Sermon - Epiphany III 2023 - Matthew 8:1-13

 

Christ and the Centurion, Paolo Veronese, 1571

                            Faith in Jesus

1. Faith is humble

2. Faith is confident

3. Faith looks forward to eternity

Imagine if the interactions between Jesus and the leper and the centurion  took a different turn, maybe something more similar to our experiences. The leper prays at Jesus’ feet, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” But what if Jesus responds, “I don’t will it; be strong in your faith, endure this illness, and I will bring you to heaven with me soon.” We wouldn’t expect Jesus to answer that way in the Bible, yet He answers us that way all the time in our lives. That’s okay, because our faith isn’t in miraculous healings, rather our faith is in Jesus. So like we learn in our readings our faith is to be humble, submitting to the will of Jesus. Our faith is to be confident, trusting that Jesus’ will is best. Ultimately, our faith doesn’t merely look towards the present but looks forward to eternity.

It’s very important that our faith is humble. The leper prayed, “if you will, you can make me clean.” The centurion confessed, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” In fact the centurion doesn’t even request healing for his servant, he just states the situation to Jesus: “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” He tells Jesus the problem but leaves it in Jesus’ hands what ought to be done about the problem. Both the leper and the centurion pray to Jesus in humility, because in humble faith they recognize that Jesus’ will is better than a miraculous healing. 

Far too often our faith isn’t humble. Rather than praying THY will be done, we usually really mean MY will be done. So when Jesus doesn’t answer our prayers according to our will, this often leads us to anger and frustration in God. This is so because our faith was misplaced. Our faith was in our own will and in a particular miracle happening; it wasn’t in Jesus. 

This can even be the case when Jesus does answer our prayers according to our will. We pray for a particular miracle, and it happens, but then our faith in God is contingent in that particular miracle. We become like those fickle crowds who followed Jesus! We like the miracles He does, but we don’t so much like what He says or who He is. Jesus’ healing of this leper and centurion’s servant comes right after the sermon on the mount when Jesus was still popular. Later in Jesus’ ministry He teaches everyone that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood, and everyone but His apostles leave Him! By the end the crowds were stirred up enough to cry out for His crucifixion! If our faith is in Jesus’ miracles, but not in Jesus, we don’t have saving faith.

This is a problem for us in our own day. Many people experience some miracle or they hear of some miracle, and then that miracle becomes the foundation for their faith. Whether it’s a miracle worker on TV like Benny Hinn, or the visions of Mary that people have had throughout the centuries, or other seemingly miraculous events, these things have a tendency of drawing attention away from the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ miracles testified to His divinity, but they weren’t the main thing He came to accomplish.

So with a humble faith we aren’t merely looking for the grandiose miracles that we want, instead we are looking to Jesus and asking for His will to be done in our lives. If that means I remain sick and frail and die sooner, so be it, because it is God’s good will that I spend less time in this veil of tears and He brings me to Him in heaven sooner. God’s will is my eternal salvation, not merely an extra few years or months here on earth. So a humble faith submits my will to God’s will.

That said, even if our faith is humble, it is still confident in Christ! The leper doesn’t doubt Jesus’ ability, he says “You can make me clean.” The Centurion is so confident in Christ that he doesn’t even need to see Jesus come, he says “only say the word, and my servant will be healed.” This is a stark contrast between the centurion and Naaman. Both are high ranking gentile military leaders, but while the centurion trusts the word of Jesus, Naaman doubts God’s power. When he was told to wash in the Jordan river, “Naaman became angry and went away, saying, ‘Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper.’... so he turned and went away in a rage.” The centurion on the other hand is entirely confident that Jesus can heal his servant simply by speaking.

This is the same sort of confident faith required of every Christian. The centurion recognized that Jesus has authority to heal in the same way that he as a military leader has authority to command the soldiers under him. St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians: “the head of every man in Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” At the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus says: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” So while Jesus is 100% true God, just as much God as the Father is God, nevertheless there is apparently an order between God the Father and God the Son, and Jesus teaches us that the Father gave all authority to the Son. This means that the centurion (perhaps unwittingly) recognized a profound truth about the nature of God and the person of Jesus Christ, and that the authority of the Father has been to God the Son in order to do all things well, including healing a paralyzed servant. 

Just as the centurion confidently believed that Jesus has authority to heal simply by command, so ought we to confidently trust that Jesus can and will do what is in our best interest. This requires both confidence and humility. We are confident that God will supply our every need, yet we humbly acknowledge that God’s will may not be what I think I want. So while the old joke that everybody prays for rain but no one brings an umbrella does make the good point that we should be confident in Jesus to provide, it’s only half the issue, since we should also be humble enough to not expect God to just pump out whatever we want like He’s a divine vending machine.

So when we pray, we pray in view of God’s will for us. “God our Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” His will is that “many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” God looks upon us and has rather long-term plans, whereas we tend to be quite short-sighted. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with praying about our immediate worldly problems, but that shouldn’t be our primary focus. Consider that the Lord’s prayer has only one petition about daily bread, and the rest of the petitions are about eternal spiritual matters. Our Lord’s primary concern for us is that we would inherit the kingdom of Heaven and dwell with Him forever in paradise.

So when we implore God’s mercy in the face of our troubles, His answer is always “yes,” but it’s not necessarily a “yes” to giving us whatever we want. When we cry out to God in our sorrows, God may not take away the sorrow, but He will give us strength to endure the sorrow. Remember, God acts in view of eternity, which means that a temporary affliction on earth may very well be what is necessary for us and others to reach paradise. Our world is so obsessed with health and living longer, whether it be diet or surgery or medicines, but that doesn’t have to be our obsession. May it be that God aligns our will with His so that our faith would be in Him and focused on His eternal will.

Thus, let our faith be humble, confident, and focused on eternity. In humility we gladly receive from God whatever He gives us. In confidence we trust that the Lord’s will is best and He will provide for us and strengthen us. In view of eternity we look not only to God for our relief from our temporary afflictions, but that He may do what is necessary to bring us out of this veil of tears and to Himself in paradise.