The James Bond Gospel

I don't know if you like Bond movies? They used to be a staple on British television over the festive period, though maybe not so much these days. The plot in most of the Bond films is quite straightforward. For me, Goldfinger is the archetypal Bond film and most subsequent Bond films use the same basic plot. An evil genius has a plan to take over the world and James Bond has to stop him (or her? though I don't think there has been a female Bond villain yet).

This plot line is actually a pale reflection of the reality of what the Bible tells us has happened to the world. An evil super-villain, a spiritual being called the devil or Satan, rebelled against God at some point before human beings came into existence. Later, when the first human beings were created, he schemed successfully to lead them into rebellion against God as well and give up their position of God's stewards and viceroys over creation to come instead under his evil influence, control and ownership as slaves of sin. Satan's work was like unleashing a terrible virus into the atmosphere that would then infect and poison the whole of creation.

Something is wrong with the world and with us. Deep down we know it. All human beings are "not quite right." We're not the people we feel we should be. Often we're not the people we even want to be ourselves. The Bible tells us we're right to feel that way. We're not imagining it. And the Bible calls the thing that's wrong with us is a deadly disease called "sin."

Sin is like a virus that infects and affects every part of us - our bodies, our brains, our hearts - and all their functions including our thoughts and our feelings. It is a disease that is, humanly speaking, incurable, and it only has one prognosis - death. In biblical terms, "death" is not just physically dying, but an eternal state of "un-life." Not only that, the symptoms of this disease ravage our behaviour and manifests as pride, cruelty, anger, hatred, lust, envy and many other utterly horrible human traits. All the particular evils trace their origin back to the disease of sin that has infected humanity, and we every single one of us catches the disease from birth. It is inevitable for everyone born into this world that they will be infected, even if there is a latency period during childhood before the disease goes "full blown".

Another horrible aspect of the disease is that it is completely debilitating. We are paralysed by sin. Unable to find a cure. Unable to even want to be cured.

That's the position we all find ourselves in. That's the way the world has always been right from the earliest period of human history.

The story of the Old Testament in the Bible is largely about God calling on one nation, Israel, to be the people through whom the disease of sin would be dealt with and through whom the world would be put right. It is also the story of how that people failed again and again in their mission, finding out that they themselves were infected with the same disease as all the other nations.

The New Testament tells the story of how God came to earth himself, which it turns out had always been the plan, in the person of his Son, his "second self" who was born and lived as a faithful Israelite called Jesus of Nazareth. He showed the character and the wisdom of God, and then in his death he took on himself the entire disease, to rid the world of it once and for all, thereby defeating the Evil Mastermind who was behind it all. He rose from the dead so that not only would the disease have no more power over him, but that the cure he had created and the immunity from it he had gained could be passed on to everyone who wants it for themselves. Not only that, but once we are given the medicine, the power of the disease is broken and we start the long process of recovering from the effects of the disease, knowing that one day we will be totally free of it and able to live forever, even though our body goes through death.

So how do you receive the cure? It's very simple. You trust in Jesus to save you and ask him come into your life and cure you. When you ask him, he will do it. Then you become his friend and stay in a loving friendship with him forever, getting to know him, learning to see what a life without the disease looks like and trying to copying him in your life. You'll also find that there's a great crowd of people who have also been saved and now live in a new kingdom. The group is called the church, which means "the gathered ones." The church gets together to thank Jesus, meet his Father who is now our Father too, and to be energised by his Spirit to live as we should and deep down really want to live. Among other things, we continue to work to help other victims of the disease in practical ways in this world and spread the good news that there is a cure available for everyone.

Encounters with Jesus: The Crippled Man

There's a true story of a Spanish father and son who had become estranged from each other. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an advert in a Madrid newspaper. The advert read: "Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father." On the Saturday 800 men named Paco turned up, looking for forgiveness from their fathers.

The point that true story makes very graphically is that the need for forgiveness is a very strong human emotion. And the burden of guilt is one of the worst things that can afflict a person’s life. Feeling guilty about something can eat a person up inside and ruin their life. Knowing forgiveness, on the other hand, heals broken hearts and restores inner peace.

This passage of Scripture we’re going to look at tonight has some really important things to teach us about forgiveness. We can break it down into three aspects and we’ll spend a bit of time on each of these. The three main lessons for us are:

Firstly, spreading the gospel of forgiveness to sinners is the most important purpose of the church.

Secondly, the Lord Jesus Christ, who forgives sinners, is the most important person who has ever lived because his actions prove he is no less than God incarnate.

Thirdly, coming to faith in Christ, so that we can receive God’s forgiveness, is the most important choice any of us can make in this life.

So let’s work through this passage as we see each of these aspects in turn. As always I would suggest you keep the passage before you as we go through it as I will be referring to the text quite a lot as we progress through the story.

Verse 1 follows right on from the passage we looked at last week. You may remember that after Jesus healed the two demon-possessed men and sent the demons into the pigs that were drowned, the people of that place came out to meet Jesus and they begged him to leave their region. Verse 1 tells us that Jesus did exactly that.

"And getting into a boat he crossed over and came to his own city."

His own city is Capernaum back on the other shore of the Sea of Galilee. We know this from Matthew chapter 4, verse 13, which says:

"And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali."

That’s why Capernaum is referred to as "his own city." People tend not to realise this. But the fact is that although Christ was born in Bethlehem, and grew up in Nazareth, it was actually in the seaside town of Capernaum in Galilee that he made his home, and he used it as a base to conduct most of his earthly ministry.

And then in verse 2, we are told that "some people brought to him a paralytic, lying on a bed." As is often the case with Matthew’s Gospel, most of the details are stripped away from his account of the events and just the bare bones of the story are told. We get much more vivid detail about exactly what happened from the parallel accounts in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels. Listen to the picture Mark gives of the same story, and notice not only the lengths the crippled man’s friends went to in order to bring him to Jesus, but also notice the circumstances of this encounter, which explains why there were scribes there to witness everything. This is Mark chapter 2, verses 1 to 4:

"Several days later Jesus returned to Capernaum, and the news of his arrival spread quickly through the town. Soon the house where he was staying was so packed with visitors that there wasn't room for one more person, not even outside the door. And he preached the word to them. Four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn't get to Jesus through the crowd, so they dug through the clay roof above his head. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat, right down in front of Jesus." (NLT)

So there was a quite a meeting going on in the house where Jesus was staying. The place was jam-packed with people inside and outside, all there to hear Jesus preach to them. Mark points out that there wasn’t room for any more people to get in through the door. And this crippled man’s friends come up with a unique solution to the problem. They climb up on the roof – remember the houses in Israel at that time would have flat roofs covered with a kind of mixture of dried clay and straw thatch rather than slates or tiles that we have – and they make a hole in the covering and then they lower the crippled man down on ropes, still in his bed until he lands right in front of Jesus in the room below. What an amazing thing to do! It’s such a remarkable detail that it’s maybe surprising that Matthew doesn’t mention it. But Matthew really wants his readers to focus on what happened once the crippled man was in the room, rather than how he got there.

This man’s friends really go the extra mile on his behalf, don’t they? They go to enormous lengths to make sure that their friend is brought to hear Jesus’ teaching. I think they challenge us. What are we doing to bring our friends and family to Jesus? In a different sense to this story perhaps, but with equal importance, what are we doing for those who can’t "walk through the door of the church" to bring them to hear the gospel? Are we capable of coming up with ideas as ingenious as this crippled man’s friends came up with to make sure he didn’t miss out from hearing the Saviour’s words for himself?

Well surely this autumn we will all have a marvellous opportunity to do something when our church will be putting on the Christianity Explored course. Of course, we should pray for this, but we should also think carefully if there’s someone we know who we could bring to Jesus because they either can’t or won’t walk into this church on their own.

But to get back to our passage, once the crippled man is in the room, lying right in front of Jesus on his bed, Jesus sees what has happened and he sees both the faith of the friends, probably peering down from their vantage point through the hole in the roof, and the faith of the crippled man too. There’s certainly no indication here that the crippled man was brought to Jesus against his will. Quite the opposite. It seems obvious to me that the man on the stretcher was probably the driving force that persuaded the able-bodied men to do what they did. At the very least we know he did not object to it. But I think he was desperate to meet Jesus.

What we don’t really know is why this man and his friends went to such lengths to come before Christ. It is possible he was merely wanting to hear Jesus’ teaching and not at all looking for his paralysis to be healed. But it seems more likely that the possibility of being healed played at least some part in his motivation to be brought into Jesus’ presence. Whatever he was expecting, Jesus’ completely ignores the fact that the man is a cripple. He cuts to the chase and immediately gets to the man’s most pressing need by saying to him, "Take heart, my son," (which could also be translated, "Be of good cheer, my child," – it is a term of endearment and kindness), "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven."

Jesus’ words, though very gentle and loving, are also quite shocking. He doesn’t say to him, as we might have expected, "Take heart, my son, you’re faith has made you well." No! "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven."

As so often in the gospels, Jesus cuts through all the baggage and dross, all the peripheral things. And he get to the heart of the matter. "Your sins are forgiven." Notice that no one has asked Jesus anything at this point. Certainly no one has raised the subject of sin at all. Bringing a crippled man to the most renowned healer in Palestine might have spoken for itself we might suppose. The most obvious assumption would that this cripple must be looking to be healed. But Jesus knows this man’s deepest needs. So he purposely switches the incident around and makes it about the forgiveness of sins.

And this is where I think the first of the three main lessons I mentioned is made apparent by Christ. I think a principle is laid down for us here and it’s this: the main purpose of the Church is to spread the gospel of forgiveness. To preach the good news that forgiveness, salvation, eternal life is offered to all sinners who will come to Christ in faith and repentance. It’s a crucial principle for the church to grasp. Telling people about God’s salvation through Christ Jesus is the primary – I might almost say the paramount – mission for Christ’s church. You see there’s a temptation to get bogged down in a "social gospel" of social work, health care, famine relief, drug rehabilitation, housing the homeless and so on. Now I’m not decrying any of these things. Of course I’m not. The church’s practical ministry of mercy to the poor, the sick and the needy is a vital part of a healthy church’s life. A church that has all its doctrines right, and pure worship according to the Word of God, and so forth, but which doesn’t show practical love to those in need is travesty of the church God calls his people to be. But the point I’m making here, is that it is also a travesty if a church thinks that as long as it does the practical things it is getting the most important things right. Because it isn’t. It’s far too easy to get sucked into that social gospel mentality which seeks to help people on this world’s terms first, with the idea being that after that, those we help will automatically become Christians because we have shown them love. Or else we say, let’s sort out their earthly lives first and then we can they’ll listen to the gospel later. Only in reality, "later" never comes and somehow proclaiming the gospel is missed out like an optional extra.

I can’t overstress how wrong I think this kind of approach is. The correct, biblical approach is for both practical help and gospel teaching to go hand-in-hand, both coming together. But of the two, the most important is spreading the gospel. If it doesn’t have primacy, we’ve got it wrong. Practical only lasts for this life. Bringing someone to faith in Christ lasts forever. Remember that Jesus didn’t say to the crippled man, "Your faith has made you well," nor did he say to him, "I will heal you first and then we’ll see about your sins." No, the Saviour lays down the principle for his church. First and foremost, the church’s "business" is telling people how they can find forgiveness for their sins and how they can find a new life in covenant relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. All the social action we can do we certainly should do, but only to back up our mission to "Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations…teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded." Only to back this up, never to replace it.

The second significant lesson for us to take away from this passage is the obvious conclusion Matthew expects readers of his gospel to come to: Jesus Christ is the most important person who has ever lived. He is no less than one true God come to earth as a human being.

As soon as Jesus says the words, "Your sins are forgiven", some of the hearers pick up on this and the alarm bells start to go off in their minds. In verse 3, some of the scribes in the room start saying to themselves "This man is blaspheming."

In the gospels we hear quite a lot about "the scribes." When we use the word scribe we usually mean a writer – particularly someone who writes things down for other people. But in the Bible, the scribes are the scholars of the law of God. They were students of the Old Testament, experts in applying God’s law to every situation in life. They are sometimes called "lawyers" or "doctors of the law" or "teachers of the law" in some translations.

It’s a group of these Old Testament legal scholars who hear Jesus saying to the paralytic "Your sins are forgiven." And though they don’t say anything out loud, in their hearts they say to themselves "This man is blaspheming." Or as some translations put it "This fellow is speaking blasphemy." And there is certainly a note of contempt for Jesus in their choice of words.
Here we should note that from their point of view there is a sense in which they are right, or at least their feelings have some justification. If Jesus is just a good man, or a great teacher, or whatever other humanistic label is put on him, then he is was sinning when he claimed to have authority to forgive sins against God. Technically speaking, the scribes were wrong to call it blasphemy. That crime was recognised in the Jewish law as only applying when the name of God was misused by the blasphemer – and the penalty was death by stoning. So the scribes are pushing it a little in calling this blasphemy, but it is certainly sinful for a mere man to claim the authority to forgive someone else’s sins. Only God can forgive sins because sin is an affront to God and a breaking of God’s laws. As Psalm 51:4 makes clear, when David prayed to God:

"Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight."

In Psalm 32:5 the psalmist says, addressing God directly:

"I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin."

In Isaiah 43:25 the LORD says:

"I, I am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins."

So for a mere man to say he has the authority to forgive sins, when the Bible testifies that forgiveness is the sole prerogative of God, is indeed a terrible wrong.

But of course there is a very good reason why Jesus could say to the crippled man "your sins are forgiven" and yet was not guilty of any wrongdoing in saying so. Probably no one present at the house that day realised it – not even when the extraordinary events of verses 4 to 6 took place. The crowd certainly gets it wrong in their explanation which we find in verse 8. They come up with the conclusion that God had changed and had now decided to give the authority to forgive sins to at least one mere man, rather than reserve it to himself. The phrase "who had given such authority to men" in verse 8 should not be read as implying they though every man now had this authority. Nothing in the passage suggests they thought that. No, their amazement was that any man at all could be given this power. But they were forced to conclude that Jesus and only Jesus had it.

But all these are wrong explanations. The real reason why Jesus can forgive sins, even though the Bible teaches that only God can do that, is because Jesus is God. This is what the New Testament teaches in many many passages. Let me read a few of them to you.

John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And of course John leaves us in no doubt that "the Word" is Jesus Christ.

John 8:57-59: "So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple."

Here the reason the crowd act so violently to what Jesus said is because they understood that he was claiming to be God here. Not only does he claim to have been in existence before Abraham lived, which was of course more than two thousand years before Christ was born, but when he says "I am" the crowd realises he is taking God’s covenant name for himself. Remember when Moses asked God what his name was at the burning bush? God said his name was "I am." Jesus here says he is "I am."

Romans 9:5 very clearly states that Jesus is God:

"Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them [that’s the Jews] is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, for ever praised." (NIV)

And finally, Paul’s great affirmation of the glory and deity of Christ in Colossians 1:15-19:

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."

So yes, the Old Testament does teach that only God can forgive sins. But the New Testament teaches that Christ is God. And that’s the reason why when Christ says to the crippled man "Your sins are forgiven" he had every right to say it.

And by what happens in the rest of our reading after Jesus says these key words, he proves that his words are true and he proves that he does have the authority of God, and is God, in three ways:

Firstly, he can tell what the scribes are thinking, even when they don’t say a word or give any outward indication. In verse 4, Jesus says to the scribes: "Why do you think evil in your hearts?" Almost as if he could hear the very words about blasphemy that they only thought silently to themselves. And he is right to call what they were thinking evil because they were actually accusing God himself of blaspheming against God! But by this display of knowledge, he shows himself to have the knowledge of God.

Secondly, he states again that he can indeed forgive sins. He does it in an oblique way though. He doesn’t come right out and say it again. Instead, he says in verse 5, "Which is easier, to say ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?’" And of course what he’s practically saying is that if he can say the second and prove it to be true, what reason can anyone have for doubting the first statement. He’s saying to them, "Look, the proof of the pudding is in the eating." He’s saying, "Okay, you want me to put up or shut up? Then watch this!"

Thirdly, he then goes on to actually heal the crippled man. In verse 6 he says this is "that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." And then he speaks the word, and it is done. And doesn’t that remind you of the very beginning of creation, where God speaks: "Let there be light, and there was light." He says it and it happens.

He bids the crippled man rise and walk, and he does. And here he shows such power, such miraculous power than no mere man could have, that he is showing the people there and us by his actions, that he is God. Imagine what it would have been like to be in that room and see that happen! Verse 8 tells us that the crowd there were afraid. And no wonder! The healing here was truly miraculous. No medical procedure, not even such as we have today could achieve what Christ achieved by his word alone.

The reason I say that is because of the particular word that Luke uses to describe this man in his Gospel. He doesn’t just call him a cripple, or a paralytic. He calls him a paraplegic. His condition was of long standing and degenerative. His bones were deformed. His muscles were wasted away. There was just no way medicine could help him. And no natural explanation for how such a man could ever stand on his own two feet never mind walk home.

But that’s what happened. He rose and walked out of the room, carrying the very bed he had been carried in on. And Luke adds in his account that he went home that day glorifying God, not just because of his miraculous healing, but even more so because of he knew the burden of his sins had been forever taken away by Christ and he had Christ’s promise from his own lips that he was now forgiven. You see that as well as showing that his forgiveness was real to the scribes, Christ was also re-assuring the crippled man that his sins really were forgiven.

That brings us to the third of the main lessons we should draw from this passage. Coming to faith in Christ, so that we can receive God’s forgiveness, is the most important choice any of us can make in this life.

The passage tells us that Jesus Christ has the authority to forgive our sins. And that is such a wonderful thing in itself that we must never forget it. Amazing though Jesus’ miracles of healing and his ability to cast out demons are, the fact that Jesus can take our sins away is even more amazing! This passage is the first time in the gospel that the issue of forgiveness of sin is mentioned. As William Hendriksen says in his commentary on this passage: "So far Jesus has healed. He has dealt with many human afflictions. But now he deals with the worst affliction suffered by men and women – sin."

Because it’s here in the forgiveness of sin that Jesus gets to the very root of all misery, which is human guilt and pollution. In forgiveness, Christ deals with the evil that separates man from his Maker. Sin unforgiven is Satan’s best friend, man’s worst enemy.

We know that the crippled man came to Christ in faith and received forgiveness and healing. What about us?

A Sunday School teacher had just concluded her lesson and wanted to make sure she had made her point. She said, "Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?" There was a short pause and then, from the back of the room, a small boy spoke up. "Sin," he said.

Well that little boy had a point didn’t he? Although obviously his answer wasn’t what his Sunday school teacher was looking for, he wasn’t wrong. Unless there is some wrong done to us, unless someone has done something to us, there’s nothing for us to forgive. Forgiveness just doesn’t come into it unless there’s something that has caused some kind of breakdown in the relationship between the person who is guilty of the wrongdoing and the person against whom the wrong has been done. Forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with guilt. Where there is guilt there is the possibility of forgiveness, and without guilt there is nothing to forgive.

In the case of the relationship between mankind and God there is always guilt because we are all sinners. The Bible could not be clearer on this point.

Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

1 John 1:8 "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

So according to the Bible, all of us, every single one of us needs God’s forgiveness, because all of us are guilty of sinning against him.

But the Bible also teaches that forgiveness is no easy thing for God. It’s not just a matter of saying the words. And Jesus knew that very well. Indeed, he knew it better than anyone else. For God to forgive anyone’s sins, his justice still had to be satisfied. Atonement had to be made. For God to forgive a sinner, a substitute had to be punished in the sinner’s place. For Christ to forgive the crippled man took no less than for the Son of God to shed his blood on the cross.
Paul writes in Ephesians 1:7: "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace."

Now the point is this: the only way to be forgiven, to receive God’s pardon, to have your sins blotted out and carried away is through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. To receive God’s forgiveness there is nothing you can do and nothing you are asked to do by God except come to Jesus Christ, even though crippled by sin and loaded down with guilt and ask him to forgive you. Come to him, trusting and relying on him to be your Saviour and you will be saved. And no one who does this will ever be disappointed.

Think of this crippled man who was saved by Jesus. He began that day crippled not only physically but also spiritually. He went home that night not only able to walk but knowing his sins were gone, forgiven and forgotten by God. And he glorified God because his sins were washed away by the blood of the Lamb.

To accept God’s offer of salvation through Christ is to have eternal joy in heaven. To reject Christ is to face eternal woe in hell. That’s why the choice to accept or reject Christ is the most important decision you will ever make.

Jesus said in John 5:24: "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."

He also said in John 3:36: "He who believes on the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides upon him."

And the choice is before all of us. A choice and a question.

As an old gospel hymn asks:

"Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

"Lay aside the garments that are stained by sin,
and be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
there’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!

"Are you washed in the blood
in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless?
Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"

There is no more wonderful thing than to be able to answer "yes" to that question. It is the first step that takes you from being a sinner crippled on a bed of sin and guilt to being a saint whose journey will end entering the gates of the holy city in heaven. May we all rise up and walk there through the grace of our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Encounters with Jesus: The Centurion

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.