Chapter Four

1-42. Christ among the Samaritans. – 43-54. Christ’s return to Galilee.

John 4:1. When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, John 4:2. (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), John 4:3. He left Judea and went again into Galilee. The Pharisees received word of the remarkable success which the new Baptist’s activity was having in Judea. These Pharisees could have drawn the attention of the Jewish authorities to Christ, and therefore Christ, knowing that His hour of suffering had not yet come, did not find it necessary to engage prematurely in disputes with the Pharisees and ceased His activity in Judea. He could do this without harm to the preparation of people for receiving the Kingdom of Heaven, since John the Baptist continued his preaching about the nearness of this Kingdom and as before performed the baptism of repentance. The evangelist notes that Christ Himself did not personally baptize, leaving this task to His disciples. This is explained by the fact that “the preparatory baptism for the Kingdom could not be performed by the Person Who had established this Kingdom” (Edersheim, p. 492). Then the evangelist notes that Christ’s withdrawal to Galilee, about which he is about to speak, was a second withdrawal: the first withdrawal or return took place after Christ received baptism from John at the Jordan (John 1:43).

John 4:4. But He had to pass through Samaria. For his readers, who did not have a sufficiently clear understanding of the geography of Palestine, the evangelist notes that Christ, on His journey to Galilee, had to pass through Samaria. This route was the quickest way to reach Galilee (when relations between Jews and Samaritans became strained, the Jews would go to Galilee by roundabout routes: either along the western shore of the Jordan, or even along the eastern shore of this river).

John 4:5. So He comes to a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. (Concerning Samaria, the Samaritans, and the attitude of the Jews toward the Samaritans, see the commentaries on Matt 10:5; Luke 9:52; 2 Sam 17:29). The city of Sychar was apparently not a particularly important city, otherwise the evangelist would not have given it a closer definition. Most likely, there is meant here a small place called Askar, which still exists on the southeastern slope of Mount Gebal. It indeed is located not far from that parcel of ground which Jacob purchased from the sons of Hamor (Gen 33:19) and which, according to Jewish tradition, he added to the inherited parcel of Joseph (cf. Gen 48:22).

John 4:6. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. Not having reached the city itself, Christ, exhausted from traveling in the intense heat (it was already midday, a hot time, when in the East people ordinarily stay indoors), stopped to rest by the well. The evangelist calls this well the “well of Jacob” according to the tradition of the Samaritans (cf. verse 12), although in the Old Testament there is no mention of such a well. From the Samaritan woman’s words it is clear that this well was fed by sources flowing from beneath the earth. However, the water in the well stood very low, so that without a special bucket it was impossible to drink from it. Jesus apparently was more exhausted from traveling than His disciples, who went to Sychar to buy food. The time was “about the sixth hour,” that is, by Hebrew reckoning about twelve o’clock—the hottest part of the day. The exhausted Christ sat by the well “in such a way” (οὕτως; this word remained untranslated in the Russian Gospel), that is, simply, probably directly on the ground. Near Him could have been the beloved disciple John.

John 4:7. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink. John 4:8. For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. At this time a Samaritan woman came to the well, perhaps from the nearby city of Sychar. Christ addresses her with a request to give Him water to quench His thirst.

John 4:9. The Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask drink of me, a Samaritan woman? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. The Samaritan woman probably recognized in Christ a Jew both by the features of his face and by his dress, and finally by his pronunciation. Travelers report that Samaritans have a type unlike the Jewish type. The dress of Samaritans had fringes of blue color, while the Jews had white. Finally, in the pronunciation of certain vowels and consonants the Samaritans differed from the Jews. For example, they could not pronounce the sound “sh” (Edersheim, p. 516). “For Jews...” This, of course, is a remark of the evangelist himself.

John 4:10. Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water. Christ answers the Samaritan woman that His request to her does not really correspond to His position. But He says this not in the sense that He is a Jew, but in the sense that He is in relation to all people the One Who gives, not the One Who receives from them. He distributes an incomparably higher gift than anything people could give Him—namely, the true gift of God. This gift of God, which Christ can give to people at their request, He describes figuratively as “living water,” apparently in order to compare it with the gift (water) which He asked the Samaritan woman for. By this gift Christ undoubtedly meant the grace of the Holy Spirit, which He was to bestow on believers in Him (cf. John 7:37-39) and which believers were in some measure to expect to receive even before Christ’s death and resurrection (Luke 11:13).

John 4:11. The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water? Since Jacob’s well was also considered by the Samaritans to be a gift of God, given to the patriarch, and since it also had living water in it (cf. verse 6), the Samaritan woman supposed that Christ wanted to spare her the trouble of drawing water from the deep well herself. But at once she objected to herself that this stranger-Jew could not do this, since he had no necessary tool for this purpose.

John 4:12. “Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, and also his sons and his flocks? The Samaritan woman wondered where this Jew could obtain living water here. The patriarch Jacob, whom the Samaritans considered their ancestor, was great in the sight of God, and yet he, by his own efforts, dug this deep well—a well so rich in water that it was sufficient for all the patriarch’s family, which was very large, and for all his livestock. This Jew, the Samaritan woman thought to herself, had no helpers or tools for digging a new well. Perhaps he would bring forth water from the rock with his staff, like Moses? But then who is he? Such thoughts the Samaritan woman harbored.

John 4:13. Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, John 4:14. But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. Christ diverts the Samaritan woman’s thought from ordinary water to spiritual water. Why speak at length of this ordinary water, which cannot permanently satisfy a man? Even if it is spring water flowing from the ground, still, having drunk such water, you will want to drink again. No, there is water of another kind, which will forever quench man’s thirst. This water can be given only by Christ, and not now (“shall give”—future tense). But more than that, this new water will not only forever quench man’s thirst; it will itself become in man a source, whose water will flow to eternal life. Christ, evidently, speaks here of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which will be granted to believers in Christ by reason of His redemptive merits. This grace will not remain dead capital in the believer’s heart, but will increase more and more, and finally will flow, like a river abundant with water, into the broad sea of eternal life. Here on earth, this stream of grace must flow only a short time; it, so to speak, strives toward wider expanses of the Heavenly Kingdom.

John 4:15. The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw. The Samaritan woman is struck by Christ’s words. With respect, she calls Him master. Nevertheless, she still cannot understand that Christ is speaking to her of God’s grace. An excuse for her in this misunderstanding could be that the Samaritans accepted only the books of Moses, and yet only the prophets described the grace of the Holy Spirit under the image of “water” (Isa 44:3).

John 4:16. Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here. Since the Samaritan woman proves to be incapable of understanding Christ’s words, He commands her to summon her husband here to converse with Him, who, it is presumed, will explain to her afterward what she herself is unable to understand.

John 4:17. The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have said well, ‘I have no husband,’ John 4:18. “For you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly. To the Samaritan woman’s answer that she has no husband, Christ says that she told the truth. Indeed, she now does not live in a lawful marriage with one man. Christ adds that in general she is a woman who is not high in moral character: she has already had five husbands. Whether the Samaritan woman was deprived of these husbands in a natural way—that is, were they one after another taken from her by death—or whether divorce took place here, Christ does not say.

John 4:19. The woman said to Him, “Sir, I see that You are a prophet. John 4:20. “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship. The Samaritan woman is astonished that the unknown passerby knows all the circumstances of her life. At the same time, it apparently became shameful for her before such a man as whom she calls him even a prophet, as if recalling that prophet whose coming had been foretold by Moses (Deut 18:18). Therefore she wants to quickly divert the conversation from her own person, from her disapproved conduct, and addresses Christ with a question of general religious significance. Perhaps she indeed had genuine patriotic feelings. In any case, she wishes to know from the prophet, who certainly she thinks will tell her all the truth, where the place of worship pleasing to God is located. The “fathers” of the Samaritans—that is, as the Samaritan woman thinks, the patriarchs: Noah, whose ark, according to Samaritan beliefs, landed on Mount Gerizim; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who also offered sacrifices on this mountain—all worshiped on this very mountain. Relatively recently, the Samaritan temple still stood here, which was destroyed somewhat before the Christian era by the Jewish leader John Hyrcanus. Meanwhile, the Jews asserted that the worship of God was possible only in Jerusalem.

John 4:21. Jesus said to her, “Believe Me, a time is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. In response to the Samaritan woman, Christ says that the Samaritans will soon “worship the Father” (Christ calls God “Father” here in order to suggest to the Samaritan woman the thought of that closeness which should exist between people and God) not on their own Gerizim and not in the Jewish Jerusalem. This clearly contains a prophecy of the conversion of the Samaritans, at least a significant part of them, to faith in Christ. This prophecy was fulfilled soon after Christ’s ascension (Acts 8:14).

John 4:22. “You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is from the Jews. But for now Christ acknowledges the Jews’ right to be considered true worshipers of God. However, He does not say that the Samaritans do not know the true God: they simply do not understand, as they should, the true nature of religion, and therefore their worship of God cannot fully be compared with Jewish worship. Christ explains the advantage of Jewish worship by pointing out that “salvation is from the Jews,” that is, salvation through the Messiah is to be the lot of all the nations of the earth, but, as the prophets said, it will first appear in the Israeli people (Isa 2:1-5). There, toward Zion, the nations of the earth should still direct their gaze; the Israeli people still continues to be the sole bearer of God’s promises, and the worship performed in Jerusalem, by its rites, foreshadows the great sacrifice which the Messiah will soon offer for the salvation of all people (cf. Rom 9:4-5).

John 4:23. “But a time is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such to worship Him. However, soon a time will come when Judaism will lose its right to be considered the only true religion, to which the gaze of all humanity should be directed. This time can be said to have already come, at least the turning toward it is being noticed. Christ characterizes this coming era as a time when “true,” that is, truly worthy of this name, worshipers or reverent believers will worship the Father (cf. verse 21) “in spirit and in truth.” The word “spirit” here denotes the opposite of flesh and everything that has a fleshly, restricting the freedom of the spirit character. Among the Jews and Samaritans there was a belief that the success of prayer depended on external conditions, mainly on the place where worship was performed. Soon there will no longer be such restriction of man to a certain place; people everywhere, in all places on earth, will offer worship to God. But beyond this, soon there will be another change: service to God will be performed “in truth,” that is, all falsity, which existed in Jewish and any other worship, will cease—when hypocrites participated in worship and were considered true worshipers of God (Matt 15:7 and following). Worship will be performed only from a sincere heart, in a pure disposition of spirit. Thus, here Christ speaks not a word against worship in general, does not deny the necessity for man, as a being living in flesh, to express his feelings before God in certain external ways (cf. Matt 6:6). He speaks only against those narrow views of worship which existed then among all peoples, not excepting the Jews. That He acknowledges the necessity for external worship is evident not only from His own example (He, for instance, before turning to the Father “lifted up His eyes to heaven”—John 11:41; knelt down in prayer in Gethsemane—Luke 22:41), but also from the fact that when He speaks here of future worship of the Father, He uses a verb that denotes precisely the bowing down of man to the earth—that is, the external expression of a prayer feeling (προσκυνήσουσιν).

John 4:24. “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. God is pleased with those who bow before Him “in spirit,” who rise above attachment to one certain place, pleased because He Himself “is spirit,” a Being standing beyond all bounds of time and therefore close to every soul seeking Him (Acts 17:24-29).

John 4:25. The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming (He is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us. The Samaritan woman does not dare to make any objections to Christ regarding His teaching about the advantages of the Jewish people and about new worship of God: she sees in Him a prophet. But at the same time she is afraid to acknowledge what the unknown prophet is telling her. She herself is not able to understand these most difficult questions of religion, although she did appeal to Christ earlier for the decision of one of them. Only the Messiah, she says, will explain everything to us. (The expression “that is, Christ” undoubtedly belongs not to the Samaritan woman, but to the evangelist, who added it for his Greek readers.) How the Samaritans at that time imagined the Messiah—one cannot say anything certain about this. However, one can fairly suppose that the Samaritans could not avoid assimilating certain parts of Jewish ideas about the Messiah. They called Him “Taheb,” that is, the Restorer, and said that He would restore the tent of witness with all its vessels and explain the hidden meaning of the law of Moses. The Taheb would appear, however, not only as a Teacher, but also as a King, to Whom Israel and all the peoples of the earth would submit.

John 4:26. Jesus said to her, “I Who speak to you am He. Since the Samaritan woman, evidently, belonged to those who awaited the Messiah with all their soul and His salvation, Christ openly reveals to her that He is the Messiah she was awaiting. Just so did He reveal Himself to John’s disciples at their very first conversation with Him, since they were prepared for faith in Him (John 1:41). The readiness, however, of the Samaritan woman to believe in Christ as the Messiah was expressed already by the fact that she recognized Him as a prophet (verse 19).

John 4:27. At this moment His disciples came, and they marveled that He was speaking with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or “Why are You speaking with her? For a man, and especially a rabbi, to converse with a woman on the road was considered improper among the Jews. But the disciples did not dare to voice their bewilderment to their Teacher.

John 4:28. Then the woman left her water jar and went into the city, and said to the people, John 4:29. “Come, see a Man Who told me all things that I ever did; could this be the Christ? John 4:30. They went out of the city and came to Him. The Samaritan woman, meanwhile, troubled perhaps by the arrival of the prophet’s disciples, who might ask their Teacher who this woman was conversing with Him, hurried to leave and hastened to inform her fellow citizens of the appearance of this remarkable prophet, so that they might have time to speak with Him before He departed on His journey. She herself does not dare to directly declare in the city that she had spoken with the Messiah; she leaves the decision of the question about the prophet to those more knowledgeable. However, she does not hesitate to remind her fellow citizens of her disreputable life, and she speaks so convincingly that a crowd of people follows her.

John 4:31. Meanwhile His disciples were asking Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat. John 4:32. But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know. John 4:33. So the disciples said to one another, “No one brought Him anything to eat, did he? John 4:34. Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him Who sent Me and to complete His work. To the disciples’ offer to refresh Himself with food brought by them from the city, Christ says that He has other food, and this food consists in His being able to do the will of His Father and to complete or, more precisely, to bring to completion the work of the Father (τελειοῦν). Christ does not mean by this that He does not need ordinary food; He only gives them to understand that under certain circumstances the fulfillment of divine will is for Him also a means of strengthening His bodily strength, and sometimes substitutes for ordinary food. It should be noted that Christ views His mission as the completion of that great work (ἔργον) which the Father in Heaven has long been accomplishing in humanity. It was the Father Himself Who prepared the Samaritan woman and her fellow tribesmen for faith in Christ; it was He Who awakened in the souls of these semi-pagans the desire to know the truth, and the task of Christ was only to develop those seeds which God had sown in the hearts of people.

John 4:35. “Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest. Christ wants to instill in the disciples also greater humility in understanding their purpose. He does this in figurative form. Since the conversation was about food and, in particular, about bread, which of course the disciples had brought from the city, Christ naturally turns his thought to the fields on which the bread grew. The well by which Christ sat was on some elevation, from which the fields belonging to the inhabitants of Sychar could be seen. “You say,” thus one can convey Christ’s figurative utterance, “that there are still four full months until harvest, and this is completely correct. But there is another harvest, more important for us—this is the conversion of souls, and here, in Samaria, this harvest must begin right now, because the fields have already turned white—the spiritual bread has already matured.” From the visible Christ turns the eyes of His disciples to the invisible. However, it can be supposed that already then the fellow citizens of the Samaritan woman, guided by her, began to come to the well (cf. verse 30), and it was upon them that Christ could be pointing to His disciples while saying: “lift up your eyes.” It should be noted that on the basis of this verse one can approximately determine the time of Christ’s public activity within the bounds of Judea. Christ says that four months remain until harvest, and harvest in Palestine usually began on the sixteenth of Nisan and continued until the Feast of Pentecost, that is, until the month of Sivan (according to our calendar, from April 1 to May 20). Wheat harvest, in particular, began two weeks later, that is, April 15. If the fields of the Samaritans were sown with wheat, which is very probable, then it is clear that Christ was in Samaria in early January or even at the end of December; before this, more than eight months had passed since Passover. The entire period of more than eight months Christ spent in Judea.

John 4:36. “Already the reaper is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life; so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. Whereas Christ’s disciples could at best compare the religious state of the Samaritans only with green fields still having much time before harvest, Christ says to them that already now (the particle ἤδη, left untranslated in the Russian text and incorrectly attached in the Slavic translation to the end of verse 35, should stand at the beginning of verse 36; cf. Tischendorf, 8th ed.), not after four months or centuries, the reaper is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, and this leads to the fact that the sower and the reaper rejoice together. “Eternal life” here appears as the region into which the spiritual harvest is gathered—all these souls being saved by Christ. Just as harvested grain goes into the granary (cf. Matt 3:12). Christ’s disciples should understand that the inhabitants of Sychar are already fully ripened wheat which must now be reaped. This harvest itself is the “reward” for the one who reaped, because he receives it not only according to his own labors, but also as the result of the labors of the one who sowed this wheat. In this spiritual harvest, however, there is something unlike what happens in ordinary harvest. Not only the spiritual reaper rejoices, but also the spiritual sower.

John 4:37. “For in this the saying is true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ John 4:38. “I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labor. Concerning the spiritual harvest, the saying “one sows, the other reaps” finds its perfect fulfillment. If in ordinary harvest the collector of grain is, as a rule, the one who sowed it, then in spiritual harvest it is always otherwise. God sows (cf. verse 34), and Christ and after Him the apostles will gather this divine spiritual sowing, when it grows and ripens. Indeed, neither Christ nor the apostles had been occupied hitherto with the conversion of the inhabitants of Sychar, and yet the Sycharites were already prepared to receive the Gospel teaching. God Himself prepared them for this conversion, perhaps through the books of Moses, which the Samaritans accepted from the Jews, perhaps and in other ways. Therefore the apostles should not be proud of their successes, as if the result of only their own labors: these successes are first of all the result of God’s activity in the world, and their work is chiefly the work of reapers. On the other hand, Christ by this also encourages the apostles regarding the results of their activity: let them boldly go into the world—there a harvest already prepared by God Himself awaits them. “I sent you...” Christ undoubtedly had already spoken to His disciples earlier about why He was calling them, and they could perform baptism only as sent for this by Christ (John 4:2). “Others have labored...” Here Christ could have in mind the Jewish priests, who taught the Samaritans the law of Moses (2 Sam 17:28 and following), as well as John the Baptist, whose activity could hardly have passed unnoticed by the Samaritans.

John 4:39. And many Samaritans from that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all things that I have done. John 4:40. So when the Samaritans came to Him, they asked Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. John 4:41. And many more believed because of His own word. John 4:42. And they said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe; for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One is truly the Savior of the world, Christ. Besides those Samaritans who came to Christ and believed in Him because of the woman’s word, many believed in Him during the two days which Christ spent in Sychar at the request of the city’s inhabitants. Remarkable is the fact that the Samaritans believed only in Christ’s teaching, not asking Him for miraculous signs to assure them of the truth of His divine mission, and thereby showed themselves better than the Jews, who if they believed Christ, did so only because they saw the miraculous signs performed by Christ (John 2:23). And those who first became followers of Christ on the basis of the woman’s testimony, from their own conversation with Christ brought away firm assurance that He is indeed the Savior of the world. This was, of course, brought about by the fact that Christ’s teaching about His Kingdom fully coincided with those hopes which the Samaritans had placed on their Taheb, or Redeemer of Jews and Gentiles (cf. verses 25-26). To the question of why Christ remained in Samaria for only two days, Loisy answers: “Jesus does not remain in the place where He was recognized as the Savior of the world, because it was not within the framework of Providence that the glory of the incarnate Word be recognized by everyone before His death” (p. 368).

John 4:43. Now after two days He departed from there and went into Galilee, John 4:44. for Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country. The reason why Christ departs to Galilee at this time, the evangelist sees in the fact that “a prophet has no honor in his own country,” concerning which, according to the evangelist’s note, Christ Himself once testified. What does the evangelist understand here by Christ’s “country”? He could not have meant Galilee because Christ is precisely on His way to Galilee at this time. Neither could he mean the truly inhospitable city of Nazareth (Luke 4:24) in this way because throughout the Gospel Nazareth is part of Galilee, and therefore the evangelist could not contrast Nazareth, which Christ did not visit, with Galilee, to which He went. It would be as impossible to say, for example, about a Russian person: “I went to Russia because I do not want to go to Moscow.” Therefore the only correct interpretation is that by Christ’s “country” the evangelist means Christ’s true homeland as a descendant of David in the flesh—that is, the city of the Judean tribe Bethlehem and Judea in general, in contrast to Samaria and Galilee. Here, in Judea, Christ indeed did not receive honor, as was evident from the attitude toward Him by the Pharisees (John 4:1-3). This does not contradict the fact that, according to the Synoptics, His country is Nazareth (Luke 4:23) and Galilee in general (Matt 26:69). The Synoptics speak only of the popular idea that had formed about Christ’s origin; John speaks of the actual fact.

John 4:45. So when He came into Galilee, the Galileans received Him, having seen all the things which He did in Jerusalem at the feast; for they also went to the feast. The Galileans received Christ much better than the inhabitants of Judea. The evangelist explains this by the influence on them of everything which Christ had accomplished in Jerusalem. They, consequently, understood the meaning of Christ’s appearance in the Jerusalem temple and, seeing His miracles performed at Passover, began to incline toward recognizing His Messianic dignity.

John 4:46. So Jesus came again to Cana of Galilee where He had made the water wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son was sick. John 4:47. When he heard that Jesus had come out of Judea into Galilee, he went to Him and asked Him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Not stopping at Nazareth, Christ goes to Cana of Galilee, probably because the inhabitants of this city, where Christ performed His first sign, were more inclined to receive Christ with due honor. After some time, a royal official of Herod Antipas came to Cana from Capernaum—that is, probably some secular person serving at the court. This man’s son was sick, and therefore he came to ask Christ to come to him in Capernaum and heal the patient. It does not appear that the royal official had faith in Christ as the Messiah; the rebuke that Christ addresses to him (verse 48) shows that he did not yet have such faith. But in any case, he saw in Christ a miracle-worker sent from God, a great rabbi, such as Nicodemus, for instance, pictured Christ to himself (John 3:2).

John 4:48. Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe. Christ attributes to the royal official belonging to those people who, for their assurance of the truth of Christ’s divine mission, need signs and wonders. But with this rebuke He does not deprive the royal official of the hope that his request will be granted (cf. John 2:4).

John 4:49. The official said to Him, “Sir, come down before my child dies. The royal official does not contradict Christ, but at the same time does not abandon what he has begun. He asks Christ to come to Capernaum quickly, in order to find his son still alive. Despairing of the power of Christ to raise the dead, he is nevertheless confident that the prayer of Christ, as a man of God, can heal the patient. With his last words the royal official expresses the thought that Christ will go to Capernaum anyway, which had become for some time the place of His constant residence and that of His family (John 2:12). So let Him hurry.

John 4:50. Jesus said to him, “Go, your son lives.” And the man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started off. The royal official undoubtedly had faith in Christ, though imperfect, and Christ, to strengthen this faith, tells him to go home calmly, since his son has already survived the crisis and at present is on the way to recovery (21). Remarkable is the fact that the royal official believed this word of Christ without yet seeing its fulfillment. Clearly, his faith suddenly became a strong conviction in the invisible as if in the visible, in the desired and expected as if in the present (Heb 11:1). Christ thus healed the son of bodily illness, and the father of spiritual illness, of weakness of faith.

John 4:51. And as he was going down, his servants met him, saying that his son was living. John 4:52. So he inquired of them the hour when he began to get better. They said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. John 4:53. So the father knew that it was at that hour in which Jesus said to him, “Your son lives”; and he believed, he and his whole household. The royal official apparently set out on his journey only toward evening, and then spent the entire night traveling (between Cana and Capernaum there was reckoned to be about 25 miles). In the morning his servants met him on the road, hurrying to report to their master that his son had fortunately survived the crisis of his illness. It turned out that this crisis occurred precisely at the seventh hour, or at one o’clock in the afternoon, when Christ said to the royal official that his son had recovered. “And he believed...” Although the royal official had already believed the word of Christ in faith (verse 50), now he believed in Christ as the true Messiah, entered into the ranks of His followers, along with his whole household.

John 4:54. This again was the second sign that Jesus performed when He had come from Judea into Galilee. This sign was the second one after the miracle of turning water into wine, which was performed nine months earlier. And after this sign John does not report any other which Christ would have performed at this time in Galilee. Clearly, Christ did not yet want to appear in Galilee as a teacher and preacher; He had not yet called His disciples to constant following of Him. Only from verse 2 of the sixth chapter does John begin to depict the sequential activity of Christ in Galilee. It can be supposed that Christ initially wanted to pass through His “country” once more—Judea—so that He might first announce the word of salvation to it. The miracle described here by John is not the same as the miracle reported by Matthew (Matt 8:5-13) and Luke (Luke 7:1-10). First of all, the time of that and this event is not the same. In the Synoptics there is mention of an event that falls on the time of great Galilean activity of Christ, which began after John the Baptist was taken into custody (Matt 4:12), while here—of an event that occurred when the Baptist was still at large (John 3:24). Then, that miracle was performed in Capernaum, while this one was in Cana. There appears a centurion—a Gentile—in one place, and a royal official—a Jew—in the other; the latter Christ directly attributes to those Galileans who expected miracles from Him (verse 48). The sick person in the Synoptics is a servant, while here it is a son, who moreover was sick with fever, whereas the servant lay in paralysis. Finally, there the centurion appears as a model of zealous faith: according to his conviction, Christ by one word alone can heal the patient; while with the royal official Christ reproaches weakness of faith: according to the royal official’s understanding, Christ needed to come and visit the patient in order to perform healing. * * * On this points the expression ζῇ, that is, lives, recovers, is moving toward complete recovery, while before he was moving toward death.