Having indicated the illustrated part of this story, we may now mark the contrast between it and the event in the Gospels. There restoration is not merely asked, but expected, and that, not in answer to prayer, but by Christ's Personal presence. But the great and vital contrast lies, alike in what was thought of Him Who was instrumental in the cure - performed it - and in the moral effects which it wrought. The history just quoted from the Talmud is immediately followed by another of similar import, when a celebrated Rabbi accounts on this wise for his inability to do that in which Chanina had succeeded, that Chanina was like a servant of the King,' who went in and out familiarly, and so might beg favours; while he (the failing Rabbi) was like a lord before the King,' who would not be accorded mere favours, but discussed matters on a footing of equality. This profane representation of the relation between God and His servants, the utterly unspiritual view of prayer which it displays, and the daring self-exaltation of the Rabbi, surely mark sufficiently an absolute contrast in spirit between the Jewish view and that which underlies the Evangelic narrative.
Enough has been said to show, that the application to Jesus on the part of the royal officer' did not, in the peculiar circumstances, lie absolutely beyond the range of Jewish ideas. What the court-officer' exactly expected to be done, is a question secondary to that of his state of receptiveness, as it may be called, which was the moral condition alike of the outward help, and of the inward blessing which he received. One thing, however, it is of importance to notice. We must not suppose, that when, to the request that Jesus would come down to Capernaum to perform the cure, the Master replied, that unless they saw [2036] signs and wonders they would not believe, He meant thereby to convey that his Jewish hearers, in opposition to the Samaritans, required signs and wonders' in order to believe. For the application of the officer' was itself an expression of faith, although imperfect. Besides, the cure, which was the object of the application, could not have been performed without a miracle. What the Saviour reproved was not the request for a miracle, which was necessary, but the urgent plea that He should come down to Capernaum for that purpose, which the father afterwards so earnestly repeated. [2037] That request argued ignorance of the real character of the Christ, as if He were either merely a Rabbi endowed with special power, or else a miracle-monger. What He intended to teach this man was, that He, Who had life in Himself, could restore life at a distance as easily as by His Presence; by the word of his Power as readily as by personal application. A lesson this of the deepest importance, as regarded the Person of Christ; a lesson, also, of the widest application to us and for all circumstances, temporal and spiritual. When the court-officer' had learned this lesson, he became obedient unto the faith,' and went his way,' [2038] presently to find his faith both crowned and perfected. [2039] And when both he and his house' had learned that lesson, they would never afterwards think of the Christ either as the Jews did, who simply witnessed His miracles, or unspiritually. It was the completion of that teaching which had first come to Nathanael, the first believer of Cana. [2040] So, also, is it when we have learned that lesson, that we come to know alike the meaning and the blessedness of believing in Jesus.
Indeed, so far as its moral import is concerned, the whole history turns upon this point. It also marks the fundamental difference between this and the somewhat similar history of the healing of the Centurion's servant in Capernaum. [2041] Critics have noticed marked divergences in almost every detail of the two narratives, [2042] which some - both orthodox and negative interpreters - have so strangely represented as only different presentations of one and the same event. [2043] But, besides these marked differences of detail, there is also fundamental difference in the substance of the narratives, and in the spirit of the two applicants, which made the Saviour in the one instance reprove as the requirement of sight, which by itself could only produce a transitory faith, that which in the other He marvelled at as greatness of faith, for which He had in vain looked in Israel. The great point in the history of the court-officer' is Israel's mistaken view of the Person and Work of the Christ. That in the narrative of the Centurion is the preparedness of a simple faith, unencumbered by Jewish realism, although the outcome of Jewish teaching. The carnal realism of the one, which looks for signs and wonders, is contrasted with the simplicity and straightforwardness of the other. Lastly, the point in the history of the Syro-Phoenician woman, which is sometimes confounded with it, [2044] is the intensity of the same faith which, despite discouragements, nay, seeming improbabilities, holds fast by the conviction which her spiritual instinct had grasped - that such an One as Jesus must be not only the Messiah of the Jews, but the Saviour of the world.