Miracles of Our Lord

by George MacDonald

But endless more will follow, for God is exhaustless in giving where the human receiving holds out. God be praised that there are such embraces in the world! that there are mothers who are the salvation of their children!

We now complete a little family group, as it were, with the story of another foreigner, a Roman officer, who besought the Lord for his servant. This captain was at Capernaum at the time, where I presume he had heard of the cure which Jesus had granted to the nobleman for his son. It seems almost clear from the quality of his faith, however, that he must have heard much besides of Jesus—enough to give him matter of pondering for some time, for I do not think such humble confidence as his could be, like Jonah's gourd, the growth of a night. He was evidently a man of noble and large nature. Instead of lording it over the subject Jews of Capernaum, he had built them a synagogue; and his behaviour to our Lord is marked by that respect which, shown to any human being, but especially to a person of lower social condition, is one of the surest marks of a finely wrought moral temperament. Such a nature may be beautifully developed, by a military training, in which obedience and command go together; and the excellence of faith and its instant response in action, would be more readily understood by the thoughtful officer of a well-disciplined army than by any one to whom organization was unknown. Hence arose the parallel the centurion draws between his own and the Master's position, which so pleased the Lord by its direct simplicity. But humble as the man was, I doubt if anything less than some spiritual perception of the nobility of the character of Jesus, some perception of that which was altogether beyond even the power of healing, could have generated such perfect reverence, such childlike confidence as his. It is no wonder the Lord was pleased with it, for that kind of thing must be just what his Father loves.

According to St Luke, the Roman captain considered himself so unworthy of notice from the carpenter's son—they of Capernaum, which was "his own city," knew his reputed parentage well enough—that he got the elders of the Jews to go and beg for him that he would come and heal his servant. They bore testimony to his worth, specifying that which would always be first in the eyes of such as they, that he loved their nation, and had built them a synagogue. Little they thought how the Lord was about to honour him above all their nation and all its synagogues. He went with them at once.

But before they reached the house, the centurion had a fresh inroad of that divine disease, humility, [Footnote 6: In him it was almost morbid, one might be tempted to say, were it not that it was own sister to such mighty faith.] and had sent other friends to say, "Lord, trouble not thyself, for I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof. Wherefore, neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee; but say in a word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it."

This man was a philosopher: he ascended from that to which he was accustomed to that to which he was not accustomed. Nor did his divine logic fail him. He begins with acknowledging his own subjection, and states his own authority; then leaves it to our Lord to understand that he recognizes in him an authority beyond all, expecting the powers of nature to obey their Master, just as his soldiers or his servants obey him. How grandly he must have believed in him!

But beyond suspicion of flattery, he avoids the face of the man whom in heart he worships. How unlike those who press into the presence of a phantom-greatness! "A poor creature like me go and talk to him!" the Roman captain would exclaim. "No, I will worship from afar off." And it is to be well heeded that the Lord went no further—turned at once. With the tax-gatherer Zacchaeus he would go home, if but to deliver him from the hopelessness of his self-contempt; but what occasion was there here? It was all right here. The centurion was one who needed but to go on. In heart and soul he was nearer the Lord now than any of the disciples who followed him. Surely some one among the elders of the Jews, his friends, would carry him the report of what the Master said. It would not hurt him. The praise of the truly great will do no harm, save it fall where it ought not, on the heart of the little. The praise of God never falls wrong, therefore never does any one harm. The Lord even implies we ought to seek it. His praise would but glorify the humility and the faith of this Roman by making both of them deeper and nobler still. There is something very grand in the Lord's turning away from the house of the man who had greater faith than any he had found in Israel; for such were the words he spoke to those who followed him, of whom in all likelihood the messenger elders were nearest. Having turned to say them, he turned not again but went his way. St Luke, whose narrative is in other respects much fuller than St Matthew's (who says that the centurion himself came to Jesus, and makes no mention of the elders), does not represent the Master as uttering a single word of cure, but implies that he just went away marvelling at him; while "they that were sent, returning to the house, found the servant whole that had been sick." If any one ask how Jesus could marvel, I answer, Jesus could do more things than we can well understand. The fact that he marvelled at the great faith, shows that he is not surprised at the little, and therefore is able to make all needful and just, yea, and tender allowance.

Here I cannot do better for my readers than give them four lines, dear to me, but probably unknown to most of them, written, I must tell them, for the sake of their loving catholicity, by an English Jesuit of the seventeenth century. They touch the very heart of the relation between Jesus and the centurion:—

Thy God was making haste into thy roof;
Thy humble faith and fear keeps Him aloof:
He'll be thy guest; because He may not be,
He'll come—into thy house? No, into thee.

As I said, we thus complete a kind of family group, for surely the true servant is one of the family: we have the prayer of a father for a son, of a mother for a daughter, of a master for a servant. Alas! the dearness of this latter bond is not now known as once. There never was a rooted institution in parting with which something good was not lost for a time, however necessary its destruction might be for the welfare of the race. There are fewer free servants that love their masters and mistresses now, I fear, than there were Roman bondsmen and bondswomen who loved theirs. And, on the other hand, very few masters and mistresses regard the bond between them and their servants with half the respect and tenderness with which many among the Romans regarded it. Slavery is a bad thing and of the devil, yet mutual jealousy and contempt are worse. But the time will yet come when a servant will serve for love as more than wages; and when the master of such a servant will honour him even to the making him sit down to meat, and coming forth and serving him.

The next is the case of the palsied man, so graphically given both by St Mark and St Luke, and with less of circumstance by St Matthew. This miracle also was done in Capernaum, called his own city. Pharisees and doctors of the law from every town in the country, hearing of his arrival, had gathered to him, and were sitting listening to his teaching. There was no possibility of getting near him, and the sick man's friends had carried him up to the roof, taken off the tiles, and let him down into the presence. It should not be their fault if the poor fellow was not cured. "Jesus seeing their faith—When Jesus saw their faith—And when he saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, be of good cheer—Son—Man, thy sins are forgiven thee." The forgiveness of the man's sins is by all of the narrators connected with the faith of his friends. This is very remarkable. The only other instance in which similar words are recorded, is that of the woman who came to him in Simon's house, concerning whom he showed first, that her love was a sign that her sins were already forgiven. What greater honour could he honour their faith withal than grant in their name, unasked, the one mighty boon? They had brought the man to him; to them he forgave his sins. He looked into his heart, and probably saw, as in the case of the man whom he cured by the pool of Bethesda, telling him to go and sin no more, that his own sins had brought upon him this suffering, a supposition which aids considerably to the understanding of the consequent conversation; saw, at all events, that the assurance of forgiveness was what he most needed, whether because his conscience was oppressed with a sense of guilt, or that he must be brought to think more of the sin than of the suffering; for it involved an awful rebuke to the man, if he required it still—that the Lord should, when he came for healing, present him with forgiveness. Nor did he follow it at once with the cure of his body, but delayed that for a little, probably for the man's sake, as probably for the sake of those present, whom he had been teaching for some time, and in whose hearts he would now fix the lesson concerning the divine forgiveness which he had preached to them in bestowing it upon the sick man. For his words meant nothing, except they meant that God forgave the man. The scribes were right when they said that none could forgive sins but God—that is, in the full sense in which forgiveness is still needed by every human being, should all his fellows whom he has injured have forgiven him already.