Summary
Through the example of the centurion’s humility in coming to Jesus, we can see how we should approach Jesus. We repeat the centurion’s words at every Mass and acknowledge that we are unworthy of Him.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant shall be healed,”
Mt. 8:8.
1. Though the centurion is a powerful man, he recognizes the authority of Jesus and shows great humility in addressing Him as “Lord.” How can you work on growing in humility in your life?
2. The centurion believed that Jesus did not even need to touch the sick servant in order to heal him. Scripture says that Jesus was amazed at the centurion’s faith. What does the centurion’s faith show you about how we should come to Jesus with our problems?
3. Jesus healed the centurion’s servant just as the centurion asked Him to. What in your life can you bring to Jesus in confidence to ask Him to fix or heal?
4. The Church has chosen the humble words of the centurion to be said at every Mass, because none of us are worthy to have Him enter us in Holy Communion. What parts of your life come to mind as unworthy of Him?
Text: The Good News: “Only say the word and my soul shall be healed”
Hi everybody, my name is Scott Powell and I want to welcome you back to the Pray More Lenten Retreat. Well today I want to talk about a line that we pray in the Mass. Maybe you’ve prayed it a million times, right? And I want to talk about where this comes from in the Gospel. It’s a really great story.
Opening Prayer
But before we do that, let’s open in a prayer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Jesus, thank you for the gift of this day. Thank you for this retreat, and I thank you so much for all the people who are listening and watching online. Please bless all of us as we enter into this Lenten season, and help us follow more closely after you.
We pray for the intercession of your mother today as we pray, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen. In the father and the son of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Matthew 8
All right, so you remember that part in the mass where we pray, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” We pray it kind of, as we begin to prepare for receiving Holy communion, receiving the Eucharist, Jesus himself. Well, those lines that we pray, they actually come from a fantastic story in the gospel of Matthew and they come out of the lips of one of the most Unexpected people imaginable.
So here’s what’s going on in the story. It comes from Matthew chapter eight. Now I love the gospel of Matthew. I love that we have four different gospels and they’re all telling us the story of the birth and the life and ministry, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, but all from slightly different points of view.
Matthew’s point of view is actually really important. So traditionally, many people believe that the Gospel of Matthew was written to a primarily Jewish audience. So people who had Jewish backgrounds who now perhaps had become followers of Jesus. But that means he leans really heavily on the Old Testament.
He is always telling you that this happened to fulfill this thing, and this happened, you know, to bring to light this Old Testament passage, and he does this all over the place. So it’s not coincidental that he sort of uses the story in a really particular way. So this story comes hot on the heels of something called the Sermon on the Mount.
One of the other things that Matthew does is really presents Jesus as Teacher. So the first kind of big public act of ministry that Matthew shows Jesus doing in his gospel is the Sermon on the Mount, and it spans from chapters five through seven. And what is the Sermon on the Mount? So, so think of this in context.
Matthew presents Jesus. Um, and when he presents Jesus, the first words, the first kind of public words out of Jesus’s mouth are repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And then he’s going to go on to teach Jesus’s teacher. He shows what that kingdom is all about, what kind of people are going to be invited into that kingdom.
What are the. Demands of citizenship. What does this all look like? That’s really what the Sermon on the Mount is all about. But if you’re thinking about this from a first century Jewish point of view, imagine you’re a Jew, you’re steeped in the Old Testament. You know the story well of where you’ve come from.
And you see the story of a man who goes up on a mountain to give a new instruction to people gathered down below. I mean, you’re seeing Moses. Like, this is such big Moses imagery. Remember Moses in the Old Testament. He is the one that leads the people of Israel out of their captivity in Egypt. They’re in slavery for about 400 years.
They forget who God is. They’re oppressed. They’re worked to the bone by Pharaoh and his taskmasters. And God comes in through Moses to remind them of who they are, of who he is. He leads them out of captivity, through water, through the crossing of the sea, into freedom. He gives them a new law, he gives them the Torah, his instruction, and then he leads them into a promised land where they will become a kingdom of priests.
I mean, this sounds a lot like what Jesus is doing in the gospel. So Matthew shows Jesus going up on this mountain, giving a new instruction, looking a whole lot like Moses. And remember when Moses came down from that mountain, he gave the people the 10 commandments. In Matthew chapter 8. We read that when Jesus, when he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.
There’s great crowds, just like there were in the first Exodus. And just as Moses brought 10 commandments down, Jesus is going to go on from here to perform 10 miracles. Not coincidental. So he comes down. What should you have on your mind? You should have on your mind the kingdom. Remember the Beatitudes?
Establishing God’s Kingdom
It’s the way that Jesus begins his sermon on the mount. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. For yours is the kingdom of heaven.
One of the things that Jesus talks about more than anything else is the notion of the kingdom. It’s always on his lips, not just in the Gospel of Matthew, but all over the place. Jesus is building, He’s establishing a new kingdom. Actually, He’s establishing God’s old kingdom in the way that it was never able to be without His grace. From the very beginning of the story of salvation history, remember all the way back in the Garden of Eden, our first parents, our first mom and dad, Adam and Eve, They are described by the writer of Genesis as royalty.
When Genesis says that they are created in the image and likeness of God, those are royal terms. It means that they are meant to be kings and queens, princes and princesses. And that means that they’re to share in the royal inheritance. of the God who is the king of everything, the king of kings. And what Adam and Eve were called to do is be the visible sign on earth of God’s invisible rule and reign over the heavens and the earth.
The story of sin is our failure at doing that. The story of salvation history is the people of God’s constant failure to live up. to this great and dignified vocation. And so what happens? Jesus comes to take that kingdom reality onto himself, but really the story of salvation history in so many ways is the story of two counter kingdoms.
Adam and Eve through their sin, through their hubris, they say, no, we want to be like God. They say, we don’t want to merely be signs of God’s kingship, we want to be gods. And so they say, we want to create our own kingdom. The story of salvation history is about two counter kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man.
And the kingdom of God is constantly trying to invade the kingdom of man to save us from ourselves. Jesus will ultimately do that. And so as he comes down off of this mountain, great crowds are gathering and Jesus is going to perform mighty deeds. Acts of authority. The first thing he does in the gospel of Matthew is meet with a leper who meets with him, kneels before him and says, Lord, if you will it, you can make me clean.
The Mark of Being Unclean
Now, the thing with leprosy, leprosy was a really horrific disease. It still exists today. Hansen’s disease. And it’s a really horrific thing to see and to experience because it really demonstrates the power of death over the human body. The human body basically dies in all of these tiny ways, in all of these very visible signs.
Hansen’s disease, leprosy, terrified people. And it was a mark of being unlcean. Being unclean throughout the Old Testament was not necessarily a moral quality, but it had to do with the power of death reigning in our lives. And any time the power of death ruled over us, so if we had blood flowing out of us or some diminution of fluids or life out of our body, we were rendered unclean, which meant we could not enter into the sanctuary and the temple under the worship of Israel.
Because the temple, the tabernacle where the presence of God was, it was meant to be the sign in the world, that death was not supposed to be a part of our story and that someday it would be gone. It would be eradicated and defeated. So this Leper really is embodying death and the idea was, if you came in contact with a leper, then you would sort of be, uh, you would, you would, um, take upon yourself that uncleanness.
It was contagious, not just in the disease sense, but the uncleanliness became a kind of spiritual contagion. So normally, if this leper were to touch someone, they’d be rendered unclean. Jesus, however, reverses all of it. And so in touching this guy and stretching out his hand, touching him, you can almost imagine the crowds like wincing, saying, no, don’t do that, you’ll be unclean.
But Jesus is life itself. He’s the way, the truth and the life. And when this guy who is embodying death comes in contact with life, death is ultimately defeated by the source of life itself. It’s a beautiful story, but it shows Jesus’s authority. It shows his power. But then. You know, I, I mean, all of the miracle stories of Jesus are great, but in a certain sense, the next story almost ups the ante a little bit.
I mean, coming in contact with leprosy, that’s a big deal. Coming in contact with death in a certain sense, that’s, that’s horrifying. But then this next story is really interesting and verse five said, then he entered Capernaum. That’s where he is kind of home base was up on the sea of Galilee. He went to Capernaum and a centurion came forward to him.
beseeching him, begging him, saying, Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home in terrible distress. Now the story might not seem like a huge deal. I mean, it’s a big deal that this guy’s servant is suffering, but a centurion, that is a big deal. A centurion is a representative, a powerful representative of the authority and the power of the Roman empire.
The Encounter with the Centurion
And in the time of Jesus, the Roman empire represents for a lot of people. The kingdom of man, the kingdom that is counter to God’s kingdom in full force. They are the nation, they are the empire that is oppressing the people of God. They have occupied the Holy land. They are demonstrating with a vengeance that God’s kingdom has had gone into hiding and the centurion, centurion, we get the word century from that, right?
It means a person who’s in charge of a hundred soldiers. So this guy’s a big deal. He is the embodiment of this. counter kingdom that is against the people of Israel. He is the last guy that you would expect to be going up to Jesus. If nothing else, he is the power structure. He is the authority structure.
He is the powers that be. And Jesus is a prophetic figure from this weak oppressed people called Israel. At least that was Rome’s point of view. But this mighty centurion goes to Jesus because he recognizes there is something that the kingdoms of the world can never give you. There is something the kingdom, the empire of Rome cannot promise and Jesus has, even if this centurion might not be able to put words to it, but he goes to Jesus in humility, it’s amazing.
And he says, Lord, he calls him Lord, which is this, um, huge sign of, uh, Jesus’s authority. And he says, my servant is, uh, my, I’d be seeing him bleeding. My servant is lying paralyzed at home, such distress. And Jesus said to him, now, my translation says, I will come and heal him, which sounds pretty straightforward.
But in the Greek, which is what the gospels were originally written in, it’s slightly different. It’s more of a question. He says, basically. Am I going to come and heal him? Like, are you asking me to do this? Because you realize, like, I’m a Jew, right? And the Jews and the Romans do not like each other. They don’t have much to do with each other.
So you’re actually asking me to come to your house and to heal him. Now here’s the other thing about this. For a Jewish person to go into the house of a Gentile, like this guy, a non Jew, an enemy, an outsider, it would actually be another thing that would render the Jewish person ritually unclean. And I wonder if that’s partially what’s going on in Jesus conversation here.
The centurion answered him. And this is where we should be familiar, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof.” Some have suggested that this guy is sensitive to the Jewish law, perhaps recognizes that yeah, no, I understand that that’s a problem for you to come under my roof. I can’t ask that of you.
Humility and deference in a certain sense. I’m not worthy, but it’s not just a deference to the Jewish law. It’s not just a deference to a cultural difference because this guy recognizes in his authority over a hundred troops, that Jesus has authority that is so far beyond him. “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word.”
You don’t even have to touch the guy. Remember Jesus touched the leper and he was healed. This centurion seems to understand, no Lord, if you merely say the word, My, uh, um, my servant will be healed and he says, he’s like, I get it. He says, look, I’m a man under authority and I’ve got soldiers under me. And if I say with my words go and he does and to another come and he comes and to my slave do this, he does it.
Jesus says, Jesus was amazed. This is the only time, or my translation says marveled. This is the only time in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus is amazed. What does it take to amaze Jesus? It takes this faith from this outsider, a representative of a pagan foreign enemy nation who sees in a way that so many of Jesus’s own people don’t even see reality, he sees the truth.
And so Jesus says in response, truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from East and the West to sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. And while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into the darkness, their men will weep and gnash their teeth.
But the centurion, to the centurion, Jesus said, go, be it done for you as you have believed. And the servant was healed at that very moment. You know, many of the Jewish people, many of the people of Jesus own people, We’re expecting that in the time of the Messiah, when their kingdom finally was resurrected and they were given this identity as the people of God again, that Jewish people, far flung exiles, would come from the East and the West and they would share in the resurrection, the restoration of the kingdom of God.
But nobody thought the pagans were invited. Nobody expected the outsiders, the enemies, Romans and Centurions, that they were going to be invited to this great feast. Jesus is showing the power of his kingdom. It’s not a kingdom that’s meant to keep people out. It’s meant to be a kingdom that invites Everyone in and it has such authority, such power, such grace that it’s going to reach even the farthest distances of the earth, even distances so far as the human heart.
Isn’t amazing that in the wisdom of the church, the church that said, This line, the line of this pagan Roman centurion that amazes Jesus with the sheer act of faith that he possesses. That’s what we need to say at every mass. We need to put ourselves in the humble shoes of this centurion to recognize there are so many parts of my life where I am not worthy to actually have Jesus enter under the roof of my body, the roof of my soul as I receive him in the blessed sacrament.
But, that that’s not the end of the story, but Jesus, your word has the authority to heal me. Your word has the power, the authority to change the way that things are to the way that you want them to be. So I pray that you would do that.
Approaching God with a Humble Heart.
I want you to listen to what the catechism of the Catholic church says, says “before so great a sacrament, the faithful can only echo humbly and with ardent faith. The words of the centurion, Lord, I am not worthy that you surrender under my roof. But only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”
This centurion acknowledged his unworthiness to have Jesus enter under his roof. We, too, are meant to acknowledge our unworthiness at the amazing fact that Jesus wants to enter the roofs of our souls and the roofs of our body.
So, We should take heart from this. This is good news. This means that the power of God, the authority of Jesus, the grandeur of his kingdom is limitless. It’s boundless so long as we have the humility to recognize who we are in relationship to him and ask for his healing and his grace. So let’s all do that.
Let’s ask for his healing. Let’s ask for his grace together. As we close out this time, as we say, Glory be to the father and to the son, and to the Holy spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Thanks so much everybody.
About Dr. Scott Powell
Dr. Scott Powell is a teacher, theologian and author. Currently, he serves as Assistant Professor of Theology at the St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Scott and his wife, Annie, founded and direct Camp Wojtyla, a Catholic outdoor adventure program for youth based in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. He holds a doctorate in Catholic Studies from Liverpool Hope University in England, and has authored a number of books, articles and book chapters on topics of theology, the Bible, and ecology, as well as Catholic culture and its relationship to the modern world. Scott has also appeared in numerous Catholic productions, including “Symbolon,” “Beloved,” “Reborn,” “YDisciple” and the “Opening the Word” series. He has been featured on EWTN, “Catholic Answers Live” and several other outlets. For nine years he co-hosted the popular podcast “The Word on the Hill with the Lanky Guys,” and currently hosts the podcast, “Sunday School, a Pillar Bible Study”. Scott and his wife live near Boulder, Colorado with their three children: Lily Avila, Samuel Isaac, and Evelyn Luca.