Saturday in the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time, June 26, 2021

Matthew 8:5-17

When Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion approached him and appealed to him, saying, “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, suffering dreadfully.” He said to him, “I will come and cure him.” The centurion said in reply, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven, but the children of the Kingdom will be driven out into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.” And Jesus said to the centurion, “You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.” And at that very hour his servant was healed.  Jesus entered the house of Peter, and saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand, the fever left her, and she rose and waited on him. When it was evening, they brought him many who were possessed by demons, and he drove out the spirits by a word and cured all the sick, to fulfill what had been said by Isaiah the prophet: He took away our infirmities and bore our diseases.

“A centurion approached him”.  The hill on which the Lord delivered his Sermon on the Mount lay not far from the town of Capernaum, where he had moved.  After coming down this hill and healing the leper, he walked the rest of the way to the town.  Upon reaching it, a centurion, came to him.  A centurion commanded a company of one hundred men in the Roman army.  It was unusual to see a centurion in the town because the Romans did not station soldiers in Galilee at that time.  Perhaps he had come down from Syria.  He was a man accustomed to command, but he had come to Jesus to present an entreaty: “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, suffering dreadfully.”  We notice right away that the centurion addressed Jesus as “Lord”, quite an extraordinary thing for him to do.  We also notice that the centurion speaks in a way very similar to how the leper spoke.  The leper had not asked Jesus to heal him, but had only showed that he believed that Jesus could cure him.  This was enough for the Lord.  Here, also, the centurion does not make a request, but states a fact, however plaintively.  Jesus healed the leper, a Jewish man, right away.  To the centurion he answers, “I will come and cure him.”  

The Lord is as eager to heal the Gentiles as he is the Jews.  He has come to save all.  And just as we can see in the healing of the leper a summary of the Redemption of the human race, here we can see a summary of the Redemption particularly of the Gentiles.  The Lord made brief visits to foreign lands during his Public Life yet did no preaching there: “I was not sent but to the sheep, that are lost of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15, 24).  He desired to save the Gentiles too, but would do it through the Apostles and their successors after his Ascension into heaven: he would do it from afar.  And so, when the centurion protests that his roof is not worthy of the one he called “Lord”, Jesus does not insist on going but commends his faith and heals the servant from a distance.  He then confirmed that his primary mission was to the Jews by healing Peter’s mother-in-law, and afterwards crowds of people from the neighboring Galilean towns.  It is important to see what St. Matthew is doing here in his Gospel: writing to impoverished and persecuted Galilean Christians, he reminds them that Jesus came down from heaven especially for them.  He did not go to the Gentiles, but to the Galileans, even above the Judeans.  Certainly, he offered salvation to the Gentiles as well, but he would do this from heaven.  He had come personally to the Galileans.

The Lord comes personally to us in Holy Communion, and he does so out of his love for us and in his desire to be loved by us.  He also does this that he might work through us for the conversion of the Gentiles in our lives.