John 4: 46-54 The Second Miracle

We are now in the season of Lent. A time to reflect upon our faith lives, both individually and corporately, and to be a people of prayer and repentance. As I was reflecting about what messages to bring this Lenten season and what topic to bring before us, I turned to Pastor Mark Batterson’s book The Grave Robber. We are aware during this season of Lent what we are headed towards - ultimately Jesus’s last meal with his disciples before he is handed over to be executed. We end our season of Lent together, with the celebration of Easter - a proclamation that the grave does not have victory over our lives.

However, I am well aware that for so many of us, during this season of Lent and our daily lives, that it seems like the grave does win. Seems like we simply go through the daily motions each day, without really expecting God to show up or make God’s self known to us. We relegate the miracles of God to big days - like Easter and Christmas - instead of searching for God in our every day lives, and seeking to have God revealed to us. We live most of our lives as if God’s glory isn’t present to us.

Thus, for the next five weeks, I want to invite us to open our eyes and hearts to the movement of God around us. While this sermon series will focus on some of the miracles found in the Gospel of John and what that reveals to us about the very character of God, I want to offer a word of caution as we begin. As believers, it is not our job to seek out miracles. We do not demand miracles from God in order to prove that God exists. Instead, we follow Jesus, which is what the season of Lent is all about - following wherever Jesus may lead, even to the cross. But while we are following Jesus we have ourselves postured in expectation - that God will show up and move in a mighty way - even if it seems unexpected. 

Today we find ourselves on a journey with a royal official whose son was sick - so sick in fact that he no longer knew what to do. He and his wife had tried the standard things - the doctors, the advice from friends. But his son was not getting better. The Official had heard of Jesus, and that he was in the area - relatively speaking at least. The Official left his sick son and travel over 20 miles to reach the town where it was rumored Jesus was staying. He begged Jesus to heal his son, whom he feared was close to death. He would give anything for his son, but at this moment all he had left to give were his tears and his pleas.

Jesus didn’t respond the way he expected though. Instead of traveling with him the 20 miles back to Capernaum he started talking about people in general - saying that unless you people see signs and wonders you won’t believe. The official didn’t care about what other people needed, he needed Jesus to come and heal his son. Right now. At this moment. Then he simply said “go, your son will live.”

How would you feel if you were the royal official on that long journey back home? Would you believe what Jesus just told you - that your son would live? Or would your head hang low and heart be heavy, feeling that surely when you returned home your son would be dead? Would you be angry at yourself for going to Jesus, instead of being there for your son or not trying something else? 

Yet, he didn’t even make it the whole way home before the servants came to meet him along the way - proclaiming that the boy was alive and well! Some translations say that the boy was healed at one o’clock in the afternoon. Others’s say that he was healed in the seventh hour. Whatever the time may be, the father realized that it was the exact moment when Jesus told him to go home, for his son had been made well. This was the second miracle of Jesus as recorded in the book of John. 

Pastor Mark Batterson writes a striking truth about miracles when he said “everyone wants a miracle, but no one wants to be in a situation that necessitates one.” For miracles need a problem to fix, an illness to heal, and dilemma to solve. Jesus’s first miracle took place not far from this particular healing, in Cana, where he turned water into wine for a wedding feast - a dilemma to be solved. But this, this seemed so much more dire, for a young boy’s life hung in the balance. 

The miracles of God don’t look the same. I think part of the reason we have a hard time wrestling with miracles in our minds is we try to look at them through the lens of our human nature. We want to make God subject to the very laws of nature that God created. We reason that we can’t be in more than one place at a given time, so God can’t either. Or we say, that we believe that if you put a and b together you will always get c - looking for a pattern or reason behind the miracle of God. But really, Christ intervened in the lives of those whom he was around at a given time. In this case, a desperate man, who went out of his way to find Christ, believing that maybe, just maybe he could help when no one else could. 

But why doesn’t God give everyone a miracle? I have two responses to this question. The first is in response to the deeper question of “why”. Why was this man’s son healed of illness when so many of our loved ones die of other illnesses? Why couldn’t God just heal everyone? We may not like it brothers and sisters, but death is a result of the fall. Death is a result of sin. Notice that I am not saying that people are sick because they have sinned, rather that because sin entered into the world their is disease and death. We may not be able to control the circumstances we are in, and we certainly cannot demand a miracle from God, but we can choose if we are going to seek out God wherever we may find ourselves. 

Secondly, though, there truly are miracles every day. Times when we find ourselves in just the right place at just the right time. I have a dear friend named Zhenya. By all logical reason Zhenya and I should not be friends - she was born in Russia, I in America. Yet, she served as the translator for the mission teams I have served on in Vladimir Russia. Then when I was in seminary in New Jersey, she received a job a mere 30 minutes away. And a few years ago when I received a scholarship to go to a conference in the mid-west, I stayed with her and her husband. A friendship across continents that should have never been if not for God arranging circumstances. I think all too often we miss the miracles right in front of us, because we expect God to act in a certain way instead of simply looking for the movement of God among us. There is a difference between expecting God to act and expecting God to act in a very certain way of our choosing. 

When the royal official came seeking Jesus he didn’t know what to expect, only that his son was in need. It was the seventh hour, almost time to give up, yet he kept going. Where are the places in your life where you have just about given up? Where are the places in your life that you need to keep praying? Where are the places in your life where you may be overlooking the miracles you have already been given? Will you join me this Lenten season praying big, Kingdom-sized prayer for those around us - not demanding that God work a certain way, but instead praying that God opens up our eyes to perceive God moving amongst us, already, here and now. Amen.