Year C

Luke 7:1-10

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Power of Faith

Two weeks ago on Pentecost Sunday, we began the rather long season of Pentecost which extends to the end of November. This period of time is sometimes referred to as “Ordinary Time,” or the long green season because we are living our faith in our “ordinary” days where our daily lives seek to nourish those seeds planted at Easter. It is an “in between” time for the church more than two thousand years after the first Pentecost because we continue to wait for Christ’s second coming. Our task during this long season will be to look at what Jesus taught his disciples and see what is in his teachings that are relevant for us today as we carry out his work in our world. Of course this is only possible with the help of God’s Holy Spirit who has come to be with us and help us to love and serve the Lord.

During this season, each Sunday will have its own theme generally based on the collect and the readings. One of the gifts of this season is the opportunity to hear some of the books of the Bible read almost as a whole. In Liturgical year C, we continue to read in the gospel of Luke pretty much in sequence which will give us a sense of the rhythm of Jesus’ ministry as he lived and taught and healed the people who came to him. What we hope to learn is what it means to be a follower of Christ as we walk with the disciples and Jesus toward Jerusalem, listening to his words of teaching and warning concerning his suffering and death, and the cost of becoming his disciple.

In the gospel reading today we meet some hurting people and we see our Lord’s response to their needs. This reading and for the next two weeks the gospels could be described as stories of unexpected guests and God’s surprising graciousness. Have you ever had a knock at your door and find unexpected guests that have come for a visit? You might have been in the middle of something but you drop what you were doing to show hospitality to your guest. This story today is a story of hospitality, one that seems to be a miracle story as we read of the healing of the centurion’s slave, but by the end it is clear that the centurion’s faith in Jesus is at the center of this story. Through Jesus’ encounter with the centurion, Luke answers the questions of how one becomes part of the people of God, a disciple. And, we learn who Jesus is and what God intends to accomplish through him?

Luke tells us in the versus preceding the gospel text today that Jesus had just finished teaching “on a level place to a large crowd of his disciples and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem and from the coast of Tyre and Sidom, had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases.” He then went to Capernaum where he meets a centurion of the Roman army an unexpected guest who had heard that Jesus was coming. The centurion belonged to the militia of Herod Antipas and he was likely one of the God-fearers. God-fearers were non-Jews who were attracted to Judaism because of its faith in one God and because of its ethical teachings. God-fearers, the Gentiles, would attend Jewish services and keep the commandments, but they were reluctant to go the whole way because it meant circumcision.

Among such Gentiles, according to Luke, the Christian message found great favor because they could belong fully to the people of God by faith in Jesus together with obedience to the ethical requirements of the law of God. For at the very heart of the Jewish law, and Christian for that matter, is love and compassion, love of God and neighbor, and this centurion demonstrates both. He demonstrates his love of foreigners which included the Jews of his town as he has acted as a benefactor by building their synagogue. He further shows his love for neighbor by sending some Jewish elders to ask Jesus to heal his slave.

Along with love of others, we see his has faith in Jesus. He not only calls Jesus “Lord,” but he believes Jesus’ word is enough to heal his slave, even from a distance. It is this centurion’s deep level of trust in who Jesus is and what he can do, his authority, that Jesus finds “amazing,” his next words of praise brings this text to its climax. “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.” Jesus’ comment leads us to believe that he is sad when he sees this genuine faith demonstrated by an outsider, a gentile and not a Jew. Even so, Jesus healed the slave so the faith of the centurion might be confirmed and held up as an example. He also turned on its head the understanding of who was in and who was out by his willingness to heal not based upon this understanding, but on faith and who was willing to call on the “Lord.”

Some find this gospel text troubling in several ways. First, the centurion had a slave, however beloved. Although slavery in the first century was quite different from the slavery of eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, our sense of justice may rear its head. When the centurion compares his status before Jesus to that of a slave, a servant, this inequity in power and authority is to testify to Jesus’ authority. He also makes it clear to Jesus that the beloved slave follows orders as a servant in his household. The centurion could have treated the slave as someone not worthy of healing. The second troubling issue is that it sounds initially as if the centurion was more worthy to receive this blessing. “He built our synagogue for us.” This could imply that the one who contributes the most money is more worthy of Jesus’ attention.

Jesus heals the slave not because of a great deal of money but because he showed a great deal of faith. Jesus demonstrated that faithfulness did not depend on social status or membership in the club. Finally, we may find this text troubling because if we have called on the Lord for healing with a great faithfulness and healing does not occur as we have asked, we may feel a sense of failure that our faith was not strong enough. But lest we forget, Jesus praises the fact that the centurion recognizes Jesus’ authority and puts his trust in it. It is the example of this kind of faith that helps us to live our lives with the joys, challenges and tragedies of life, and to reconcile the unpredictable nature of each with the grace of Jesus Christ.

Through the healing of the centurion slave, Jesus extended God’s graciousness and by doing so we learn who Jesus is, and we learn what God intends to accomplish through him as he teaches the disciples and others that God’s saving grace extends to all guests that show up at his door. It was precisely the centurion’s sense of unworthiness before Christ, his vulnerability in the face of Jesus’ power, his openness to what he needed but knew he did not deserve, his reaching out to what can only be called grace, that Jesus calls “faith.” After Jesus commends the centurion, he turns to the crowd who had followed and holds him up as an example; hoping that by doing so, we his people would follow this example of faith. This is what it means to be a follower, a disciple carrying out the work we have been called to do for the salvation of the world.