Healing the centurion's servant


Healing the centurion's servant is one of the miracles said to have been performed by Jesus of Nazareth as related in the Gospels of Matthew and Gospel of Luke. The story is not recounted in the Gospels of either John or Mark.
According to these accounts, a Roman centurion asks Jesus for his help because his servant is ill. Jesus offers to go to the centurion's house to perform a healing, but the centurion hesitates and suggests that Jesus' word of authority would be sufficient. Impressed, Jesus comments approvingly at the strong religious faith displayed by the soldier and grants the request, which results in the servant being healed the same day.

Scriptural sources

The story of the Centurion appears both in the Gospel of Matthew and that of Luke:
Matthew 8:5–13
Luke 7:1–10

Origins

The story of the Centurion is not mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four gospels. One theory is that material not in Mark but found in both Matthew and Luke may have came from a lost source known as "Q". If true then this passage would still be an anomaly as Q is believed to have been a collection of sayings of Jesus with no other contextual material; but the story of the Centurion does include background detail. It would also be the only miracle story that originated in Q. One possibility is that only the dialogue was in Q, and both Matthew and Luke added the background details from a shared oral history.
The Gospel of John does narrate the account of Jesus healing the son of a royal official at Capernaum at a distance in. Some modern commentators treat them as the same event. However, in his analysis of Matthew, R. T. France presents linguistic arguments against the equivalence of pais and son and considers these two separate miracles. Merrill C. Tenney in his commentary on John and Orville Daniel in his Gospel harmony also consider them two different incidents.

Use in the liturgy

The words of the Centurion are used in the Prayer of Humble Access contained in many Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Christian Eucharist liturgies. The words are also used as part of the Communion rite in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

Interpretations

Meaning of "servant"

Luke 7:2 and 7:10 refer to the person to be healed as doulos, unambiguously meaning "servant" but has the Centurion himself call him "pais" – which has a number of more ambiguous meanings including "child" and, "servant".