Then said Jesus unto him,
Except you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Jesus therefore, &c. Signs and prodigies mean nearly the same thing. Signs, however, are properly what take place in natural things, and by nature, slowly operating, but which Christ wrought in a moment, and therefore miraculously. Such are the healing of the sick. But prodigies are things which surpass the whole power of nature, as the raising of the dead.
Christ reproved the small faith of the nobleman, in order that He might sharpen and augment it. As though He said, "Thou and thine hast heard of certain signs and prodigies which I have wrought; still thou believest not that I am the Messiah, unless I do very many more, and that thou thyself mayest behold them with thine eyes." "He teaches," says S. Chrysostom, "that it is not His miracles that we are to attend to, but His doctrine. He shows that signs are especially made gracious to the soul; and in this case He heals the father who was labouring under a disease of the mind, no less than the (bodily) disease of the son." Indeed, H...
Jesus therefore, &c. Signs and prodigies mean nearly the same thing. Signs, however, are properly what take place in natural things, and by nature, slowly operating, but which Christ wrought in a moment, and therefore miraculously. Such are the healing of the sick. But prodigies are things which surpass the whole power of nature, as the raising of the dead.
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Yet the very coming and beseeching Him was a mark of faith. And besides, after this the Evangelist witnesses to him, declaring that when Jesus said, Go, your son lives, he believed His word, and went. What then is that which He says here? Either He uses the words as approving of the Samaritans because they believed without signs; or, to touch Capernaum which was thought to be His own city, and of which this person was. Moreover, another man in Luke, who says, Lord, I believe, said besides, help my unbelief. And so if this ruler also believed, yet he believed not entirely or soundly, as is clear from his enquiring at what hour the fever left him, since he desired to know whether it did so of its own accord, or at the bidding of Christ. When therefore he knew that it was yesterday at the seventh hour, then himself believed and his whole house.
Do you see that he believed when his servants, not when Christ spoke? Therefore He rebukes the state of mind with which he had come to Him, a...
