Monday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 28, 2022

John 4:43-54

At that time Jesus left [Samaria] for Galilee. For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his native place. When he came into Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, since they had seen all he had done in Jerusalem at the feast; for they themselves had gone to the feast.
Then he returned to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. Now there was a royal official whose son was ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, who was near death. Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” The royal official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “You may go; your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus said to him and left. While the man was on his way back, his slaves met him and told him that his boy would live. He asked them when he began to recover. They told him, “The fever left him yesterday, about one in the afternoon.” The father realized that just at that time Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live,” and he and his whole household came to believe. Now this was the second sign Jesus did when he came to Galilee from Judea.

St. John’s use of the phrase, “A prophet has no honor in his native place”, brings to mind Matthew 13, 57 where the Lord Jesus applies it during a visit to his home town of Nazareth.  John does not link the phrase to Nazareth.  Instead, he uses the phrase as though the Lord’s homeland wasJudea.  This seems very odd, and appears to tell us that John was unaware that the Lord’s “native place” was Nazareth.  But in fact, the Lord was born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth, so his native place (the Greek word should be translated “fatherland”) really was Bethlehem in Judea.  The Lord’s spoken testimony that Judea was his native place indicates that others knew this also.  This puts a different spin on how we think about what the people of his time knew about him. If it was widely known that despite his Galilean accent he was from Judea, and specifically from Bethlehem, people would have been much more likely to see this as proof that he was the Messiah, for that was where the Messiah was said in the Scriptures to be born (cf. Micah 5, 2).  The usual idea is that since we do not hear the Lord ever claiming to have been born in that town, most if not all of his followers would have been ignorant of this fact.  That the leading Pharisees did not seem to know this when others do tells us of how little they had sought to understand who he was: “Search the Scriptures, and see that a prophet does not rise out of Galilee” (John 7, 52).  If they had searched his life, they might have learned something.

“When he came into Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him.”  John says that Jesus went back to Cana, where he must have had some connection, perhaps through the bride and groom whose marriage feast he had attended.  Pointedly, he did not return to Nazareth.  He had left that town months before and taken up residence in Capernaum. 

“Now there was a royal official whose son was ill in Capernaum.”  This sounds somewhat like the cure of the centurion’s slave as recorded in Matthew 8, 5-13.  The point of the story as The other Evangelists tell it is to praise the faith of the Gentile.  Here, the request of the royal official is met with, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”  The official, abashed, repeated his request.  Strangely, the word translated as “slave” in the other Gospels is here translated as “son”.  It is the same word.  The Lord’s words shock us with their apparent lack of compassion, but he is speaking to the crowd, not to the man.  The English translator tries to make this clear by inserting “you people” here, but “people” is not on the Greek.  This is proved by the fact that the second person form of the verbs “you see” and “you will not believe” is in the plural, whereas if the Lord were speaking to the man, they would have been in the singular.  It is safe to assume also that John leaves out some details, such as comments by the crowd.  For instance, St. Luke informs us, in his account of this event, that the Jews insisted that Jesus perform this cure: “They besought him earnestly, saying to him: ‘He is worthy that thou shouldest do this for him. For he loves our nation: and he has built us a synagogue.’ ”  It is likely that the Lord was responding to both their impertinence and the lack of faith on their part, for which he condemned them later: “And you Capernaum, shall you be exalted up to heaven? You shall go down even unto hell. For if in Sodom had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, perhaps it would have remained unto this day” (Matthew 11, 23).  That is, they believed he could heal, but not that he was the Christ, whose words they should obey.  In contrast to the obstinacy of the citizens of the town, which must have persisted even to the time when John wrote his Gospel (so that it was well-known to the early Christians), we learn that the man “and his whole household came to believe.”   

Through our own searching of the Sacred Scriptures we can know much about the Lord Jesus so that our faith in him might grow, and help is maintain our belief even in times of trial.