This morning in church we read the story of Jesus healing the centurion's slave from Luke 7:1-10. I found it hard to listen to the sermon because I kept being distracted by the story. Here's what was distracting me. This story takes place in the village of Capernaum and has three main characters - the centurion's slave, the centurion himself, and Jesus. The slave is the trigger for the story: ...a centurion's servant, whom his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. Other translations say that the slave "was dear to him". There's some ambiguity here - was the slave a loved member of his household, or a valuable piece of property? Either way, what follows in the story indicates that when Jesus is asked to heal this slave it is not seen as an act of service towards the slave, but towards the centurion himself. This is not surprising when you think of who the centurion was. He was a Roman army officer, roughly equivalent to a captain
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson