God's signs are sufficient

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/040119.cfm
Isaiah 65:17-21
John 4:43-54

If you Google “religious signs,” you get somewhere over a quarter of a billion results. The first batch of hits as determined by the search site’s algorithm is to focus my request on religious “signs and symbols,” the iconic representations intended to represent a specific religion, or a specific concept within a given religion. The Star of David of the Jewish religion, Christianity’s cross, and the Muslim Crescent are always included, along with a lot of other interesting pictographs.

But that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

I dig deeper. Now I’m getting the often humorous signs that churches sometime use to get your attention. Things like “Sign broken, please come inside for message” or “Seven days without prayer make one weak.” It seems that I’m not getting very close to today’s Gospel, where Jesus seems to be complaining about our desire to see signs and wonders.

The phrase “signs and wonders” has its biblical origins in the Old Testament in chapter 7 of Exodus, which has God telling Moses:

“… I will make Pharaoh so headstrong that, despite the many signs and wonders that I work in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you.”

The next several chapters of Exodus show many of God’s signs and wonders in the form of snakes, plagues, infestations, river transformations, and lots of frogs, among other things, used over a long period of time to finally wear Pharaoh down and force him to let the Israelites go.

There is a widespread scholarly view that John's gospel can be broken into four parts: a prologue, (John 1:-1:18), the Book of Signs (1:19 to 12:50), the Book of Glory (or Exaltation) (13:1 to 20:31) and an epilogue (chapter 21).

The seven signs are:

• 1. Changing water into wine at Cana in John 2:1-11 - "the first of the signs"
• 2. Healing the royal official's son in Capernaum in John 4:46-54
• 3. Healing the paralytic at Bethesda in John 5:1-15
• 4. Feeding the 5000 in John 6:5-14
• 5. Jesus walking on water in John 6:16-24
• 6. Healing the man blind from birth in John 9:1-7
• 7. The raising of Lazarus in John 11:1-45

The seven signs are seen by some scholars and theologians as evidence of new creation theology in the Gospel of John, the resurrection of Jesus being the implied eighth sign, indicating a week of creation and then a new creation beginning with the resurrection.

Nature, the International Journal of Science, tells us that, “Signs and symptoms are abnormalities that can indicate a potential medical condition. Whereas a symptom is subjective, that is, apparent only to the patient (for example back pain or fatigue), a sign is any objective evidence of a disease that can be observed by others (for example a skin rash or lump).”

Applying this view to today’s Gospel, we might conclude that a sign is objective evidence that something happened on demand by God’s intervention . . . a visible, miraculous result that is readily apparent to all.

So let’s take a journey back in time to catch up with Jesus as he returns to the small mountain town of Cana. We are reminded that this is the town where Jesus, while attending a wedding, turned over one hundred gallons of water, normally used for Jewish ritual cleaning, into “good wine,” the wine usually served first, while the guests could still tell the difference between good wine and the lesser quality wine served later. The water into wine miracle is regarded as the first sign of Jesus, revealing his glory and a precursor to wine replacing water in the new covenant. And his disciples began to believe in him.

Is Jesus back to check up on the couple previously known as newlyweds? We don’t really know. But we do know that a royal official had travelled from his home in Capernaum to ask for help. Capernaum was a town on northeast side of the Sea of Galilee, about 17 miles from Cana and something like 1600 feet lower in elevation. It would have been a tough 2-day journey to ascend to Cana.

Unlike other readings, we don’t see the official making demands for a sign from Jesus. We see a man who must normally feel completely in control of a situation now feeling lost, asking for the Lord to come with him to Capernaum to heal his son, who is near death. To me, this shows that this must have been a man of great faith. He surely could have afforded the best medical care that money could buy in his home town by the sea, but that wasn’t enough to save his son’s life. The official made the effort to personally go up into the mountains to ask for Jesus to travel with him down to Capernaum.

Jesus seems to be a bit annoyed, saying, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Yikes!! That’s the kind of rebuke we would expect if this was a group of Pharisees saying something to the effect. “If you are the Messiah, show us a sign and save this man’s son.”

Why did Jesus say this? Surely he did not misread the royal official’s intentions. Was Jesus testing the man? Or was he in fact talking to everybody else who was present and not directly involved in the conversation? I think it was both. 

Jesus wanted the official to rethink his request. Was he looking for Jesus to perform a miracle, a sign? Or did he believe the words of Jesus, a sign of faith?

As for everyone else there, they are put on notice – why do you need to see a sign to believe?

The royal official sounds humbled, saying, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

Jesus says to him, “You may go, your son will live.”

If you are reading this Gospel at normal speed, you might miss the most important verse in this whole section. Half verse, in fact. The second half of John 4:50 states, “The man believed what Jesus said to him and left.”

He believed Him. That’s WAY beyond the official believing that Jesus could lay hands on his son in person and perform a miracle cure. He believed the spoken words of Jesus that his son would recover.

The trip back to Capernaum started mid-afternoon, immediately after the royal official had been dismissed by Jesus. It was a rugged 17-mile trip downhill to the coast. As the man headed down towards home, he would be replaying this short encounter with the Lord in his head. The rebuke about signs and wonders would only be replayed a couple of times before the man would come to the same conclusion I did – that wasn’t directed at him. Instead, the intensity of Jesus in stating, “You may go, your son will live,” would be replayed in his head, over and over, increasing in speed to keep up with his accelerating pace as he hurried a bit more to return to his son’s side. 

It would have been almost 3 days since the official had left Capernaum until he met his slaves on his return from his moments with Jesus. He is told his son would live. When did this happen, the father wants to know. About one in the afternoon yesterday, which is exactly when Jesus told him, “Your son will live.” We are told that he and his whole household came to believe. 

John ends this chapter by telling us this is the second sign Jesus did when he came to Galilee. This sign assures us that the word of Jesus by itself is sufficient to heal.