Hearing is Believing
We’ve all heard the phrase “seeing is believing,” but Jesus seems to differ with this maxim. In the healing of the official’s son in John 4, Jesus castigates the crowd for their desire to see him perform miracles: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe” (4:48). The “you” hear is plural—it is a condemnation of the on-looking crowd.
The father is undeterred by Jesus’s words to the crowd and begs him to come and heal his son (4:49). But instead of going and performing a miracle in person, Jesus merely speaks: “Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way” (4:50). Notice, how this verse draws attention to the fact that Jesus spoke. It is his words that bring healing. More than physical healing, Jesus’s words bring abundant life to this father and to his family. John records what happens when this man heard of his son’s healing:
As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And he himself believed, and all his household (4:51-53).
The healing of the son by Jesus’s words brings the father and his whole household to saving faith.
The contrast between hearing and seeing is stark in this passage, and I was struck by the explanation that long-time missionary Lesslie Newbigin gives in his exposition of John’s Gospel. He begins, “A belief which requires signs and wonders is one which lays down in advance the conditions which are required to authenticate any alleged revelation of God.” In particular, Newbigin goes on to note, is the contrast that is made in this passage between hearing and seeing:
Why should there be a distinction between "seeing" and "hearing"? Why does John so often stress this contrast right up to the decisive word of Jesus to Thomas: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (20.29)? And why does the Old Testament combine such an emphasis upon the word of God with such a horror of visible representations of God? Perhaps—without going too far beyond the present text—one may attempt to answer as follows. The demand for a visible sign means that the one who makes the demand keeps ultimate sovereignty in his own hands. He has himself prescribed the tests by which divinity must prove itself. So the demand for signs and wonders is refused. To this man, however, in his simple human need and distress, the word of Jesus carries in itself a sovereign authority which commands obedience. One does not obey an image or a picture; one obeys (or disobeys) a word. For this practical man, accustomed to the voice of authority, the word of Jesus is enough. He accepts and obeys, leaving to Jesus the sovereign freedom to fulfil his word as he will. His own insistent and urgent cry for help is stilled by a word which shifts the center and takes the control out of his anxious hands into those of Jesus. And so he turns and goes home.
On his way home, the father hears that his son has been healed, so, Newbigin continues, “He learns that the word of Jesus was indeed a word with authority. And this authentication of Jesus’ word leads him and his whole household to become believers in the full sense of the word as the readers of the Gospel understand it.”
Hearing is believing. This is, as Newbigin notes, the pattern of the Old Testament that is carried into the New. As the Apostle Paul declares, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). In his grace to us, God still works to bring people to faith through the announcing of the good news of Jesus Christ. He allows and enables us to have a role in his saving work when we proclaim the good news of the life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus.
