The third and fourth chapters of the Gospel of St. John illustrate how the Word of God manifested His divine power by bringing about the spiritual regeneration of men through His grace. The story of Nicodemus (Jn 3:1-21) demonstrated how some Jews would come to accept the faith. The story of the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4:1-42) illustrated how Gentiles would be converted by Christ’s teaching. Now, in the story of the healing of the official’s son (Jn 4:43-54), he explains how Gentiles are to be converted by signs. These three stories–the discourse with Nicodemus, the conversion of the Samaritan woman at the well, and the healing of the official’s son–represent the various ways people were brought to the faith and offered the grace of salvation. The Jews were evangelized in one way, and the Gentiles were evangelized in two ways: by the teaching and by signs which confirmed the teaching.

“After the two days he departed to Galilee” (Jn 4:43). That is, after Jesus spent two days teaching the Samaritans in or near Shechem, He resumed His journey from Judea to Galilee. In a spiritual sense, He left the Gentiles before the third day, that is, before the day of glory at the end of time, in order to return to His home, that is, to the Jewish people. This signifies that, after the nations have been converted, but before God brings the world to an end, one final attempt shall be made to convert the last remaining Jews who tenaciously resisted conversion to the Christian faith. St. Paul foretold these events: “a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:25-26).

The Evangelist then gave a reason for Jesus’ departure from Samaria: “For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country” (Jn 4:44). This presents two problems: one concerning the literal meaning, the other concerning the continuity of this verse with the one preceding it.

1. The problem concerning the literal meaning of Jn 4:44. The problem is that this statement does not seem to be true in a literal sense, for it appears that some prophets were honored in their homeland and among their own people. We can resolve this problematic statement in two ways. First, according to St. John Chrysostom, Christ’s statement is literally correct for the majority of cases. Because, in matters of faith and morals, the occasional exception to a rule does not negate the truth of the rule, he asserted that we should admit that Christ’s statement is true. Second, the truth of Christ’s assertion is proven true by Sacred Scripture, for an examination of the lives of the Old Testament prophets reveals that hardly any of them escaped some manner of persecution, whether it be a lack of respect, derision, or physical harm. The persecution of the prophets was addressed by Christ when He lamented for Jerusalem with the words, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!” (Mt 23:37) Likewise, St. Stephen, at his trial before the Sanhedrin, raised this accusatory rhetorical question: “Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute?” (Acts 7:52) Origen noted that even the Gentiles persecuted their own seers and sometimes put them to death. Therefore, Christ’s statement, “a prophet has no honor in his own country,” holds true as a rule, both for Jews, as can be demonstrated from Sacred Scripture, and for Gentiles, as we read in secular historical accounts.

How did it happen that prophets came to be dishonored by their countrymen and kin? We observe that, in human social intercourse, familiarity inevitably lessens the respect one man has for another, and too much familiarity often breeds contempt. The reason this happens is because, the longer a person lives with another person, and the more intimately one gets to know the other person, the more he become aware of his companion’s human weaknesses and character flaws. This can cause him to lose respect for his friend. But while this is the situation between men, who abound with imperfection, it is not the case between God and men, for their relationship is not one of peer to peer, but of superior to inferior. The more we love God and contemplate His greatness, the more we realize how superior He is to us; and, the more we acknowledge His superiority, the more we respect and honor Him. Thus, while familiarity among men often leads to their contempt for one another, familiarity between man and God leads to man’s greater love for His Creator and Redeemer.

Was Christ a prophet? A prophet obtains prophetic knowledge obscurely, in visions and in dreams, as the Lord said, “If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream” (Nm 12:6). But, Christ’s knowledge is not obscure, and never was anything but clear and perfect. For His divine intellect knows all there is to know (STh III, 9 1), and at the moment of His conception, the Word of God infused into His human intellect the intelligible species of all the things which it can possibly know (STh, III, 9, 3) and all the things that God has ever revealed, or will reveal, to mankind (STh III, 11, 1). Thus, when He foretold His own resurrection, saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19), He spoke with absolute certainty. The accuracy of His prophecy was attested to by His disciples, for “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken” (Jn 2:22). Likewise, when he disclosed to the Samaritan woman her past and present sins (Jn 4:17-18), He knew those things for certain. She responded by saying, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet” (Jn 4:19), because a prophet reveals hidden things. Yet, she had no idea how He obtained that secret knowledge. She only knew that what He said was correct. Despite her spontaneous declaration, it nonetheless seems that Christ was not a prophet, for while prophetic knowledge is obtained obscurely, Christ obtained His knowledge clearly.

But on the contrary, when Moses said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you” (Dt 18:15), he foretold that the Messiah would indeed be a prophet. Further, after Christ was rejected at Nazareth, He said, referring to Himself, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house” (Mt 13:57). Christ truly was a prophet. Consider that a prophet has two functions: he sees and he makes known what he sees. Christ was a prophet in both ways. First, He was a seer of hidden things, both as a wayfarer and as a comprehensor. He was a wayfarer like all men in this life, inasmuch as He suffered in His human nature and experienced what men experience in this life. Inasmuch as He knew and announced things that were beyond the knowledge of other wayfarers, He was rightly called a prophet (STh III, 7, 8). He was also a comprehensor from the moment of His conception, when His human soul was united to the divine essence in the hypostatic union, which is the greatest of all possible union (STh III, 2, 9, ad 3). Since His human intellect was united to the divine intellect by this union, He had knowledge of hidden things, as do other prophets, but His knowledge far exceeded any prophetic knowledge that God had ever given to any other prophet. Second, Christ, Who is the Incarnate Word of God, was a prophet in the second sense as well. That is, He revealed the truth about God, as He admitted to Pilate, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37). Thus, Christ knew hidden things and revealed them to others. He was, therefore, a prophet.

Was Christ a prophet in the same way that other men and women were prophets? When a prophet “sees” in the prophetic sense, two human faculties are involved: the intellect and the imagination. With the intellect he receives divine knowledge of hidden things, and with the imagination he forms various images. The intellect is one of two rational faculties that man possesses; (the other is the will) (STh I, 78, 1). The imagination is one of four interior sensitive faculties that he possesses; (the others are the consciousness or common sense, the instinct or estimative sense, and the memory) (STh I, 78, 4). Because both the human intellect and the human imagination are created things, they are imperfect and naturally prone to error. But Christ’s intellectual knowledge was perfect and without error, due to the grace of the hypostatic union. Thus, it follows that Christ was not a prophet as regards His human intellectual faculty, because the light of His knowledge was perfect, without any deficiency, whereas the intellectual faculties of the other prophets were naturally subject to error. However, as regards His human imagination, Christ was indeed a prophet, for He was able to form various images with His imagination, even as the other prophets had done.

2. The problem concerning the continuity between verses 43 and 44. In verse 43 we read: “After the two days he departed to Galilee.” But then it follows with: “For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country.” There appears to be a discontinuity between these two verses in two ways. First, it seems odd that Christ would return to His home territory of Galilee, even though “a prophet has no honor in his own country.” Second, the Evangelist’s use of the conjunction “for” (enim, for, because, indeed, in fact) seems out of place, for it implies that Jesus returned to Galilee precisely because a prophet has no honor in his own country. The use of “for” seems to be a non sequitur.

But, there is really no discontinuity, for the juxtaposition of these two verses can be explained in two ways. First, according to St. Augustine, the Evangelist said these things to explain why the Galileans had still not been converted, even though Christ had lived there His entire life, whereas the Samaritans had been converted in just two days. The reason “he departed to Galilee” was precisely because (enim) “a prophet has no honor in his own country.” That is, He returned to Galilee in order to convert Galilean Jews to the faith. Second, according to St. John Chrysostom, it is true that Christ departed the region of Samaria for the region of Galilee, but He did not go to Nazareth of Galilee, where He grew up, nor to Capernaum of Galilee, where He lived, but to the town of Cana in Galilee, where He had changed water into wine. The people of Nazareth rejected Christ when He taught in the synagogue (Mt 13:53-58), and the people of Capernaum refused to believe in Him, despite the many miracles He performed for them. And so, He castigated them, saying, “And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.” (Mt 11:23) But those who witnessed His sign at Cana, the miraculous transformation of water into wine, believed: “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (Jn 2:11). Thus, when Christ returned to Galilee from Judea, by way of Samaria, He headed for Cana, where the people had been well-disposed to believe in Him.

Chrysostom’s interpretation raises the question: Did Christ seek His own glory? It seems that He did not, for He stated, “I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it and he will be the judge” (Jn 8:50). While it is most proper for a man to give glory to God, it is sinful for him to seek his own glory from other men, for only God may rightly seek His own glory. Christ as God fittingly sought His own glory, for the Son of God is truly God, and God fittingly seeks His own glory. Christ as man rightly sought the glory of God, inasmuch as His human soul was united to the Word of God in the hypostatic union.

“So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast” (Jn 4:45a). We can make two points here. First, the reason why the Galileans received Christ respectfully this time, unlike other times, was because of something He had done in Jerusalem only days before, when He was there to celebrate the Passover, according to religious law. Concerning this, St. John attested that “when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did” (Jn 2:23). What was it that He did to earn the respect of His countrymen? There are two possibilities. First, according to Origen, the event that impressed the Galileans was His expulsion of the merchants and money-changers from the temple courtyard (Jn 2:12-17). Many Jews regarded this bold action as a miracle, for the manner in which Christ drove them out of the temple precincts manifested great authority and fervor. Second, it is also possible that Christ performed other miracles in Jerusalem that we do not know about because they were not written down, for St. John said, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book” (Jn 20:30). Second, notice that the less dignity a man has, the more he respects God. The Judeans were superior in dignity to the Galileans, for God chose Mount Zion in Judah to be His dwelling place, as we read, “His abode has been established in Salem, his dwelling place in Zion” (Ps 76:2). Thus, according to the scriptures, “no prophet is to rise from Galilee” (Jn 7:52). The Galileans, who were Jews, were superior to the Samaritans, who were Gentiles. Thus, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (Jn 4:9). But, ironically, though the Jews had more dignity than the Samaritans, the Samaritans were better than the Jews, for they believed in Christ after only two days, and without having witnessed any great miracle, whereas the Jews of Galilee came to believe in Christ only after many days, and only after He had changed water into wine at Cana and had done notable things in Jerusalem in their sight. A greater irony still is the fact that, even though the Jews of Judea had more dignity than the Jews of Galilee, no Judean Jew, except perhaps Nicodemus, believed in Christ at that point in time. Therefore, of the three groups–Judean Jews, Galilean Jews, and Samaritans–the Samaritans had the least dignity, but the greatest respect for God, for they were the most willing to believe in the Son of God, Whom the Father had sent.

Then, St. John explained how the Galilean Jews knew what had happened in Jerusalem during the Passover: “for they too had gone to the feast” (Jn 4:45b). Christ, along with many other Galilean Jews, had gone up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover in accord with Jewish religious law. It seems plausible that the reason why the others arrived back in Galilee before Christ did was because Christ sojourned for two days at Shechem to preach and convert the Samaritans.

“So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine” (Jn 4:46a). Christ made two trips to the Galilean village of Cana: the first, when He changed water into wine at a wedding feast (Jn 2:1-11), and the second, when He returned to Galilee from the Passover in Jerusalem and healed the official’s son, who lay dying in Capernaum (Jn 4:43-54). When Christ returned to Galilee from the Passover, He chose to go to Cana, rather than to His home in Capernaum, because He was no longer respected in Capernaum.

The Evangelist mentioned both trips to Cana for three reasons. First, in order to illustrate the Jews’ hardness of heart. For after the first miracle at Cana, in which Christ changed water into wine, only Christ’s disciples believed in Him, and after the second miracle in Cana, in which He healed the Roman’s son, only the Roman and his immediate household believed in Him, whereas the Samaritans believed without seeing any miracles. The Samaritans believed on account of the words of Christ, and some even believed on the strength of the woman’s testimony alone. Second, in a spiritual sense, the two trips signify the two effects that God’s words have upon us. First, they cause delight in us, as in the man “who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy” (Mt 13:20). This delight is signified by the wine which Christ confected. Second, God’s words heal us, as we read, “neither herb nor poultice cured them, but it was thy word, O Lord, which heals all men” (Wis 16:12). This healing is signified by the cure of the Roman’s son. Third, again in a spiritual sense, Christ’s two trips to Cana signify the two comings of the Son of God. Christ’s first coming was characterized by gentleness and joy, for He came as a gentle child, and His birth was an occasion of great joy, as Isaiah indicated when he said, “Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel” (Is 12:6), or as the angel said to the shepherds, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:10-11). Christ’s first coming is signified by the first miracle at Cana, for wine gives joy and gladdens the hearts of men (Ps 104:15). But Christ’s second coming will be in majesty, when He will raise our human bodies in glory to be like His (Phil 3:21), removing all our bodily weaknesses. This is signified by the cure of the official’s son.