When preparing for tonight’s service I read something that J C Ryle said that I thought was very interesting – one of those things that sounds quite obvious once you hear it, but I had not really considered before. He said that the events of these chapters of Matthew were very significant because they follow right after the three great chapters of the Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. After the teaching comes a series of great miracles performed by Jesus to show everyone, including anyone reading this Gospel today, that the authority of Jesus’ words are backed up by the authority of his actions.
That’s the key I think to understanding the miracles of Jesus. Certainly they demonstrate Christ’s power and authority, they proclaim his deity as God the Son, but they are far more than mere divine magic tricks. They back up his teaching and more often than not they present to us his teaching in visual form. And finally they display the character of Jesus – his compassion, mercy and love for people – and I think we will see all these elements in our readings tonight and over the next two Sunday evenings.
Now, as we look at this passage from Matthew’s Gospel this evening it would be very helpful to have the words of Scripture before you in the printed order of service as I will be referring to the passage quite a lot.
It is apparent even on a cursory reading of this passage that it is all about faith. Twice at key points in the passage, Christ mentions faith explicitly. In verse 10: "With no one in Israel have I found such faith." And again in verse 13: "Let is be done for you as you have believed."
Like so many passages of the Bible the more you meditate on a passage like this and study it, the more you see in it. So in the first part of this sermon I would like us to think about the man of faith in this passage, the Centurion; and then in the second part of the sermon I think we should consider some very important things this passage tells us about the one in whom the Centurion put his faith.
Let us begin then by thinking about this Centurion who comes to Jesus at the beginning of the passage. Now as you probably know as centurion was a rank in the Roman army – an officer placed in command of one hundred men. Actually many centurions commanded more men than this, but the name comes from the fact that an officer of this rank commanded one hundred men. It is almost certain that there would be a Roman garrison in a town like Capernaum and it could well be that this centurion is the garrison commander. The commentators tell us that Centurions were the "working officers, the backbone of the Roman army," lower than a colonel or general but higher than a mere lieutenant - something like the rank of Captain in the British army. So here was a fairly important man in the Roman occupied town of Capernaum.
But there’s something different about this particular Centurion that made him stand out, and caused the Gospel writers to record this passage for us to read all these years later. The thing that stands out is that this Centurion is a man of faith. Whether he had heard the Sermon on the Mount, or whether he had seen or heard of other miracles that Jesus had performed before this we don’t know. But we do know that he certainly knew of Jesus and probably he knew quite a lot about Jesus as well. And on the basis of whatever knowledge he has, he uses it, leading to faith and action.
Before we go any further I’ll just briefly address the supposed contradiction between Matthew’s account of this incident and Luke’s account. In Luke’s account the Centurion and Jesus do not meet face-to-face, but communicate through messengers. The commentators get worked up about this. The best explanation it seems to me is simply that Luke’s account gives the details that there were go-between messengers involved, whereas Matthew simply omits this detail. This doesn’t make Matthew’s account inaccurate. He just distils the story down to the essentials. In the ancient world, when a messenger conveyed the words of one person to another it was regarded as if they had spoken personally to each other. Just as if in our day we say we talked with so-and-so, we might omit the detail that we spoke on the telephone. It doesn’t mean we did not speak. So here the messengers that Luke mentions were really the telephones of their day and are omitted from the story in Matthew’s version.
There are several aspects of this Centurion’s faith that merit our attention this evening. In fact there are five aspects of his faith I would like to mention.
Firstly, this Centurion has a practical living faith. We’ve seen that already. In verse 5, the Centurion "came forward to him, appealing to him." This man’s faith obviously affects how he lives his life. It’s not just something intellectual or emotional for him. So when his young servant is laid low with a terrible crippling illness, in verse 5 the Centurion seeks out Jesus to make his appeal to him. "To beg him" wouldn’t be too strong a translation, such is the strength and intensity of the Centurion’s appeal. And what is his heart-felt appeal? To heal "his servant." The words translated "my servant" are literally "my boy", so it is likely it was a young male slave in the Centurion’s household who was lying in bed, literally "thrown down onto his bed," paralysed and in a lot of pain. Calling the servant "my boy" surely indicates that the Centurion had real affection for him. He thought of him as more than just a commodity to do work for him. This in part probably explains why the Centurion went to such lengths to try to get him healed. And there’s a lesson here for employers I think, who no longer think of the people who work for them as "personnel" but merely "human resources"! But we’ll not go any further down that road tonight, except to note that this important military man is concerned for his servant and takes the time to do what he believes will be of most benefit to him and that was going to him and asking Christ to heal him.
This is not to downplay the importance of medicine. I am not advocating "faith healing" over modern medicine. I am reminded of a story I read about how some people get the wrong idea about what real faith is. There was once a great flood somewhere in the Southern United States and one farmer’s house was flooded right up to the rooftop. And on the roof the farmer stood clinging the chimney. A rescue boat with two fireman in it came along and they shouted to the farmer to come over and climb in the boat. But the old farmer shook his head. "I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he said. They tried to persuade him to come with them, but he was having none of it and finally they had to go off in the boat to see if they could find someone else needing rescued. The water continued to rise and even the roof began to go under water and the farmer had to climb right up on top of the chimney stack to keep dry. Just then a helicopter flew over and started to hover overhead. The pilot shouted down on a loud hailer, "Hold on and we’ll lower down a man on a winch to get you." But the old farmer waved the helicopter off. "No way, I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he shouted. Well the helicopter was running low on fuel and couldn’t stay over the farmer’s house any longer so it flew away. Not long afterwards the flood went over the top of the house and old farmer drowned. When he got to heaven and met God the first thing he said to him was this: "Lord, I trusted in you real hard. I never doubted you for a second. I never thought you would fail me like this and let me drown." And God replied, "Fail you? Didn’t you see the boat and the helicopter I sent to rescue you?"
Well modern medicine is a bit like the boat and the helicopter in that story. Just because something is discovered or invented by the hand of man doesn’t mean that the hand of God isn’t behind it.
But let’s get back to our Centurion now. We’ve seen that the Centurion’s faith expresses itself in real love for other people. Our faith too must be practical and loving if it is to be a living and not a dead faith, which the Letter of James tells us will is useless. We should be looking for opportunities to help our neighbours and show them practical care and support. And of course where there is sickness and suffering we should take the time to seek out Jesus and bring those in need to our Saviour in prayer. Whether he chooses to heal through normal medicine or through something that modern medicine can’t explain is up to him.
Then secondly, in verse 8 we see that the Centurion had a humble faith. "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof," he says. He comes to Jesus not proud and arrogant as we might expect an officer in an occupying army to behave. But filled he comes to Jesus full of humility and self-deprecation. Even though a Roman officer used to soldiers obeying his orders, he is not too proud to come to a poor Jewish Rabbi for help. That must have taken a big heart to do that, not knowing what his men, or the other officers, or his superiors would think if news got back to them. To me that’s probably the best piece of evidence that this Centurion’s faith in Christ was not merely the faith a patient might have in a doctor. Because the human heart is not humble, not genuinely humble, by nature. By nature we want to make ourselves the centre of attention. By nature we’re number one and we want people to know it. But when a person is born again by the Holy Spirit, given a new heart and made spiritually alive, their whole perspective on life changes. No longer are they number one: Jesus is number one in their lives. And, like John the Baptist says, as he "increases" we must "decrease". Our selfishness diminishes. Our whole life view alters and we begin to see that it is God’s glory that counts in life, not our own glory, for we have none.
Thirdly, the Centurion has a strong faith. The whole passage demonstrates this. It is quite clear this Centurion really believed that bringing his servant’s illness before Christ would be a way of bringing relief from suffering and real healing to the young man paralysed. In verse 8 again, "Only say the word and my servant will be healed," he says. It is a confident faith – and by that I mean not a faith confident in itself, but a faith supremely confident of the one in whom his faith is placed. "Just say the word, Lord and it will happen" is his attitude. There’s no doubt in the Centurion’s mind or heart. He believes Jesus can heal his servant and he believes Jesus will heal his servant, even though he is too ashamed to have the Saviour even come into his house. Perhaps this because the Centurion knows that his life is not all it should be, perhaps because having heard parts of Jesus’ teaching, he knows he does not deserve to receive any blessings from God. So combined with a strong trust is a strong sense of unworthiness and a realisation perhaps that his relationship with Christ is based entirely on grace. Merit doesn’t come into it. And that’s certainly something we need to keep constantly in mind as well. We should never take God’s help for granted. He doesn’t owe it to us. He blesses us only out of grace and love because he wants to.
Fourthly this Centurion has a faith built on knowledge. In other words, this Centurion’s faith is not ignorance, it is not a blind faith. It is built on what he knows about Christ. In verse 9 the Centurion shows a remarkable understanding of who Jesus is and what authority he has from God. It’s really quite a deep insight that the Centurion displays here. He has a rather profound theological understanding it seems to me to make the comparison he does between his life as a Captain in the Roman army and Christ’s ministry on earth. And he certainly does make that comparison. "I too am a man under authority," he says. He realises that Christ is under the authority of God the Father. In John chapter 17, verse 4 Christ himself says as much as he prays to the Father: "I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do." And in the Great Commission at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28, verse 18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he said, which clearly implies that Someone gave Christ all authority, and that can only be God the Father. In some way, we don’t know how sketchy his knowledge is, but at a basic level at least, this Centurion grasps something of that truth: "I too am a man under authority."
But the second piece of knowledge the Centurion has about Jesus, and upon which his faith is built, is the knowledge that as well as being under someone else’s authority - and indeed because of it - the Centurion also realises that Christ has authority over other people, events, illness, over everything in fact. And as a result, Christ has authority to tell people what to do – even to tell illnesses what to do. "I say to one, ‘Go’ and he goes, and to another ‘Come’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this’ and he does it." And of course what the Centurion is really saying here is that Jesus has that kind of power and authority not over junior soldiers but over things that only God has power over: to say ‘Go’ and demons will leave the person they are possessing, or to say ‘Come’ and a paralysed man will rise from his bed, or to say ‘Do this’ and sinners dead in trespasses and sins will be born again, come to faith in Christ and be saved.
Every indication here is that the Centurion realises this Jesus is far more than just a popular Jewish teacher and healer. He surely sees him as the Son of God, His Lord and Saviour. And that leads us on to our last point. Fifthly, this Centurion has an unexpected faith. A professional solder is perhaps not the kind of person we would think of as most likely to come to faith in Jesus, or the kind of person whose way of life we would tend to think of as being godly. But more than that this man was a Gentile, not a Jew at all. Both of these facts make it all the more amazing that such a man had come to genuine, life changing faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself proclaims that he had not come across such faith even among his fellow Jews. In verse 10 he says, "with no one in Israel [that’s the Jewish nation] have I found such faith."
Today we are used to the fact that the Gospel has gone out to the Gentiles – the non-Jewish people like us – and we know that God’s plan of salvation is to bring people from all the nations into his covenant people. But in Jesus’ time it would have been astonishing for Matthew’s first readers for not only a Gentile, but a member of the hated occupation army, to be singled out and praised by the Jewish Messiah.
It is this last aspect of the Centurion’s faith – the remarkable fact that here is a Gentile soldier trusting in the Jewish Messiah – that Jesus focuses on to make a beautiful, encouraging and challenging prophecy in verses 11 and 12. "Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven," Jesus says. These are words we should treasure because it is a prophecy that is directly fulfilled in we Scottish Christians! There is much we could say about this verse, but time is short. We can be certain of one thing from this verse: the Gospel coming to the Gentiles was no accident and it was no afterthought – it was part of God’s plan and Christ knew it even here. The Centurion is a forerunner of millions of Gentiles who would put their faith in the Jewish Messiah and find salvation. Those who have faith in Christ have eternal life, whatever their race or background or whatever they have done. They are safe and blessed now and in heaven they will enjoy the great feast of the Lamb forever, even reclining at table with the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But where verse 11 contains a wonderful promise, verse 12 contains a stern warning. Those who do not believe in him, those who reject Christ and his gospel, no matter who they are, no matter how entitled they are think they are to call themselves God’s people, no matter what a great history their earthly nation has of glorifying God, if they do not have Christ they will not be blessed. They will be cursed in hell, which Jesus here describes as a dark and terrible place like a Roman dungeon, damp, dirty, full of disease and the stench of death, cut off from God and form every good thing in this world. Here Jesus has primarily in mind the Jewish nation which rejected him, but it equally applies to everyone who thinks of themselves as religious, but doesn’t know Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.
That’s the real challenge this Centurion’s faith makes to us. The question this passage forces us to ask of ourselves is whether we have a faith like this in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do we have a practical living faith? A faith built on knowledge of God revealed to us in the teachings of the Bible? A humble faith that realises God owes us nothing and any blessing we have from the Saviour is pure grace? A confident trust in Christ as our Lord and Saviour, able to meet all our needs in this life and all our hopes of heaven in eternity? An unexpected faith that challenges us to do things we would never do naturally, like turning from our sins, and doing good to others, and confessing Christ and witnessing to God’s love in Christ before the entire world?
This is the kind of faith this Centurion had. This is the kind of faith that saves us if we have it – not because it is great faith, but because it is true faith in a great Saviour. This is the kind of faith that Christ blesses. Let us not forget that our passage ends with the servant beings healed. Even though Christ doesn’t meet the servant face-to-face, he does speak the word and the servant is healed – at that very moment. Christ’s word is shown to be powerful and effective.
Just as Christ prophesied, this faith is now possessed by people of every nation, tribe and language. This is the faith that will be shared by all the saints who will gather in heaven to praise God at the end of time. Echoing Jesus words in this prophecy, the apostle John in his vision of glory in the Book of Revelation, says this about the worldwide church of God gathered in heaven in Revelation, chapter 5:
"And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth."
We do not know this Centurion’s name, or anything about him except his military rank and that he was a man of deep personal faith in Jesus Christ. But one day, we will meet him in heaven along with the vast multitude of the redeemed who have trusted in God for salvation through Christ down, through the ages. Remember Jesus’ gracious words:
"Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."
Rejoice if you are among their number. Repent and believe the gospel if you are not. Come to Christ now and put your faith in him. Nothing in life is more necessary or more important.
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