So the father knew. — He was not mistaken, then. The power he had felt when these words were spoken to him was real. The hours that had passed since, as he hastened to know all, had prepared him to read the sign. “Thy son liveth!” “The seventh hour yesterday!” There is more than one miracle here. A new life passes into his own spirit, and he, too, bound in the death-grasp of a formal religion, liveth! A Father’s love has yearned for him. Christ has come down ere the child died.
Himself believed. — This is a yet higher faith. He believed the report before he went to Cana. He believed personally when he pleaded, “Lord, come down.” He believed the word that Jesus spake when told to go his way, and every step of that road going away from the power to the sufferer was an act of faith; but still there is place for a fuller faith, and he and his household became believers. St. John traces here, as before, in the case of the Samaritans (John 4:41-42), and of the disciples themselves (John 2:11), the successive development of faith.