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under authority". The fact that he was under authority gave authority to his words; he
said to a soldier, "Go, and he goeth", and the authority under which he himself was
placed gave, in its turn, all the weight to his commands. So with the Lord, He spoke not
His own words, but the Father's; the works He did He declared were not His, but the
Father's that sent Him. The whole of John's Gospel rings with the fact that Christ was
the Sent One. The healing of the centurion's servant was John 5: 24 in tableau,
"He that heareth My word (`speak the word only'), and believeth on Him that sent Me
(`for I also am a man under authority'), hath everlasting life."
The words of Christ that follow show that the miracle was connected, in some way at
least, with teaching:--
"I say unto you that many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the
kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of
teeth."
The centurion's faith was real and strong, for the Lord said:--
"Go thy way, and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee, and his servant was
healed in the selfsame hour."
The parallel record in Luke 7: 1-10 should be read. The Companion Bible considers
this a second miracle of healing, suggesting that the Lord had blessed the centurion
before (Matt. 8: 12, 13), i.e., before the calling of the twelve in Matt. 10: 1, etc. The
second healing of the centurion's bondman took place after the calling of the twelve
(6: 13-16). It must be remembered that Matthew selects his items with a view to the
object of his gospel, and nowhere claims that historical order is maintained. Luke,
however, does claim that he writes "in order", and we take Luke's record of any incident
to be the true historical order of its happening. Many have found a "discrepancy" in the
fact that whereas Matt. 5:-7: was evidently spoken on a mountain, Luke 6: 17 says
that a body of teaching of exactly the same character was spoken "in the plain". "There",
says the critic, "the narrative is contradictory, one says a mountain, the other a plain".
Others, to avoid the difficulty, say (and with truth), that the Lord could have repeated His
teaching again elsewhere. The whole controversy is dispelled by looking at the original,
and using simple common sense. First as to the mountain, Matt. 5: 1 says:--
"And seeing the multitude, He went up into a mountain, and when He was set, His
disciples came unto Him."
Luke 6: 12 says:--
"And it came to pass in those days, that He went out into a mountain to pray, and
continued all night in prayer to God and when it was day He called unto Him His
disciples, and of them He chose twelve, whom He also named apostles."
This passage supplements Matthew's record. Matthew evidently had no reason to say
why the Lord went up the mountain, except that it was because of the multitude. The
multitudes which followed Him were from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and