John 4:46–54
So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.
So Jesus said to him, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’
The official said to him, ‘Sir, come down before my child dies.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’
The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering.
So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.’
The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live.’ And he himself believed, and all his household.
This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.[p 77]
Finding Jesus
On returning to Galilee our Lord went to Cana, the town where he had earlier turned water into wine (John 2:1–11). It so happened that at that time the son of a royal official in Capernaum was ill and seemingly beyond hope of recovery. Hearing that Jesus had returned to Galilee from Judaea, the boy’s father in desperation decided to go to him and ask him to come and heal his boy.
Cana was some twenty miles from Capernaum, and he rode hard. It would take him some time to get there, and when he arrived he had to find where Jesus was and then persuade him to come to Capernaum and do the healing. What if when he arrived Jesus was in the middle of preaching one of his long discourses to the crowds? There was nothing he could do about that. He would just have to wait until it was over before he could get near enough to ask him. And then there would be the problem of getting him to Capernaum. How long would that take? Could he ask Jesus to ride horseback? Or would he have to be carried on a portable chair the way some of the nobles were? What if Jesus insisted on walking the whole twenty miles back? That would take a full day at least. It was an agony to contemplate, for time was slipping away and any minute could be the boy’s last.
Arriving in Cana he found Christ and pleadingly put the question to him: would he come down to Capernaum and heal his boy?
‘The trouble with you people’, said Christ, ‘is that unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’
‘Look,’ said the distraught father, ‘if you don’t mind, let’s not stand here discussing fine points of theology. My boy is desperately ill; he could die any minute. Please come down at once before anything happens.’
‘My good man,’ said Christ, ‘you have misunderstood me. Your son lives. He is already healed; you can go home.’
‘Healed?’ said the man. ‘Already?’
‘Yes, healed already’, said Christ. ‘You asked me to heal him, didn’t you? Well, I have healed him. At this very minute he is alive and well. You see, I do not have to come to Capernaum to heal your boy, and you should be grateful that I don’t. If I had had to travel all that way and lay my hands on him before I could heal him, he could easily have died before I arrived. As it is, standing here I have healed him. What I was[p 78] observing just now is that you now have a problem of faith. I am telling you that your boy is well and that you can go home; but you cannot see that he is well. All the evidence you have at this moment that your son is well is my bare word; and in the nature of things, you cannot have any other evidence until you get home and see for yourself that my word is true. The trouble with you, and the rest of the people around here, is that unless you see signs and wonders you are not prepared to believe; and that means that these next few hours are going to be difficult for you. I am not coming to Capernaum with you. I say that your son is already well, and there is no need for you to continue standing here pleading with me; you can go home.
‘You have to make up your mind then. If you cannot take my word for it that he is well without seeing signs and wonders, your next few hours till you get home are going to be full of worry and anxiety. It won’t alter the fact that your son is well, for I have healed him. But if on the journey home you want peace of mind, you will have to be prepared to trust my bare word without any further evidence. I could, of course, here and now do some signs and wonders in front of you that you could see. But what would that prove? It would only prove that I can do miracles if I want to; and that much you already believe, for, if you did not, you would never have left home and come to me with your request. To do fifty miracles here and now before your very eyes so that you could see them would not prove that I can do a miracle of healing at a distance of twenty miles, and still less would it prove that I have done such a miracle. I’m saying that I have done such a miracle and that your boy is well. It is already true and nothing will change it.
‘Moreover, when you get home you will have visible evidence that it is true, and has been true from the moment I said it. But you can’t have that visible evidence until you get there. In the meantime, then, if you want peace of mind on the way, you had better learn to trust my word without demanding further evidence, and, acting on it in faith, journey home.’
The father's decision
The official didn’t know quite how to feel. The past hours had been filled with mounting anxiety and tension. It seemed an eternity since the boy took ill. They would have called in the doctor at once, the[p 79] very best in the palace service. But the boy’s condition had steadily deteriorated, and there had come the sickening moment when the doctors had pronounced the case hopeless. Frantic with worry, he would have talked it over with his wife. He had heard in town that Jesus had returned from Jerusalem, where he had done a lot of amazing miracles, and he was now in Cana. Should they now try Jesus themselves? It would mean him leaving the lad and travelling to Cana, and he didn’t like leaving him. He felt that he was doing something, if he was only sitting by the bed and holding his hand. It was irrational, of course; it was not helping the child, and it seemed to be only a matter of time now. So they decided to try Jesus. He was their only hope.
Tearing himself away from the bed, he had ridden those twenty desperate miles as fast as he possibly could. Every mile covered had tortured him with the realization of what a long way he had to bring Jesus back before he got him home. From time to time hope would set his imagination running: he could see himself urging Jesus forward the last few steps into the house and then into the bedroom. He could picture the dramatic moment as Christ would lay his hands on the child’s head and the little fellow would sit up and say, ‘I feel better now, Dad.’
Then the horse would stumble a bit and the official would come back to reality. He had not reached Cana yet, let alone got back again. Still more miles to go. Would he never get there? By the time he reached Christ, he had already worked out what method he would suggest to Christ for getting him to Capernaum as fast as ever possible, if only he was willing to come, the exact route they should follow, and the time it would take.
And now suddenly there was this strange anti-climax. ‘The boy’, said Christ, ‘is already well.’ It was difficult to know how to feel. There was no sense of any miraculous power surging around, no electrified atmosphere about him, no ecstatic exultant feelings within him; nothing except the simple plain statement of Christ, ‘Go, your child lives.’ After all the stress and anxious excitement, it seemed unreal.
Nothing but a bare word! Had he got to be content with that, when every nerve and blood vessel in his body was tensed to its limit and crying out for action? A bare word: dare he stake his child’s life simply on what this man said, without any further evidence? Christ[p 80] had said, of course, that the matter was already settled and the child was already well. For Christ, it was not a question of risking whether the child would be saved or not, for he had already healed him the moment his father had asked him to come. The question for the father was, what if Christ was not true and his word could not be trusted? Then the child was not healed, and would die, perhaps even before he got back. But then, even without Christ, the child was going to die anyway. If Christ had not in fact healed him, it made no difference—except that Christ was now telling lies. And if Christ was palming him off with lies, there was no point in continuing to plead with a liar to come and heal his boy. On the other hand, if Christ was telling the truth he was already well and there was no need to continue pleading with Christ to come and heal him. Either way, he must go, and begin the journey home.
What should he believe? He had come staking his last hope on Christ’s miraculous powers; but the question now was not his miraculous powers but his character. Was this Jesus to be trusted, or was he a deceiver? He must make up his mind. How would he do that? The sight of his little boy as he had last seen him rose before his mind. He could see his wife, her heart fit to break, anxiously trying to soothe him as he tossed in his delirium. ‘Go,’ said Christ, ‘your son lives.’ It was no good dithering: he must make up his mind about this Jesus, whether he should trust him or not, and then act upon it. As a palace official he was used to meeting men and having to decide whether to take them at their word or not. He must do the same with Christ. He turned and looked Christ straight in the face, man to man. For a long moment his eyes searched the eyes of Christ and scanned his countenance. John tells us, ‘The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him’ (4:50). We can easily imagine that presently he said to him, ‘Thank you, Lord. Thank you for healing my child’, and with a deep bow he turned and walked away.
The return journey
It was only the seventh hour, or one o’clock in the afternoon, and that meant that if he had left at once and ridden back to Capernaum as hard as he had ridden to Cana, he could have reached Capernaum by dusk the same day. In actual fact the record tells us that he did[p 81] not arrive back home until the next day (v. 52). Where he went and what he did in the meantime we are not told. We may be sure that it was no lack of love for his child or his wife that made him delay his return home. Perhaps it was the sleepless nights and the strain of the last few days, and the hectic ride to Cana that now led to a reaction, and he felt he just could not face the ride back until he had some sleep. But whatever he did, the delay in returning home is an excellent testimony to his faith. Christ had said that the boy was well, and the man believed what he said.
Faith meant not only giving reluctant and half-hearted consent to Christ’s statement, but believing it and acting on its implications. If Christ said the boy was well, he was well. Probably by this time he was out of bed and starting to play with his toys. As for his wife, she would already be deliriously happy. The miraculous suddenness with which the boy had recovered would have already let her know that her husband had reached Christ and that it had been the power of Christ that had healed the boy. She would have a profound sense that all was well, so there was no need for him to go rushing back home as fast as he had come. True, he himself still had no evidence that this was what was happening at home, except for the bare word of Christ and what could be logically deduced from that word. But then true faith is—and is expected to be—logical (see Matt 16:5–12).
The next day, by the time he was getting near home, his servants had decided that he must soon be arriving and they came out along the road to meet him, all excited with the news that his son was perfectly well. ‘As a matter of interest,’ said the father, ‘at what precise moment did the lad begin to get better?’
‘Yesterday,’ they said, ‘at the seventh hour the fever suddenly left him.’ He thought for a moment.
‘At the seventh hour yesterday’, he said. ‘Let me see—yes, that was the very time I had just found Christ and was asking him to come back home and heal the lad, and he said, “I don’t need to, the boy is already well. I have now healed him”.’
The way belief works
There come times in life when the distinctions of our human condition—distinctions of rank, time and distance—seem to fade away[p 82] and for a moment eternity floods our spirits with a vivid sense of the immediacy of its unchanging realities. Such a moment occurred that morning on the Cana road just outside Capernaum, as master and servants together discovered the unchanging, timeless and universally present reality of the utter reliability of God in Christ. For the servants and the rest of the official’s household, it was a question of believing Christ for the first time; but for the official himself it was the culmination of a process of increasing faith. Twice the Scripture explicitly mentions that ‘he believed’. Verse 50 says, ‘The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him’, while verse 53 says, ‘And he himself believed, and all his household.’
Actually the first time he had believed was when he left home to go to Jesus. Before that, he had heard of Jesus and his ability to do miracles, and it had interested him in a vague sort of way, but he had never exercised any personal faith in Jesus or his power. When, however, he was faced with the reality that his child was going to die, Christ became his only hope. And it was then that he made his decision. He decided that there was nothing he could do by staying at home by the bedside: the only hope lay in going to Christ and asking him to come and heal the boy. He made his decision, and acted upon it. And he had no sooner asked Christ to heal the boy, than Christ healed him; for it is an unvarying principle that, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ And when he says that, the Apostle Paul first gives the reason: ‘for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him’ (Rom 10:12–13).
Delayed evidence
Then there had to come the next, and probably more deliberate and conscious, act of faith. When he had first set out to seek Christ his faith was based on reasonable evidence: he had heard of all the miracles that Christ had done at Jerusalem at the feast (John 4:45), and in addition he had doubtless heard of the earlier miracle at Cana of Galilee. But when Christ said ‘Go; your son will live’, he had no evidence on which to base his faith. He evidently had never known of any case in which Christ had healed at a distance, for if he had, he would surely have asked Christ to heal his son at once without first travelling to Capernaum.[p 83] He was therefore faced with the challenge to believe the word of Christ without any evidence, save only the character of Christ. It was not that in this case the evidence was faulty. It lay in the nature of things; in the nature of time and space. In a time before any form of instant long-distance communication had been invented, the man could have no evidence that his son, twenty miles away in Capernaum, had been instantaneously healed. Later, when he got home, there would be evidence; but for the moment it was unavoidable: for him the evidence must be delayed. Yet the man believed and once more acted on that belief. And it was not irrational of him, for to his knowledge Christ had done many other miracles. While that did not prove he had now done this one as well, it was reasonable grounds for trusting until evidence became available. The irrational thing would have been to demand the evidence that this particular miracle had taken place, before it could possibly be available.
The evidence of salvation
His case is not without its lesson for us. When we come to Christ for salvation, we come with the evidence all around us of how he has saved thousands of other people. When we personally call on the name of the Lord he saves us instantaneously, ‘for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But the evidence that he has saved us, has given us eternal life, will make us holy, will bring us home to heaven at last, must in the very nature of things be more or less delayed. It will only come to light bit by bit as we go along, and it will not finally be complete until we reach heaven. But, having come to Christ and asked for salvation, we are required to take him at his word and, believing that same bare word, act upon it in faith and begin our journey home, allowing the evidence to disclose itself as we go along.
And it is to be observed that if, when Christ had said to the man, ‘Go your way, your son lives’, the man had not gone but had continued to pray that Christ would heal his boy, his continued praying would not have been a sign of faith, but a sign of unbelief. And serious unbelief, as John argues in his first letter (5:9–12). If God says: ‘He that has the Son has life’, and I say, ‘I have received God’s Son, but I am not sure if I have life or not, so I continue to pray that God will[p 84] give me life’—that prayer is an insult to God. For if God says I have life, to then ask him to give me life, is to show that I don’t believe what he says, and that is to make God out to be a liar. Moreover, the inevitable absence of immediate evidence will drive us, as it drove the official, to place our faith in the character of Christ as a person, and not merely in the fact that he has done this or that work. There are of course many facts about the work and person of Christ in respect of which we are required to believe that such and such a fact is true. For instance, we are required to believe that Jesus is the Son of God (1 John 5:5); and very important it is too that we should believe the fact. But away and beyond the importance of believing these facts about Christ, is the importance of believing and trusting Christ himself as a person. And faith in him as a person will often lead us into situations when we are required to believe him without any immediate evidence, or even in spite of apparently contradictory evidence. But the evidence will always sooner or later be forthcoming, as surely as it was for the official when he reached home.
Believing more than once
When he eventually heard from his servants that his boy was well, and discovered that he had in fact recovered precisely at the hour in which Christ had said ‘Go; your son will live’, we read that ‘he himself believed’ (John 4:53). It obviously does not mean that he had not believed before, but now he believed in a somewhat different way. When he stood in Cana talking to Christ, he had decided to ‘believe the word that Jesus spoke to him’ (v. 50). It was largely a matter of the will; and while a man can control his will, he cannot completely control his emotions and feelings. He had decided to believe Christ’s word; and logically deducing from that word that there was now no need for him to hurry home at once, he had apparently put up for the night in a hotel or a friend’s house somewhere.
Perhaps when he woke up in the morning, if not before, his emotions suggested to him that the whole thing might be false, and he had had to take a grip on his determination to believe the word of Christ no matter what his emotions felt like. But when he got home and the evidence stared him in the face, it was no longer a question of the will, nor of deciding to believe. Belief was automatic. But if[p 85] our own experience is any guide, belief this time was accompanied by a profound sense of awe at the utter reliability of Christ; the sense that Christ’s word had been true right from the very start. His boy had been made well and nothing was going to change it, even if his own emotions were still making him feel afraid that the boy might not be well. It quite likely was accompanied by a feeling of shame that his emotions had ever suggested any fears and doubts; and a determination by God’s grace never to doubt Christ’s word again.
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