THE FAITH WHICH CHRIST PRAISES

’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. 9.  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 I and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this; and he doeth it.’—­MATT. viii. 8-9.

This miracle of the healing of the centurion’s servant is the second of the great series which Matthew gives us.  It is perhaps not accidental that both the first and the second miracles in his collection point out our Lord’s relation to outcasts from Israel.  The first of them deals with a leper, the second with the prayer of a heathen.  And so they both contribute to the great purpose of Matthew’s Gospel, the bringing out of the nature of the kingdom and the glory of the King.

My object now is to deal with the whole of the incident of which I have read the most important part.  We have in the story three things:  the man and his faith; Christ’s eulogium upon the faith, and declaration of its place in His kingdom; and the answer to the faith.  Look, then, at these three in succession.

I. We consider, first, the man and his faith.

He was a heathen and a Gentile.  The Herod, who then ruled over Galilee, had a little army, officered by Romans, of whom probably this centurion was one; the commander, perhaps, of some small garrison of a hundred men, the sixtieth part of a legion, which was stationed in Capernaum.  If we look at all the features of his character which come out in the story, we get a very lovable picture of a much more tender heart than might have been supposed to beat under the armour of a mercenary soldier set to overawe a sullen people.  ‘He loveth our nation,’ say the elders of the Jews,—­not certainly because of their amiability, but because of the revelation which they possessed.  Like a great many others in that strange, restless era when our Lord came, this man seems to have become tired of the hollowness of heathenism, and to have been groping for the light.  His military service brought him into contact with Judaism and its monotheism, and his heart sprang to that as the thing he had been seeking.  ‘He hath built us a synagogue,’ thereby expressing his adhesion to, or at least his lofty estimate of, the worship which was there carried on.  Just as, if an English officer in India were, in some little village or other, to repair a ruined temple, he would win the hearts of all the people, because they would think he was coming over to Brahminism; so this soldier was felt to be nearer to the Jews than his official position might have suggested.