April 19, 2021 John 4: 43-46
39 Many Samaritans from that
city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I
have ever done.’ 40So when the Samaritans
came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two
days. 41And many more believed because of his word. 42They
said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe,
for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of
the world.’
43 When the two days were over, he went from that
place to Galilee 44(for Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor
in the prophet’s own country). 45When he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed
him, since they had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the festival; for
they too had gone to the festival.
46 Then he came again to Cana in Galilee where he had
changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill
in Capernaum. 47When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he
went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of
death. 48Then Jesus said to him, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’
So
after two days with the Samaritans, Jesus goes north. The northern edge of Samaria borders on the
Jezreel Valley, in which Nazareth is situated.
The Galileans welcome him because they’d seen Jesus at the festival in
Jerusalem. This was the Passover
festival, back in John 2. What they had
witnessed was Jesus turning out the money changers and the sacrifice sellers
from the Temple. So there was something
powerful in Jesus that they were seeing.
But notice there is this odd infix in the paragraph.
He went
to Galilee, they welcomed him, but in verse 44, parenthetically (which means ‘in
parentheses’), Jesus had prophesied that a prophet had no honor in their own
country. In the other gospels, there are
records of Jesus returning to Nazareth, where this exact reaction took
place. The people of Nazareth did not
see Jesus as the Messiah or as a Rabbi, but as the son of Joseph, the carpenter. That was a blue-collar job. For Jesus to come around as a Teacher is, for
them, the work of a poser. Jesus is ‘above
his station’ because while there is evidence that the Jews were a highly
literate people, the Teacher ‘class’, the Rabbis, the Pharisees and so on, they
were all about education. The support of
the people was given them so they could study and become properly learned in
the ways of the Hebrew Bible. Jesus
never had that kind of training.
I
remember one preacher talking about how the people who ‘changed Jesus’ diapers’
would have a different point of view, they would know the little kid who was now
the man before them. I believe what John
is doing here is acknowledging the other gospels, that go more fully into this
encounter Jesus has at Nazareth. What
happened there is not his focus, is not part of his narrative, but it is a part
of Jesus’ story, so he does acknowledge it.
John also puts Jesus in Cana as his first fixed spot in Galilee. This town is just north of Nazareth and, at
the Wedding of Cana, two chapters back, it seems there was a regional invitation
that included him so it would seem likely that Jesus came through Nazareth to
get there (thus the reference to prophets and their home towns).
Nazareth
was in the Jezreel Valley, Galilee was centered more on the Sea of Galilee, and
it was to this region that Jesus went.
It was there that the locals, who’d seen him in Jerusalem, were now
gathering to know more. I find myself
pondering their reaction. What Jesus did
was essentially a political statement, defying the norms and the practices of
the Jewish leadership. It is not the ‘typical’
gospel reaction, where the miracles and the preaching of Jesus open the way for
his presence.
It is
also interesting to note that the people here who welcomed him were not acknowledging
the ‘baptismal competition’ that was being styled as happening between Jesus
and John the Baptist. That was the reason
Jesus pulled back to Sychar in the first place, to remove himself from that
kind of attitude among the people on the Jordan River.
It
strikes me that there is an application of the ‘Come and See’ focus that we have
already come across in John. The
Galileans saw Jesus in Jerusalem, they saw what he did and recognized him for
it. Now they are coming to see for
themselves. As mentioned above, Jesus
arrives in Cana, where he did his water into wine miracle. From there, we transition into the next part
of the narrative, with the royal official from Capernaum.
More
tomorrow.
Peace, Pastor Peter
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