In the story of Jesus and the centurion, one important detail is easy to overlook. Although much of the story is in the form of a conversation, the two main characters never meet. The centurion is the best man Jesus never met. Not the best man Jesus “ever” met – the best man Jesus “never” met. Jesus came to the city of Capernaum near the Sea of Galilee when a group of Jewish elders delivered him a message about a worthy centurion whose slave is dying. Jesus headed toward the man’s house when another group of people, sent by the centurion, intercepted him and let him know that the centurion does not expect Jesus to actually come to his home, but instead asks only that Jesus will say the word and let his servant be healed. This amazes and impresses Jesus, who remarks with wonder about this man’s faith; and then the story ends. Jesus goes on his way and the group of friends returned to the centurion’s house and find the slave miraculously healed.
Now ask yourself “How did this miracle happen?” Well, perhaps not literally “how” did it happen, because miracles by definition defy literal explanations. But ask yourself “What made this healing possible, especially if the two main characters never met?” Surprisingly, science can help answer that question. We learned in science class that sound cannot exist in a vacuum. Sound waves need air to travel through in order for us to hear them, so if there is no air present, no sounds can be heard. In a similar way, faith cannot exist in a vacuum. Faith needs a community in order to come to life. Just as air is needed for you to hear sounds, a community of people is needed for any of us to live out our Christian faith.
I may be going out on a limb here, but I think this idea highlights a wrong turn taken by Christian evangelicals. A lot of preachers and evangelical churches emphasize that you need to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. They will hold revivals and tell us to repent of our sins and get right with the Lord. Now, don’t get me wrong: sin is bad and repentance, turning away from sin, is good. But believing in Jesus as your Savior does not mean that you and Jesus are a team of two, walking in a protective “bubble of faith” through the messiness of the world. No, the messy, complicated world is the medium through which your faith in Jesus comes to life. Like sound waves moving through air between two points, the world and all who live in it is the medium through which your faith becomes real. The centurion never met Jesus, but his words and faith were expressed through the medium of others – through the Jewish elders that told Jesus about him, and through his group of friends who insisted Jesus need only say the word and the servant would be healed. Faith may be personal, but it is not private. It comes to life through a community – like this church, like our neighborhood, like our world. That’s how it works.
Next question: Why did this miracle happen between these two men who never met – Jesus and the centurion? That’s a harder question to answer, but it seems to have something to do with “worth.” That word appears twice in the passage. The first group told Jesus that the centurion was “worthy” of having Jesus help him, saying that he loved the Jewish community and had generously built a synagogue for them. Then a second group comes to Jesus and tells him that the centurion feels “unworthy” of troubling Jesus to have him come to his house.
So what is true worth? Is it something we can quantify or measure? Not easily. Worth is a subjective category. For example, something is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When I was a kid growing up, everyone collected stamps. Now almost no one does, so most stamp collections aren’t worth very much any more. Sometimes at our jobs, we worry about being seen as worthy. The comic strip “Dilbert” exposes how easy it can be to appear worthy at work without actually doing any work. For example, Dilbert advises that “If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.” He also says, “When you don’t know what to do, just walk fast and look worried.”
Worth is generally something ascribed to us by others. Worthy persons don’t walk around telling others that he or she is worthy; rather it is something others say about them. The elders came to Jesus and said, “This centurion is worthy of your help.” Now, can people be wrong about whom they find worthy? Yes, of course. Maybe in this case some of the elders were impressed because the centurion was a powerful commander of a squadron of 100 Roman soldiers, or felt he was worthy because he had enough wealth to finance the building of a synagogue. Expensive wristwatches, expensive cars, gold-plated credit cards may falsely convince us of someone’s worth. But in the end, most of us can usually see through the superficial standards of wealth and prestige and tell when someone is truly worthy. It appears this centurion was worthy: He was generous and cared for others – and he was using his influence on behalf of a lowly servant, someone without resources or prestige by the world’s standards.
But look at this question from the opposite perspective: Who is unworthy? The idealist may say that ultimately no one is unworthy. No one is unredeemable or without some potential value. But in actuality we daily treat many people as being unworthy. Every day we walk past people on the streets who are in need but whom we deem unworthy of receiving care from us. We withhold compassion or justice from others. We comment that so-and-so should be locked up and they should throw away the key. We allow solitary confinement, life without parole, and capital punishment to literally torture people and deem them unworthy of life. We remotely determine someone overseas is a threat to us and send unmanned drones to kill that person sight unseen. Israel now makes a drone called the Harpy that is programmed to recognize and automatically dive-bomb any radar signal that is not in its database of “friendlies.” No human finger is on the trigger; it simply acts as it’s been told. But what if the radar installation was put on top of a children’s hospital?1 What if the programmed designation of worth was wrong?
It is a slippery slope to begin naming who is unworthy in the world, for are we confident we can each escape the label we too easily assign to others? Paul’s words echo in our ears, when he wrote “Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God’s love was proven for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:7-8) While we were still unworthy, Christ died for us. Or turn it back around the other way: Christ deemed us worthy to die for, worthy for him to reach out to us and bring us to a place we couldn’t reach on our own, to see more in us than we or anyone else could see in us. He saw, and still sees, our true worth.
Jesus never met the centurion. Maybe that truly was because the centurion, being a Gentile, knew that Jesus shouldn’t come into his home for according to Jewish law that would make Jesus ritually unclean; and so he sent his friends to tell Jesus that he was unworthy to have this Lord and Rabbi risk that impurity on his behalf. More likely they didn’t meet because the centurion already had a lot of faith – more faith than Naaman had, when he got angry because the prophet Elisha refused to meet him and personally heal him of his leprosy, and instead sent him to wash in the river Jordan seven times sight unseen. The centurion knew that Jesus’ love and power and mercy wasn’t limited to those who personally encounter him. He knew deep down that Jesus need only say the word and the servant, whom both of them loved, would be well.
So what does all this mean for us today? It’s a reminder that the world is full of the best people we’ll never meet. The world is full of worthy people we’ll never meet. Like the air through which sound waves travel, bringing beautiful music to our ears, the community around us is the medium through which deeds of justice and compassion travel. The community is also how worth is ascribed to us and to others – true worth. And over it all, Christ ascribes a higher, richer level of worth to everyone, having loved us enough to die for us, and having been raised to life so he might continue to be amongst us even now.
So go forth by faith. As Bishop Gene Robinson is fond of quoting: “The power behind you is greater than the task before you.”2 Live and act with compassion for the sake of all the best people you’ll never meet. And remember that true worth comes from the power of Christ that is behind, before, beneath and all around you now and always. Thanks be to God.