Homily for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C

Homily for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Our Gospel today starts off from exactly where it left off last Sunday, the 8th Sunday, which is when Jesus was finishing up the Sermon on the Plain, the Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount. And today: "After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum." Now Capernaum, remember, he'd been in before; it was an important part or center of his ministry. And for our interest in today's story, it was also not an insignificant tax station for the Roman authorities, and it was in the territory ruled over by King Herod Antipas, which means that there were a couple of different sorts of centurion there. It's worth knowing, just for anthropological fun reasons, what sort of people would have been around, because it was a tax station and the Romans tended to want to be in charge of taxes, or tax farming — who they farmed the taxes out to themselves. There would probably be a Roman centurion there, but in fact the garrison, or most of the garrison, had been populated by a levy which King Herod Antipas was allowed by the Romans to make of men from neighbouring regions, which would be formally speaking part of the Roman army, but they would have been locals. They wouldn't have been Italians; they would have been under his jurisdiction. They probably in his case came from the area in the south of Lebanon, the borderlands with Syria, Aramea in general. So that's — we don't know whether the centurion who's about to appear was an Italian, hence rather an important tax figure, or a local. We get some hint of this in St John's telling of the same story, where the centurion is merely referred to as a royal official, which suggests that he was a centurion in the Herodian levy rather than in the Roman army. The same military discipline would have applied, but people would have had different customs. Okay, so a centurion there had a paîs (παῖς) — the translation which we have in the NRSV is "the slave," which is the same term as is translated in Matthew's Gospel where it is doulos (δοῦλος), which is literally a slave or a servant. But here paîs is "a boy," and it could mean a slave boy, but there's something slightly more affectionate about the term paîs than would simply be normal for slave, and we'll have a look at what that might mean later. "A boy whom he valued highly, who was dear to him." And here we're beginning to get some sense of where this story might be going, because there are three Old Testament figures who are hovering over this story as it were. The first, from his appearance here is the prophet Elijah towards the end of his life — when a bad king of Israel, the successor to Ahab, was stricken down with a disease and was told he was going to die — he sent off to get a prophecy from a pagan prophet about getting better. And that prophecy got stopped, and he had to send off instead to Elijah, who was his old enemy. So he sent soldiers to Elijah. The first one turned up with 50 soldiers and said, "Oi, the king wants you to come down and prophesy to him about whether he's going to get better or not." And Elijah was having none of it, and basically had fire cast down from heaven and killed 50. And antoher commanding officer — a second servant — turns up, same thing, the same rather arrogant request: "Oi, come down, king wants you." And a second load of 50. So we've not got a hundred — we've now got a centurion's worth of soldiers killed. So a third officer comes, a little bit more savvy. So he says, "I've been asked to come and bring you to the king so that he can consult you on this matter of his health, and I have these very dear soldiers, who are very dear to me, and I would very much like you to come." In other words, he treats his soldiers with a great deal more affection, and with the result, Elijah comes along. But interestingly, the word for "dear" and the affection is the same as "a slave whom he valued highly." So there's just a little hint here that a message is being sent to Elijah. Anyhow, this paîs — this boy — was ill and was close to death. So when he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him. So he was clearly somebody who was influential enough, and as we'll see later, got on well enough with the local Jewish community to be able to actually ask people to go and do something for him. And here we are reminded of another foreign figure who actually doesn't appear far from that Elijah story, but at the very beginning of the Elisha cycle — and this is Naaman. Naaman was a high-ranking military officer for the king of Aram, the king of Syria. And Naaman had leprosy, and a servant girl of his said that there was a man of God in Israel who could sort this out. So he asked permission of the king of Syria — that is, to go and get cured by the holy man of God. And the king said, "It's fine by me," and wrote a letter to the king of Israel saying, "Oh, I'm sending you my general, he wants to get cured by your holy man." Whereupon the king of Israel of course had kittens, because he thought this was a pretext for war: "I'm going to send you a general, and if you don't cure him, I'm going to beat you up" — because he didn't dare to believe that Elisha would in fact be able to cure him. So he thought that it was a pretext for war. So he wrote a very, very sort of apologetic letter to Elisha saying, "Would you awfully mind curing this fellow? He's going to come and see." Anyhow, Naaman turns up, is all hoity-toity about the kind of cure that Elisha has for him, and thinks, "Ah, I can't — this silly river, the Jordan, it's a non-river really. Why am I going to wash in this, because the holy man tells me to?" And luckily, one of his servants said, "Well, come on, you know you're being a bit arrogant. Even though this river is nothing like as grand as any of the rivers back home, now you've come this far, the holy man told you to wash, and it's not that difficult — why not just do it?" And so he does, and his skin is cleansed, and he goes home happily. So here we have someone sending some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. Now that's interesting, because it means that he's been able to be quite strong with the elders and say, "I've heard about this bloke, he can cure, so please get him to come and cure my boy, my slave." So when they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly. And you can imagine that the earnest appeal might have had something of the same sort as the king of Israel: "Oh dear, he's asking us for a favour — we've got to show up and do good, or else we might not have such a good relationship with him." But anyhow, they appeal to him earnestly, saying, "He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us." In other words, they go out of their way to say what a good egg he is, and how much he is worthy of you, Jesus, to do this favour for us and him. So Jesus goes with them. He accepts the request and he goes with them. But when he was not far from the house — so he's actually getting quite close — the centurion sent friends to say to him. Friends, not servants this time. Friends. And he sends friends to say to him, "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof." So the first — "do not trouble yourself" — this is harking back to Jethro. Jethro was Moses's father-in-law. And Jethro came across Moses — he came and visited his son-in-law when his son-in-law got all busy with governing the people, and found him absolutely exhausted with being basically the only bureaucrat in the land and having to sort out every problem — he was king, judge, purser, everything you can think of, all at once. And so Jethro, his father-in-law, came along and said, "Oi, you're basically — you know — you're going to get into trouble if you carry on doing everything. So don't trouble yourself so much. Divide it up into people who have charge over fifty or a hundred other people." He actually talks about people who have said over a hundred — hecatontarchos is over a hundred, which would be a little Greek for a centurion. "And let them sort this out for you. You can just concentrate on the big cases and let these people deal with the little stuff." So little Jethro touch here — the pagan outsider who has mercy on the man of God. But then he also says, or his friends say on his behalf, unlike what the servants have said, unlike what the Jewish leaders whom he has sent have said: "I am not worthy to have you come under my roof." And this of course is an absolute contrast with exactly what the Jewish leaders have been saying. The Jewish leaders have been saying basically, "You know, miracles come to worthy people and this guy's a worthy person, so please back us up on his worthiness and do this for us." And the centurion is under no illusion about his worthiness. He's clearly a God-fearer — that's to say, someone who was aware of the Jewish law and Jewish customs, a second-class citizen according to Jewish rites, but he would have had his own place in the synagogue, separate but certainly honoured. And in this particular case he'd obviously been the guy who actually built them the synagogue — in other words, he was clearly a friend of the Jewish community. But even so, he has listened to the word of God enough to know what the real faith of Israel is like. And it's not like the faith of the worried king of Israel, who was also a bit upset about whether or not this was too much to ask, and so endeavoured backwards to try and say how worthy he was. Here this is someone who just knows: no, the holy man of God — he can do this. It's nothing to do with my worthiness. It's because I love this boy that I want him to be cured, and you can do it. "I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, therefore I do not presume to come to you." In other words, he's not saying he's not coming out of laziness — it's because you are so much more than I that you can do this at a distance. "But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed." In other words, all you need to do is actually say something. You don't need to be physically present here. I don't even need physically to see you, because I know that you have this power. "For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me, and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my servant, 'Do this,' and the servant does it. In other words, he gives actually a very good account of something which the ancient world rightly admired the Roman army for, which was having exceedingly strong discipline, which was how it was able to be so effective, because it meant that power could be devolved from high down to ever lower offices, to centurions who would be able to trust that what was done was done, and that whatever was to be done would be done, and that whatever their boss told them, they knew that it would be done. In other words, it depended very, very much on exactly this model of obedience. And behold, the centurion, whether of the Italian sort or of the Lebanese sort, understood exactly how this works. He understands that a distant word can produce an astounding effect. When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him. Now here's the very interesting thing: the centurion had said, "Only say the word," but Jesus doesn't in fact say a word to him or to the one to be served. When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him — so now he's speaking to the people who've been with him, not to the centurion — "I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith." In other words, the people behind him have been a bit like the king of Israel in the Naaman story. And they were clearly hoping that something would happen. But here was the person who, rather like Naaman the Syrian, knew that this would just happen. When those who'd been sent returned to the house, they found the boy, the slave, the servant, in good health. In other words, the healing was done at a distance without Jesus saying the word, but at the word of the centurion. That's the remarkable thing about this story, that Jesus doesn't say the word. It's the centurion who says the word, and his boy is healed. In the next story, immediately after this, the healing of the widow of Nain, Jesus does say the word, and the healing occurs — or the resurrection occurs — in the case of the son of the widow of Nain. But here, what is really interesting is that the centurion is a person who has seen that the power of Jesus is like the power of God, independent of place, of proximity, and he's able to make this astonishing plea and on returning home find it answered. So that's how today's Gospel works with those three Old Testament figures. Jethro, the father-in-law, saying, "Don't trouble yourself." Elijah, getting stroppy but finally conceding when there's dearness involved. And Naaman, the warrior, who when he went home, healed. And this, I think, is something which is why I suspect Luke uses the word paîs here: because in the account of Naaman in the Greek it says that when he went, when he got home, his skin was like the skin of a little boy. So that was how he was healed. I'd like to make a brief note here for anybody who's interested. This is one of the very few passages in the New Testament where it's possible to make a gay-friendly reading of something which might not at first sight appear to be the case, and this is because, as people from quite a long time ago have pointed out, the relationship between a centurion and a young male paîs could indeed be that of the young male bed-warmers who were well known to accompany armies in the area — a custom that was known to be practiced by at least some Roman centurions. Whether it was also practiced by the kind of Syrian or Lebanese soldiers who would have formed Herod Antipas's army, and therefore the centurion not being strictly an Italian, we don't know. Though that these things happen, they happen. My brother was a reporter for Reuters in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, and told me about how when he'd been with a group of British soldiers they were astounded when a lorry appeared out of nowhere containing painted boys — young boys, pre-beard, with makeup. And they were very friendly. They'd come there to give themselves to the British soldiers, because they assumed when there are military men they will have needs, and since no men in Afghanistan would have access to women under those circumstances, then what an old-fashioned and rather contemptible term used to refer to as "dolly boys" would be very much on offer. Anyhow, so it's not implausible, and it can be rather beautiful — for again, there have been people to imagine a situation in which a love of this sort was expressed to some degree by the centurion, and the depth of his faith was such that Jesus commented that he had cured, because effectively it was the centurion's faith that cured his boy. Okay, all I want to say is that that reading, wonderful as it is, is as anachronistic in some senses as any of the readings that are used against gay people from early Scriptures. So I'm slightly nervous about using them in those ways. The same boy is referred to as a slave in Matthew, as the royal official's son in John, and as a boy whom he loved here. These three are completely compatible. He could be both the slave and a slave boy who was a bed-warmer, and he could at least at a later stage in his life have become a son, because adoption was by no means a rare practice in those times. But the key element of this story is much more looking at how the Old Testament figures are being, if you like, outdone by what Jesus is about. But also the recognition that the real faith of old Israel is to be found in this Aramean or Lebanese person – rather like Naaman – rather than amongst the people of Israel. It's another of Jesus's teachings as he leads to John the Baptist saying, "Are you the one who is to come, or wait we for another?" In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.