When we put our faith in Jesus, he saves us for eternity
by Julian Mann, TCW:
JESUS’S treatment of suffering people in the Prayer Book Gospel reading for today, the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, reveals his divine compassion and his power to save.
The passage from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter eight, records Jesus healing a leper and the suffering servant of a Roman centurion. This Gentile commander in the Roman army occupying 1st Century Israel had exemplary faith in Jesus’s divine authority as the Jewish Messiah, the Christ of Old Testament promise:
‘And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it’ (Matthew 8v5-9 – King James Version).
The centurion knew from experience how the military chain of command worked. Its efficiency in the Roman army made it the formidable fighting force that it was. Insubordination was out of the question. From his apparent knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, the centurion knew who was in charge of the cosmic chain of command and that is why he knew that the King chosen by God had only to give the order.
The account of the same incident in Luke’s Gospel records that Jewish leaders in Galilee asked Jesus to agree to the centurion’s request, ‘for he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue’ (Luke 7v5). It would appear that this soldier had learned biblical Hebrew so that he could read the Jewish Scriptures and that the divine grace mediated by the Old Testament had aroused the humanity of this hard-bitten warrior, leading him to compassion for his suffering servant. In both accounts, Jesus is recorded as marvelling at the faith in the God of Israel which the centurion showed by his appeal:
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