NOTES for Mat 8:5-13
Jesus' healing of the centurion's servant is remarkable because it happens at a distance: Jesus not only does not enter the house where the sick man lies, He does not even take a step in that direction. And He explains the healing by the faith of the Roman officer, a faith like which, in His own words, He had not found even among the people of God.
How was this faith shown? Clearly, in the fact that the centurion did not doubt for a second that the powers Jesus uses for healing are absolutely subject to Him. Of course, the Roman could have thought that Jesus commanded not simply powers but spirits capable of healing a person by driving out illness, as many pagans thought in those days. But in any case, the measure of his trust in Jesus was almost absolute: he does not doubt for a second that He needs only to command, just as the centurion himself commands his soldiers, and His command will be carried out. And, of course, he trusts the Savior in another sense too: he believes that he will not be refused, that if he asks this mysterious Wonderworker, He will help.
And this fullness of trust opens the Kingdom to the centurion. To him, a pagan with no relation to the people of God, a person who appears to know nothing either about the Messiah or about the Kingdom, who is not thinking about the Torah at all and probably has quite vague ideas even about God. But all this moves into the background before the trust that binds him to Jesus.
And then everything happens, one might say, quite naturally, at least naturally for the Kingdom, which does not know distances in our sense of the word. The centurion's desire to see his servant healthy brings the servant into the Kingdom as well. And the breath of the Kingdom heals him. The trust of one connects two with each other: Jesus and the sick man who needs healing.
Such a thing, of course, is possible only in the Kingdom. And the Kingdom is open to everyone who is ready to receive it. Even if the seeker does not have a very clear idea of what he is seeking and what it looks like.