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Catholic Bible Study
Matthew 8:1-34
00:29:58
Dr. Michael Barber and Dr. Tim Gray return discuss and teach on the texts of Matthew 8.
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to form. Now, I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute. And joining me today is Dr. Michael Barber, who's a good friend and a professor here at the Augusta Institute as well. And we're going to talk and continue our Bible study on the Gospel of Matthew. I hope you can join us. We're in chapter eight, and so you can just pick up right here at chapter eight. So just grab your Bible and open up with us, because I think you'll. It'll just be much easier to follow along if you have your Bible with us. And of course, we're using the. The ESV Catholic Edition, which is the Augustan Bible. So you can see that you're welcome to get that. And you can find that at Catholic Market if you're interested. I know we get questions about that. So we're going to start with a new section. So we finished last time the Sermon on the Mount, right? And Matthew chapters five, six and seven. And now we're beginning a new section of Matthew's Gospel. And that section is Matthew 8 and 9. And in those two chapters, Matthew, who is that tax collector? But Matthew is very organized in the way he teaches and relates the life of Jesus Christ. And he's organized. And so he's putting together in these two chapters, ten stories where Jesus does a mighty deed, what we would call a miracle. And these mighty deeds, these deeds of power are going to illustrate Jesus authority. So authority is going to be one of the most important themes in chapter eight and nine, because we're learning about the authority that Jesus Christ has. That will be very important because when we get to chapter 10, Jesus is going to share his authority with the 12 apostles. What kind of authority is he sharing? Well, that's the kind of authority that will be demonstrated in chapters eight and nine. So you really want to look at chapter eight and nine, which is a narrative story that gives us 10 mighty deeds of Jesus and that prepares us for the speech that Jesus gives in chapter 10, also known as a discourse. And that speech that Jesus gives will be giving his authority, sharing his authority with the 12. So it's a very organized, systematic way of teaching the life of Jesus for Matthew. And we're going to see the deeds and then we're going to see the words that follow. And the words have an authority because the deeds Jesus show his authority. And of course, that all fits very well with the Jewish idea of authority, because you think of the number, Michael, that symbolizes authority for the Jews is the number 10, isn't it? And you think of the 10 commandments, the authoritative word of God that Israel has to shape their life based on those 10 words. So 10 signifies authority. You'll even find it in the Book of Revelation where, you know, the dragon has 10 heads. And so again, the idea of meaning, he's got total authority, political authority. So the idea of 10 signifies authority. And this section is going to be a fascinating Bible study, isn't it? On Jesus authority.
- [02:55]
B
Yeah, this is so much fun because after we see Jesus go up on a mountain and teach like Moses, what happens next in the Gospel? Well, after Jesus has been teaching like Moses, he goes out and he performs 10 miraculous signs. And of course, ancient Jews would have remembered that Moses worked the 10 signs in Egypt, right? We call them the 10 plagues. But here again, that theme of Jesus as the new Moses we saw at the very beginning of the Gospel. Jesus is born during the reign of a tyrannical king. He wants to kill the Israelite children. Jesus escapes. He finds safety in Egypt. He's much like Moses. He gives a. A sermon on a mountain, goes up on a mountain like Moses, comes down, and now performs miracles like Moses. And the first one we read about is a story involving a leper. And it's helpful to point out that of course, in the book of Leviticus, part of the Book of Moses, right, we see that leprosy is associated with uncleanness. And so Jesus comes down from the mountain and there's a leper that comes before him, and he kneels before him and he says, lord, and if you will, you can make me clean. So Moses was the one who identified leprosy with uncleanness. This leper wants to be healed of his uncleanness. And so he comes before Jesus. And there's a lot going on here in the story that points to Jesus being more than just a new Moses.
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A
There really is. And I think one of the things that even the Egyptians had a sense of is ritual cleanliness, right?
- [04:34]
B
That's right.
- [04:34]
A
And Jesus comes in and he's going to be entirely new force. Because I love how the leper says, if you will. He recognizes that this is within Jesus willing. And, you know, and in this sense, it's seeing Jesus as beyond a Moses, but really as the Lord. And he even says, lord, I don't.
- [04:54]
B
Think that's a coincidence because we were just looking at the Sermon on the Mount. The last chapter of the Sermon on the Mount has this remarkable line. Jesus talks about how on the last day, not everyone who says to me, lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven. As I pointed out last time in the Septuaginthe Greek version of the Old Testament, the only time anyone has ever addressed Lord, Lord is the Lord, the God of Israel. Right? So whether historically this leper understood Jesus to be the God of Israel or not, Matthew certainly recognized that there was the spirit moving here and the leper identifying Jesus as Lord Kurios. We have Matthew showing us that Jesus is not just Moses, he is one greater than Moses. He's the Lord himself, if you will.
- [05:48]
A
You know? Absolutely. Because anybody who touches somebody who's richly unclean in Israel, it doesn't matter if it's Moses or Aaron or anybody, they become richly unclean when they touch that person who's unclean. So in other words, and I like to play cards, in our family, you have a trump suit. And the trump suit in the Old Testament era is the unclean. The unclean always beats the clean. Whenever they come into contact, the clean becomes unclean. And now with Jesus, there's a new force at work. And so with Jesus, when the unclean touches him, he doesn't become defiled. He, he doesn't become unclean. They become clean. And that is astonishing.
- [06:30]
B
It is astonishing. And Jesus, we see, he reached out and he touched him. Oh my goodness. I mean, when you read Josephus, who is a first century Jewish historian, he talks about how the lepers had to be quarantined, they had to stay away from the general populace. If you had a leper in your house, your whole house was unclean. So you would expect that Jesus to touch the leper and the power of impurity to then affect Jesus. But what Jesus shows is he is more powerful than the power of uncleanness. And we should just emphasize here, unclean, it's not a sense of whether you have dirt on you or not. We're talking about ritual cleanliness, ritual purity, which without getting into a long explanation of this, is a symbol in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, things associated with Satan, sickness and death, and yes, sin are associated with impurity. The way God through Moses is teaching his people that the Lord is the God of life, that the Lord is the God of order. So anything that comes into proximity with death, with sickness, with disease, with sin is rendered unclean. And it shows that at least without grace, the power of sin is more powerful than we have. Right? And so we are powerless over sin. But Jesus demonstrates his power. He says, I will be clean. And then it's interesting, at the end we read Jesus says, show yourself to the Priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, he's not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. And so Jesus is demonstrating, yes, he's coming to fulfill it. And he says, do it as a proof that. And the Greek is a little bit ambiguous. It could be a proof for them, in other words, a proof that you have been cleansed, or it could be a proof against them, that is they don't believe, but they're going to have to accept this gift and acknowledge that I did render you clean. So there's a little bit of ambiguity there.
- [08:33]
A
But anyway, yeah, you know, and I like, Michael, what you said about this idea of ritual uncleanliness just for people to get their minds around it, just to take that one step further and to build on what you said, it's all about policing access to the temple. And so the ritual cleanliness, the point of being richly declared, richly unclean, means you can't go to the temple. You can't enter into the precincts in the temple for liturgical worship. So the leper who can't access the temple can't access the presence of God. He has to be. Not only not can he be in a village, but he can't go to the temple. And so imagine if you're the leper in ancient Israel and you're devout, that means you're cut off from the liturgy. You cannot make. You can't put yourself before the presence of God. Because the idea was that the temple was to be the new Eden, and it was to be the place of life. And anything that had to do with death, the effects of sin, bleeding, hemorrhaging, that made you richly unclean, and it had to do with death. And you couldn't enter with something, you can't bear death into the place of Eden or the temple. And so that. That idea striking. What I love about the leper here is that he says, if you will, you can make me clean. He doesn't say, you could heal me. So just getting over the affliction that could be crippling and cause death eventually of leprosy. He doesn't simply want to be healed of his disease. He wants to be healed of the separation between himself and his God. Right. This barrier that he has with the temple. And so I love what I think the leper, by the wording of the leper, saying, you can make me clean. In other words, I think the leper desires access to the liturgy. And then how does Jesus respond by saying, go and show yourselves to the priest and present an offering. In other words, the very thing that Leviticus says you have to do in order to be reincorporated into the liturgical life of Israel and have access to the temple. So Jesus, I think, reads this man's heart and says, here's now go do what you have to do to complete your access to the temple. So it's really a beautiful thing.
- [10:49]
B
It is a beautiful story. And one last point in Second Kings, chapter 5, when Naaman wants to be cleansed of his leprosy in he goes to the land of Israel and he asks the king at the time, I've heard, you know, there's someone here who can, you know, help me with my leprosy. And the king says, what am I, God? Only God can heal lepers. And you don't find prophecies about in the Messianic age, healing of leprosy. Even in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there's a famous list of all the things the Messiah will do. And it maps on neatly to what we find in the Gospels, but even in the scrolls. And it was unimaginable that there would be a healing.
- [11:28]
A
Oh, I didn't know that point. That's a great point.
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B
That's amazing.
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Yeah, they just couldn't even imagine leprosy being reversed.
- [11:34]
B
Only who am I, God? That's what the king of Israel says. So it's a remarkable way to start it off. Now we move into the next story in the story of the faith of the centurion. This is the second famous healing here. Jesus heals the centurion. Servant man. There's so much we could say. We're going to run out of time. I'm worried about this. So of course we're going to. Well, we've got 34 verses and we've covered four.
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So.
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B
We read about the story, of course, of a gentile. A centurion is a Roman figure. He's over 100 soldiers. And of course you know that the Romans were despised by the Jews. They were seen as unclean, they were seen as uncouth, they had no morals, they were savage. And yet Jesus is in Capernaum. Centurion comes, and once again he addresses him as Lord. Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly. And Jesus says, I will come and heal him. And the centurion says, lord. Now, I don't know, maybe Catholics will be familiar with this line. Maybe they've heard this somewhere before. Lord, I am not worthy to have you under my roof, but only say the word. And my servant will be healed. And then he says, I, too, am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, go. And he goes to another, come. And he comes. Jesus says, I will come. No, no, you're not my servant. Right. I tell my servants, go and come and do this. And they do it. And then Jesus marveled and said to those, amen. I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. So it's a really amazing thing that the centurion refuses to have Jesus come to his house, saying, oh, basically putting himself under Jesus authority.
- [13:24]
A
Exactly. Out of humility. And I think and just it underscores that key thematic word that we talked about at the beginning, and that is authority. And I love how the centurion says, I'm a man of authority. And I say to one go. And he goes, and another come. And he comes. In other words, he's saying, I'm a man of authority, but he's recognizing that Jesus has a higher authority.
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B
Yes.
- [13:42]
A
You know, and so again, what Matthew's teaching us is who Jesus is and the idea that he has great authority. Right. And that's a big theme. And of course, you know, this passage of what the centurion says, Holy Mother Church gives us his beautiful response to Jesus that we pray every time we're about to encounter Jesus in the Mass. Right.
- [14:05]
B
So, and that's not a coincidence because in the next line, Jesus says, I tell you the many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. There was an ancient Jewish hope that there would be a future banquet in which God would overcome death. You read about this in Isaiah 25 and in other texts, later Jewish texts like Second Baruch, we read about this hope as well, involves the Messiah being at the banquet. Jesus is talking about the day many will come, and they will sit at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with the saints of the scriptures, of Israel, of the Old Testament. When do we do that? Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we have a foretaste of that marriage Supper of the Lamb that the Book of Revelation says will take place on the last day. And so Jesus tells the centurion, wow, many will come someday. And we are in the Mass, in a way, entering into that reality. And so, like the centurion who recognizes his unworthiness in approaching Jesus, we use the same words, Lord, I'm not worthy to come before you. I'm not worthy to have you under my roof.
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A
Yeah, it's Such a beautiful prayer that the Church gives us. And of course, rather than saying, you.
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Know.
- [15:29]
A
And my servant shall be healed, we say, let my soul shall be healed. And so the church slightly tweaks the words, but you get the echo. And so every time you're at Mass and you say, lord, I'm not worthy to have you enter under my roof, but only say the Word and my soul shall be healed. You are right here with the centurion in Caphernum in this beautiful encounter. And so it's to take us there to say, wow, I'm at the Mass. Just it's like being in Caphernum, and I'm at the Mass, and our Lord is present, and I'm not worthy to have him enter under my roof, but he will. And I need to say, but only say the Word and my soul shall be healed. And it's almost as if we're also saying that prayer of the leper, you know, if you will, you can make me clean. You know, if you will, you can make me worthy. And it's a beautiful prayer. And again enters into this great story of Scripture, this great, great story.
- [16:23]
B
And.
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A
And I like what you said too, Michael. I think it's so rich here about the Messianic banquet that the rabbis had this idea that goes back to Jeremiah and Isaiah of a Messianic banquet. In other words, when the Messiah came and redeemed Israel, there would be a celebration of that victory with a great meal. And here what we get is Jesus suggesting that many of the sons of Israel may not be at that meal at the end of the day, but there might be Gentiles, and thank goodness that some Gentiles, because that gives us Gentiles some hope.
- [16:56]
B
Amen.
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A
That we can join the sons of Israel at this Messianic banquet.
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That's right.
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Which would be the Lamb's Supper.
- [17:01]
B
Yep. It's worth mentioning at this point. One of my favorite lines in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which talks about the sacraments, and it helps us understand how we can come to a deeper understanding of the sacraments. It says, this is Catechism number 1115. The Mysteries of Christ's life are the foundations of what he would henceforth dispense in the sacraments through the ministers of the Church. And then it quotes Leo the Great, for what was visible in our Savior has passed over into his mysteries. That's a term that's used for the sacraments. And so what Jesus does in his miracles is he makes visible what happens invisibly in the sacraments. So if you want to understand what going on in the sacraments, you got to look at the miracles of Jesus. And so, for example, Thomas Aquinas says that the healing of the paralytic. I'm sorry, the healing of the leper who's told he has to make restitution, go offer a gift. What does this point us to? It points us to the sacrament of confession, the story of the centurion. If only you say the word, my soul will be healed. Well, Jesus says, and one day people will come and sit at table with the saints. When do we enter into that reality? In the Eucharist. So we see we're right there, as you said. I loved how you said that. We're right there with the centurion. The miracles of Jesus show us what is invisible in the sacraments. Just as his servant was healed, we are healed in the Eucharistic celebration.
- [18:35]
A
It's such a beautiful faith we have. And I think that one of the things that, as you do more Bible study, I hope you'll see that Catholicism and what we believe in, the sacraments and practicing liturgy is all there in Scripture. And so scripture and liturgy fit hand in glove. And it's always a beautiful thing to see those connections. Should we move to the next story?
- [18:56]
B
Let's go on. Yes.
- [18:57]
A
Great. So Jesus is going to heal many, and he's going to start with Peter's mother in law who has a fever. And Jesus touched her hand again and the fever left her and she rose and began to serve him. And then that evening they brought to him many who were oppressed with demons. And he cast out spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. And this was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah. He took our illnesses and he bore our diseases. Now, that's a very interesting way that Matthew is looking at the fulfillment of that. You wouldn't expect how he bears our illnesses and our diseases with this kind of healing ministry. But let's talk about the significance of that.
- [19:39]
B
Well, the quotation there is from Isaiah 53 in the famous story of the suffering servant. And so what we see here is that Jesus is the one who takes upon himself ultimately our sin. And the sicknesses and the diseases that people are suffering are a kind of symbol, a kind of manifestation of the consequences of sin. Not suggesting, of course, that all these people were sick because they were sinners. But sickness enters into the world because of sin. And so Jesus is going to take on the causes of disease, sin as the suffering servant who Suffers on account of our sin.
- [20:20]
A
It's almost as if Jesus power to heal here, Matthew suggestion is because he's taking upon himself their afflictions. And so, of course. And that song that you mentioned, Michael, is the fourth servant song. And so this idea of Isaiah shows a suffering servant who will bear the illnesses and the disease and ultimately what's not said here, but it's going to point us in that direction that we'll see at the end of the story. Ultimately, the suffering servant not only bears the illnesses and diseases of Israel, but the sins of Israel. And that's unstated here, but I think that Matthew is setting us up for that. And so it gives us the power by which he's able to heal is that he's able to take the suffering upon himself, in a sense.
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B
That's right. All right, so moving on. Jesus talks about the importance of leaving all things and following him immediately. There's a story who comes up, a man who says, let me first go bury my father. And here we have allusions to Elijah who calls Elisha. Jesus is more important than Elijah. Right. There's an even greater urgency following him. Yeah.
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A
Because Elisha is told he can go back and see his father and mother and say goodbye to them before he goes to follow Elijah. But unlike following Elijah, following Jesus means you have to say, there can't be time.
- [21:48]
B
There can't be time. That's right. And then we move into the next story. This would now be the fourth miracle story will look at Jesus calming the storm. Now, we've already mentioned this a little bit before, but it's worth mentioning what happens here. Right. Jesus is in the boat, and there's a great storm that arose on the sea. The boat is being swamped by waves, but Jesus was asleep. Convenient. No, not so much for them. And they went to him and they woke him up saying, save us, Lord, we are perishing. And he said to them, why are you afraid, oh you of little faith? And then he rose and rebuked the wind and the sea. And there was great calm. And they marveled, saying, what sort of man is this that even the wind and sea obey him? And the reason they're shocked is because in the scriptures of Israel and For example, Psalm 107:29, it's the Lord who's able to calm the wind and the sea. So you don't see prophets calming the wind and the sea like Jesus does here. So it's a really an amazing story. And in fact, many commentators and even Jewish scholars recognize here Jesus is being portrayed as the Lord, as the God of Israel.
- [23:02]
A
I think that's undoubtedly the case, Michael, because if you think of the two parts of nature that are the hardest to control, wind and the waves of the sea. I mean, Even in our 21st century century, all of our modern technology, we can't do anything to say, you know what, we're going to bring the wind down tomorrow in its forecast by about five miles an hour.
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B
That would have been really convenient for the giants when they played in Candlestick Park. That wind was whipping.
- [23:29]
A
Exactly. Stop all that wind or bring it, you know, make the wind blow in Wiggly field when the cubs are up to bat. But this is the interesting thing. Window and waves are the two most uncontrollable forces in nature. And just think of a hurricane which puts both those forces together in the power. Right. We are humbled in that. And yet our Lord is. Who is this man? Well, he's not just a man that even the wind and the sea obey him. Right. And notice Jesus isn't interceding to God. He's commanding him directly. So you see Jesus as God.
- [24:08]
B
That's right. He's not praying, Lord, stop the wind like you would expect. Now, this story really blows me away. But we get to the final story here then in Matthew 8, which is Jesus healing two men with demons. And they come to the other side and then they go to the country of the Gadarenes and there you have two demoniacs. And in the country of the Gadarenes. This is really gentile territory. If you look on a map, you can see that Gadara is really deep now into Gentile territory. What they call the Decapolis.
- [24:41]
A
Yeah, the Decapolis, which is under Philip's jurisdiction. And there was a mix. There were some Jews there, but not many. And it was a. Although there was a lot of Jews, especially closer to the coast of Galilee, but it was a mixed place. And there was a lot of Gentiles in the Decapolis. Philip is probably his region divided by Herod the Great. He got the most Gentile dominated. And not that there wasn't a lot of Jews. There were, but even those Jews tended to be more what we would call worldly. Right. They were more accommodating to gentile worldly culture. And so that's going to be an issue that's going to be at play here.
- [25:28]
B
And so we see the man. There are two demoniacs here and they're coming out among the tombs. And so you see their association with Jesus Death, right? Just like we saw with the leper, for example. Or, you know, in the case of the other miracle, Jesus disease, they come out from the tombs so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, what have you to do with us, O Son of God? And have you come here to torment us before the time? Of course. Demons know that the judgment is coming, right? Their defeat is inevitable, right? On the last day they will be overthrown. And the demons begged him. And we read there was a herd of many pigs that was feeding at some distance from them. And the demons begged them, saying, if you cast us out, send us into the herd of pigs. Now, I don't want to bore you with all the details here, but it's significant that the Roman soldiers that were stationed in Palestine at This time, the 10th Legion, is associated with the image of a boar. And the rabbis saw this as highly significant, right, Because a boar, swine, they're unclean, right? And what happens is Jesus cast the demons into the pigs. Pigs were associated with the Romans because the boars especially, they would pillage, they'd plunder, right? They'd roam without any direction. Anyway, Jesus shows his defeat of them. He casts them into the demons, into the pigs, and they go and they drown into the waters. And we see Jesus here even more powerful than the powers of Satan and the pigs, which I think represent that Roman legion too. So he is the king of kings. So much more could be said, though.
- [27:13]
A
Yeah, we have the demoniac here, so you could call it a story of deviled ham. And it's strange that the demons want to go into the pigs rather than being cast out of these two individuals and thrown into a place of binding, you know, and then I think the demons. It's a matter of interpretation. Do the demons do their own trick where they cause the swine to be in a frenzy and to run off the cliff? In Mark's Gospel, in Mark, chapter five, he tells this story in more detail. And it seems that the demons want to take the herd off the cliff because then the villagers then ask Jesus to leave the neighborhood. And so the demons, in a sense, kind of win a victory here. But we'll come back to this story. But just to wrap it up, Jesus authority is once again manifest. He has the authority to clean the leper, the clean triumphing over the unclean. He has authority that even the centurion, who's an officer, a man of authority, recognizes that Jesus is a commander and he has true authority. And then we see that Jesus has authority that even the wind and the sea obey him. And now even the unclean spirits themselves, the demons, will obey Jesus. And so the picture that Matthew is painting of who Jesus is, is one who is more than Moses, more than a prophet of Israel. He is the Lord of Israel. He is the Lord of creation. He is the Lord over the good and bad spirits, and he is the Lord over clean and unclean. And so we come to this picture that is very moving about the power of our Lord. And we're going to pick that up in chapter nine. So next time, in preparation for our next Bible study, read the rest of chapter eight and read Matthew chapter nine and you'll see more mighty deeds of Jesus that illustrate his authority and that will elucidate that. I want to thank everybody for the wonderful letters we receive. Gratitude. I'm so glad that so many of you are benefiting and loved watching our forum now, which will be there's a new form now episode Monday through Friday, and we want to make that available to you. And of course, one day a week, we always do our Bible study on Matthew. So it's a joy for Michael and I to be with you and open up our Bibles and do a Bible study with you. Thank you for everybody who joined our Zoom meeting where there was question answer. We'll try to do that again. And we're just grateful that you support us through the mission circle. That's a great benefit to us. It allows us to have this ministry and to be free to serve you. So thank you so much for all you do and God bless you.