John 4:42-54

What an interesting passage..

Before we dive into it…2 things to remember

a reminder John 20: 31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

This is why John was written, this why John recorded these particular stories from Jesus life…… and the purpose for our study in John……that we would know that Jesus is the Messiah the son of God… 

There is so much in today’s short passage which gives us answers to who Jesus is as well as what is Nb to him……

Also… we need to just remember the passage that Lawrence spoke on last week… in order to understand today’s passage we need to take into account what happened in Samaria…. It is tempting to see the Bible as a collection of stories standing alone, but God has written this book and each part …. including the order and flow…., are essential to take into account …

Let’s read…from vs 39

39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.

42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Jesus Heals an Official’s Son

43 After the two days he left for Galilee. 44 (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country.) 45 When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.

46 Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. 47 When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.

48 “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”

49 The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

50 “Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”

The man took Jesus at his word and departed. 51 While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. 52 When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.”

53 Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.

54 This was the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee.

So last week Jesus was teaching in Samaria and this week he moves on to Galilee…. Two different places and two different stories……There is a very awkward segway here between these two passages vs 44 which seems completely out of place… at best an afterthought and at worst erroneous. In brackets nogal…..

44 (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honour in his own country.) 

While this contention may well be true… the husband who takes his wife for granted while everyone else sees how wonderful she is…. The son who takes his father’s provision for granted… the hiker climbing a beautiful mountain day after day, but only sees the steep path and feels the mosquitoes….

I saw a video the other day by an Australian couple….

In the same way a prophet has no honour in his own country….

While the statement is clearly true….it does  not seem to fit here……because vs 45 promptly says..45 When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. 

Huh? I thought he was being rejected? not honoured?.....This does not make sense? Unless of course….. We are misunderstanding the word ‘honour’... we’ll get back to this….

This passage describes the healing of the official's son as the second sign…..which is also confusing because Ch 2 tells us that many people in Jerusalem believed in Jesus because they saw the miraculous signs that he performed….

So let's clear this issue up first as it is the less complicated one…..we heard from Lawrence in the introduction that there are 7 signs that Jesus gives in John… these take the form of miracles, but they are recorded as separate from the ‘every day’ miracles because they point directly at John 20:31 as proof that Jesus is the Messiah the son of God…

This is the second one of these signs… each one shows a different aspect of God’s power…. In order to complete the proof that he is who He claims to be….

The first sign was the changing of the water into wine … this showed that Jesus had power over the physical world… that he could change matter and had power over time, as the wine was well aged….. This second sign shows that Jesus has power over the human physical body as well as distance…. He is both Omniscient and Omnipresent….. This is God….

As an aside… the sceptic may say that John was just making up stories… that John saying that these signs happened does not mean they happened…..but it needs to be remembered that one of the greatest indicators of the validity of a text is when an eyewitness writes it down….especially… and this is important… when other eyewitnesses are alive and could contradict any error….. These things are of course also written elsewhere by other people which adds to their validity…..

This second sign as described here is there to point us to God… keep an eye out for the other 5 over the weeks ahead….

This leaves us then with the struggle to understand why God included vs 44. What did he mean about a prophet not being given honour in His own country….?

Jesus seems to be well received in Galilee…WHY? NB……Because the people …the Galileans …..were in Jerusalem when he was performing the miracles there… they saw mind blowing things which were awesome and entertaining and caused a stir in Jerusalem…. How cool… the man from Jerusalem…the one we told you about….. has now come to our little corner of the World…of course he was going to be well accepted……

There was no TV or sport to watch… no internet or Youtube… no newspaper and they mostly could not read….which is fine because there were no books……. Life was about work.. Life was slow and boring… how great to have a visiting miracles worker who was so interesting to listen to…..they were all there cheering him on….he is popular when he arrives there…

Did this please Jesus? … it appears not…. God says that they have not honoured him….the Galileans do not hold Him or his purpose in the position he deserves…..

Jesus does not seem to want people to be interested in following Him because he wants more followers….I don’t think he would buy into the Social Media generation who will do anything for likes…..anything to get subscribers….

In fact he rejects the notion of ‘likes’ completely……. He reprimands them for following him …you are here because you want to see miracles…..

48 “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”

The shallowness that comes with the vagaries of popularity may be tempting for us, but Jesus who has come to Earth with a clear purpose …. 

He is not entrapped by such vanity…… in fact he sees it for what it is……… infatuation with the entertainment value and completely missing his core mission…. 

Jesus, God’s son, the creator of the universe, who has sacrificed His place in the heavenly realms to take on the sins of the World … a world full of selfishness….. He is going to take on this burden and suffer and die….. 

These people can only see him as an entertainer…. Or at best a benefactor….

His miracles, designed to show that He is God are debased to something temporal. This is dishonouring…… seeing him as any less than who He is…. the Messiah… is dishonouring…

Jesus wants them to accept Him by faith…….not because of miracles….

This is as vital for us to grasp as it was for those miserable Galileans……

God is not interested in filling a church with people who are here because the singing is good, or the preaching is entertaining or the social life of the church fills our needs….. That is a church that does not honour God…..

What would please God? How do we do this….the answer is here….

Firstly we find the answer with the Samaritans…And because of his words many more became believers…… “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

These people were not needing great signs and wonders to believe….There were no miracles…. They simply heard Jesus' words and believed….by faith…

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

They did not just hear Jesus’ words and decided that he was a decent teacher… they were not just entertained by him…. They didn't put their own spin on things….. They heard His words and declared their belief that He is the Saviour of the World…..

Imagine how disappointing it was for Jesus to go from the Euphoria of working with people who wholeheartedly believed and understood His mission to Earth and then He met with the Galileans(his own people) who only saw the most basic, the surface, the shallowness.. They only saw the outer shell and had no understanding of the deeper eternal things…..

This is clearly upsetting to Jesus, that the Galileans need miracles. 

He is clearly pleased with the faith of the Samaritans….

God is big on FAITH. By Faith not by works. It is all over the Bible……Why? Why does He want you and I to accept Him by faith?

Surely He could do a whole lot of miracles and people will turn to Him in droves and believe. Why does he make it so difficult? 

Why does He make such a big thing about Faith?

While I don’t know what God ‘thinks’ of course …….part of the answer is portrayed so well in the example in this passage  …but explained clearly  in that most famous chapter on Faith Hebrews 11 …. Here the writer lists all the great people of the faith and commends them…. Right in the middle of this passage we see these verses:

13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

This passage tells us that if we need miracles to believe, then we have our hearts set on temporary, Earthly things, but when we accept God by faith then we are demonstrating that we have a heart for eternity. 

This is not me saying this…..   I don’t understand the human heart….. This is God explaining….. If you accept Him by faith this is proof that your heart is on eternal matters you are looking forward to heaven and are wanting to live for God’s glory….

But when we are wanting God to do something miraculous before  we believe it is because I am still selfish and looking to fulfill my wishes for me right now here on Earth so that my life can be better……

Faith is so important because it separates out those who are seeking their own glory and those who are looking for God’s glory….. And this is the definition of being a Christian….

No wonder Jesus was so disappointed in the Galileans and so pleased with the Samaritans….. God is pleased with you and I when we live by faith…..

As an aside….what I like about the description of the Samaritan’s path to faith is that it is a pattern for the church and faith today…… Someone shares their love for Jesus, people listen and are brought into faith through the sharing of the gospel and when they come to faith they find out for themselves and they grow in their faith.

Then we have the central miracle laid out in these verses… the palace official… he also comes to God… his path is not Samaritan like…. He is not like the Galileans either… he seems to fall in the middle……

Imagine this…. It is World War 1 and Steve is fighting in the muddy fields of France… he is under fire and his friends are dying all around him…..then a mortar lands right next to him and blows his mate to smithereens…. Steve in all the horror remembers his Sunday school lessons and in the moment he calls out to God, ‘ God if you save me I will lead a good life and serve you forever’..... God answers his pleas..the shooting calms down and he is able to withdraw to relative safety…. Is Steve now a Christian?

This is called a foxhole conversion… How many men give their lives to God during war?

It does not have to be in war… it could be in financial difficulty ... .it could be when a marriage is breaking up or a child is wayward… it could be because of illness or extreme loneliness…… when people have nowhere to turn they turn to God…. are these people saved … does this please God ? ….afterall …like we have heard this morning…..like the Galileans they are begging for a miracle to hang their faith on….

The palace official here has a sick son and he has little hope that he will survive… maybe he has tried all the royal physicians….and all hope is lost…

Then he hears that Jesus is nearby.…..

We don't know how he knows about Jesus….maybe he was in Jerusalem…. Maybe he had just heard reports.. We are not told….

What we can assume is that he had enough faith to walk the 30km to Cana… enough faith to approach Jesus… enough faith to beg him to heal his son….. 

Wherever that faith came from.. Maybe it was out of desperation… love for his son…..

Whatever it was Jesus acknowledged the faith in him and healed the boy…..

Now this is where it becomes interesting……if Jesus was looking to grow his ministry through this miracle he would have led the procession all the way to their home like he did with Jairus’ daughter…. And then he would have raised the boy and everyone would have known that he could heal…….But he didn’t … this is a personal miracle.. Just for this man and his family…….

It also puts this man in a difficult situation… the man said to Jesus, ‘Come, before my child dies’..... But Jesus puts the ball back in his court and he says, ‘Go…your son will live’...

Jesus sets up an opportunity for the man to demonstrate his faith…

So what does the man do? He has two days of travelling to go….. Two days before he has proof that his son is healed…. It would be much better if Jesus was there at the bedside …just in case it did not work…..

He could have reacted in a number of ways…. continued the begging…. Or thrown up his arms in distress…. But he goes…. He took Jesus at his word……How is that for faith?

When the man gets half way home he meets his servants coming in the other directions and it is confirmed that the boy was healed the moment Jesus declared that he would be…..him and his family believe

This is Fox hole faith….so is he saved?

In this case the man has demonstrated his faith and faith is what is important to God.

Yes. It was perhaps the miracle that got him to really believe, but God took that little bit of faith and used it…. Even that small faith was valuable to Jesus…..

The official could have gone back to his old way of life. In fact he would have gone back to his old way of life if his faith was not genuine…… In this case the man’s faith was real… he took his fox hole experience and used it as a springboard for his life of faith…in fact his whole family believed and grew in the faith…..

Does this answer our question about whether people who turn to God in a crisis for miraculous help go on to be Christians?

Well at the very least sometimes… perhaps not even very often… and this is of course the problem with only turning to God in a crisis….. When the crisis is over too many turn and forget God again…

After all, if miracles alone could turn people to God…if a healing or creating something from nothing could turn people into believers  then surely creation is, everything we see around us is so much greater…. Miraculous in the extreme……. Everyone should turn to God…. but miracles are not enough, ……without faith they find ways to explain it all away…

The defining factor here seems to be that the man had that kernel of faith… he had faith before the miracle….he had the faith to make the trip to see Jesus, to beg and then the faith to go home without proof and this showed that their was some faith without the miracle…. Just like the Samaritans…. Jesus talks about us having faith like a child…. And then he will use that seed to grow our faith…

So where does this leave us? 

What we need to see here is that faith is what is NB to God. 

His purpose for making us is that we spend eternity with Him. It is not about this world.

Sin is by definition our desire to glorify ourselves instead of God.

Faith shows that we have a heart for eternal matters and not just the temporary physical world.

Faith is therefore vital for salvation.

As Christians we need to live by faith every day. Why? because this pleases God. 

Why does it please God? Because faith shows that our hearts are set on eternity and His glory.