Believing is Seeing
A sermon brought forth from John 4:46-54 preached on Sunday, February 6, 2022
I imagine it was the walk back home that was the hardest part. Jesus had told him that his son would be okay. The man remembered Jesus saying his boy would live. Taking Jesus, or anyone else, at his word wasn’t something this royal official was usually comfortable with. He was a servant of the state—the occupying Roman state or was it Herod’s tight grip of the people of Israel and their land—either way, the man was used to operating under strict and very detailed orders. There was no such thing as trust or faith or taking others at their word. In his line of work there was only proof, verification, and hard facts. That’s how life serving an occupied state worked. Nothing could be left to question. Matters of belief were outside of this official’s purview; more than annoying, they were unacceptable and most likely dangerous.
The story of Jesus turning water into wine was still news in Cana of Galilee when He returned. Word had spread quickly across that village. There were many at the wedding celebration that day, and they all told a similar story—that after the wine was replenished, the servants came around to pour what Jesus, Mary’s son, had given into their empty bowls. And it was good. Very good. Far better than what the guests were first offered.
The neighbors who left the wedding celebration long before they first ran out of wine regretted their leaving so early, and there were others who had not come to the celebration at all who felt even more left out. A story of a man turning water into wine would be hard to believe if it wasn’t for the remarkable similarities between each witness’s story. The whole village came to believe what they could not see.
So, when word got out that Jesus was making His way back to Cana of Galilee, everyone there came out to welcome Him. They needed to see this wonder worker and pay witness to what he might do next. Word had gotten around He did more than party tricks. The people of Cana needed to see more because matters of belief make for good stories, but seeing is believing. They were eager to see what Jesus would do next.
Everybody loves a wonderworker, and anyone can benefit from a healer. It’s easy to have faith when faith is helpful—so long as it works out in your favor. But what happens when that wonderworker and healer demands something of you? See, the people of Cana of Galilee did not anticipate that. But that’s exactly what happened.
Across the entire region, people were telling of what Jesus accomplished for them—that He had what it takes to release people from their deepest pains and sorrows. But word also got around that there was more to Him than wonderworker. The people who came to Him for healing also saw another side to this man, something unexpected and unwelcome. Jesus had healing in His hands, but He also had short words for those who came to Him only for their benefit. The townspeople did not anticipate the challenging words Jesus had for them. But there were more to these miracles. Jesus expected more—more from everyone.
So, the moment this royal official, this desperate and grieving father, got to the end of his day-long journey, looked Jesus in the eye, and told Him about his dying son was also the moment when Jesus had reached the end of His patience. All these people, not just the ones in Cana of Galilee but every other village Jesus made His way into since that wedding miracle, were all asking something of Jesus without ever considering that Jesus was asking something of them at the same time.
Jesus was happy to heal the many who came to Him, but not one of them seemed to notice that Jesus had to offer much more than renewed health. He was waiting for them—for anyone—to recognize what He really had to offer: a new way to live. Jesus was waiting for someone to notice that beyond the miracle worker was One who was the Source of all life and that in Him could be found fullness of life, that He was, in fact, the Word God spoke into creation to redeem and restore all things to Him.
Seeing isn’t always believing. Sometimes it’s the very thing that gets in the way of believing. Jesus had only seen in these miracle seekers a spurious faith that was dependent on His performance. They could easily welcome into their lives one who could meet all their physical needs, some sort of diviner who proved useful when life gets complicated, some vending machine for signs and wonders who could dole out a fix for their latest distress, but they were not ready for a relationship in a Messiah who offered them forgiveness of sins and a transformed life because that involved their commitment, their attention, their everything.
Throughout the course of His earthly ministry, Jesus had to get used to a disappointing reality. There weren’t many who were ready for a Messiah because a Messiah can only rescue those who recognize they need rescuing. Faith in Christ is an undertaking—it has its obligations. And for the many, seeing is believing. And that’s too small.
Gospel faith isn’t something to celebrate only when it produces results that land in your favor. Faith in our Savior deserves to be celebrated even when—or maybe especially when!—there’s nothing to show for it. Faith accomplishes its most powerful work in those seasons of our life when nothing is resolved or accomplished. We may become so entranced with the benefits of our faith that it never dawns on us that it’s also a relationship with the living Christ. And every relationship comes with its obligation to another. It’s only when we wake up to the Gospel testimony that Jesus expects His singular devotion to us to be matched and mirrored by our singular devotion to Him that we’ll grasp what means to believe in order to see. Salvation is the pursuit of believing in order to see.
There is much ado within churches these days about what we can no longer do or be because of what we do not have, or what we once were but are no longer. The stories we tell each other about this are too often premised upon what we lack, what we could count upon 20 or 40 or 60 years ago in the church’s fuller days but can no longer.
The conversations we have about all this are anxious ones, despairing too. In them, we assume that what we have now—what we are now—is less than what we had, or were, then, as if being faithful disciples of Jesus ever had a thing to with what could be counted.
Gospel faith isn’t something to celebrate only when it produces results that land in our favor. Deep commitment in this Christ-life has never been popular, and that’s what the church was always meant to be—a gathering of those willing to give themselves to the deep commitment of discipleship. Jesus has never made a disciple out of anyone who reached out to Him on their terms.
As for us who together are called church? We’ll never stop reaching out to those not yet in our company, but we won’t do it for our sake; we’ll do it for Jesus’s sake, for the sake of the saving Gospel, and for the sake of a world that has forgotten how much they are in need of it. This is what we who are church need to believe. Only then will we see it. We have Jesus at His Word.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.