heard by us as thrillingly good news, because it means that both the inner child of our past and the child as the promise of our future are safe, healed, secure, blessed, and made alive by his word.  His words mean we have hope.  The world does not have to be the way we know it; there is a better, truer way to live.  And through trusting and obeying the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the Lamb, takes away our loneliness, our alienation, our brokenness, and our separation, and restores us to union with and in God.

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