Homily for Monday, 4th Week of Lent

Homily for Monday

4th Week of Lent

March 12, 2018

John 4: 43-54
Nativity, Washington, D.C.

You know that in our 3 Sunday cycles of readings we follow the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  In this year, for instance, called Year B, we read from Mark.

There’s no cycle for John’s Gospel.  Instead, he gets, 5 consecutive Sundays in the middle of Mark’s year, during which we hear his 6th chapter, Jesus’ teaching on his saving word and on the Eucharist.  John is also featured on the later Sundays of Lent.  And, starting today, the 2d half of Lent belongs to John in our weekday readings.  He also owns most of the Easter season.

I just noted that John 6 teaches about the saving word of Jesus.  That’s actually a theme in John’s Gospel, and it’s the focus of today’s passage, the final verses of John 4.  The preceding part of this chapter tells the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well and the conversion of many of her fellow villagers upon their hearing the preaching of Jesus.

(source unknown)

By contrast, now Jesus returns to Galilee, where “people will not believe unless they see signs and wonders” (4:48).  I.e., they’re not really interested in his word and its saving power:  “A prophet has no honor in his native place” (4:44), a point made also by the other gospels.

Jesus comes back to Cana, where he’s met by an official from King Herod’s court.  This story seems to be a variant of the one told by Mark and Luke, in which the suppliant is a Roman centurion, a pagan presumably.  The royal official would be a Jew.  In either case, the man coming to Jesus would be from outside his normal society.  He’s not a disciple, not peasant farmer or fisherman; he’s from the world of the elite.

Jesus is reluctant to respond to the man’s request.  He basically refuses his plea to “come down and heal his son,” who’s dying (4:47).  But the man persists, and when Jesus dismisses him with only an assurance that his son will live (4:50)—without Jesus’ going in person—the man believes just as the centurion does in the other version of the story.  He departs, his son is indeed cured, and “he and his whole household came to believe” (4:53), just as earlier Jesus’ disciples began to believe in him at Cana when he worked the 1st of this signs, changing water into wine (2:11), to which John alluded at the beginning of this passage (4:46), marking a connection between the 1st and 2d of Jesus’ signs and their influence on faith.

But the royal official demonstrated faith as soon as he accepted Jesus’ promise:  “The man believed what Jesus said to him and left” (4:50).  He wasn’t like Thomas after the resurrection, who insisted on seeing Jesus and putting his fingers into his wounds before he would believe.  The official doesn’t insist that Jesus come down and heal his son right in front of his eyes.  Jesus’ word is enuf.

Jesus is the living Word of God, the Word that became flesh (John 1:14).  As Peter will profess at the end of ch. 6, he has the words of eternal life (6:68).  He is the Word of eternal life.  He speaks the saving word; he is the saving Word.  We don’t follow him because he changes water into wine, walks on water, or heals the sick.  We haven’t seen any of that.  We follow him because of who he is:  the way, the truth, and the life.  We listen to him, we walk with him, we believe that he takes away our sins and restores us to a saving relationship with his Father in heaven.