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Matthew 9:1-26
00:29:54
Dr. Tim Gray and Dr Michael Barber unpack Chapter 9 of the Gospel of Matthew.
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Welcome to Form Now, I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute. And joining me today is Dr. Michael Barber, who is a professor of scripture here at the Augusta Institute. And we're going to continue our Bible study on the Gospel of Matthew. We invite you to grab your Bible and we'll be using the Augustan Bible, which is the ESV Standard edition, Catholic edition, and it's a wonderful Bible translation. We hope you can join us. And we left off last time, and we covered Matthew chapter eight, and we talked about how chapters eight and nine are a particular section in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus does ten mighty deeds. We call them miracles. But miracle isn't a biblical word. It's more of an enlightenment word that we use. The idea of a miracle where you stop nature in its tracks. Well, that's not how the ancient people described it, especially the Jews. They talked about dunami deeds of power might, because there's nothing more natural than that the maker of nature commands nature to obey him. And so it's a very different worldview, very different mindset for these mighty deeds. Well, Jesus does 10 mighty deeds. And we talked last time that 10 in the Bible and Jewish culture is a symbol of authority. That's why you have the Ten Commandments, the authoritative commandments. Well, Jesus does ten mighty deeds, and they illustrate Jesus authority. We saw that with the healing of the leper, where the leper says, if you will, you can make me clean. And then the centurion who comes, who has a servant who is ill, and he says, I'm a man of authority. And I say to one, go and he goes. I say to another, come and he comes. So he recognizes Jesus authority. And then Jesus is astounded by his faith and then heals his servant. And all these great scenes, we see Jesus commanding the wind and the waves with calming the storm with peace boat. So now we're moving into chapter nine. So we're halfway through this section, Michael, with these ten great mighty deeds. And you want to just maybe start off with the first couple verses in the transition. I guess Jesus, just at the end of chapter eight, exorcised some demons, right? And he did that in that region of the Gerasenes, in the region that was part of the Decapolis, which is Philip's territory. And now Jesus gets in the boat and goes to the other side.
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The other side. And he's going to, it says here, his own city. Now, in Mark's version, it's Capernaum, right? And so it seems that even though Jesus was Brought up in Nazareth, Capernaum is really the center of his ministry. This is really where most of the stuff happens. And it's pretty cool. We've actually discovered the remains of the city of Capernaum. You and I were there last year and it's an amazing place. We go on and we read that, behold, some people brought to him a paralytic lying on a bed. And when Jesus saw, and I like this, when he saw their faith. So notice that it's not simply the man who is in need of the healing, whose faith is in view. It's also the people who bring him to Jesus. He saw their faith and he said to the paralytic, take heart, my son, it's very tender. Your sins are forgiven. Now this is sort of a strange scene, right? Why is Jesus forgiving his sins? It seems like they're bringing a paralyzed man to Jesus with hopes that he will heal his physical ailment. So here we're going to see Jesus show us something. And that is what his physical miracles do is they make visible what is invisible. And that's going to be a major theme that gets played out in this miracle. And of course, doctors of the church, like Thomas Aquinas point out that here we have an image of what happens in the Church's celebration of baptism. You know, when my son Simon Peter, my youngest, was baptized, he hadn't earned it. It wasn't like my wife and I sat around and we said, well, you know, Simon's finally sleeping through the night. He's not waking us up at 3 o' clock in the morning. He's not so much of a pagan anymore. You know, let's reward him, let's give him baptism. No, when we bring our children to the baptismal fund, the parents supply the faith, right, for the child. And so we see something analogous here. And behold, some of the scribes, it's.
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The faith of his friends that wins the merit and moves God's heart to bless and forgive his sins.
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That's right.
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The faith of the parents is God takes as credit to say, all right, this child can enter into the family of God.
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That's right. Because salvation isn't just about an individual affair. There's an ecclesial dimension to that as well. Right? Anyway, we go on and we see and behold some of the scribes said to themselves, this man is blaspheming. Now why do they say Jesus is blaspheming? Well, it seems that Jesus has taken to himself a prerogative that belongs only to God. Namely, to forgive sins. This is remarkable that Jesus says that. Now, some people like to play that down. Some people say, well, no, you know, the priest would pronounce forgiveness of sins. Jesus is just acting like a priest here. But the next line makes that impossible to hold, because then we read, but Jesus knowing their thoughts, you know, like priests can read people's minds. No, clearly, Jesus is being presented here as God himself, right? And so. But Jesus knowing their thoughts, you think of 1st Samuel 16, only the Lord sees the heart of man. Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier to say your sins are forgiven, or to say, rise and walk, but that you may know that the Son of man has authority to forgive sins. And then the scene is interrupted here. He then said to the paralytic, I like that. This is in all the versions of the story. Jesus is interrupted. The narrator interrupts. He then turned. So you get a little bit of a visual visualization of what's going on here. He then said to the paralytic, rise, pick up your bed and go home. And he rose and went home. And when the crowd saw it, they were afraid and they glorified God, who had given such authority to men. So I like this expression here. What is easier to say? It's kind of a funny line, right? Because of course, we all know which one is easier to say, right?
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No, if he says, your sins are forgiven, well, there's no empirical proof or disproof of that, right? So they're saying, anybody can say your sins are forgiven. So Jesus says, okay, what do you think is easier to say, your sins are forgiven or rise and walk? Well, of course, rise and walk, that's going to be empirically demonstratable.
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And it is. And so the man rises up, and that demonstrates what the physical healing makes visible. The invisible healing, the invisible grace that's given to this man is made manifest in the physical healing. And so the Church explains. We talked about this last time in the Catechism of the Catholic church, quotes Pope St Leo the Great, that the miracles of Jesus make visible what is invisible essentially in the Church's sacraments. And so with that in mind, it's interesting, Jesus says to the man, rise, agero is the Greek word there. And it's interesting if you go back to colossians, in Colossians 2, that word is used in connection to baptism, right? So where is it that we rise up to? New life in baptism. So what happens physically to this man who is paralyzed? Right. He's now, able to stand up and walk is what happens to us in the sacraments, especially in baptism, where without God's grace, we're paralyzed. We're unable to walk in the way of the Lord, but with the grace of baptism, we're able to stand up and walk in Him.
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You know, there's so many beautiful echoes here of scripture passages, and I think of this great confrontation with the scribes and the Pharisees. And Jesus says, you know, so that you may know. And that phrase is used in the story of the Exodus repeatedly, when Moses and Aaron are sent before Pharaoh. And, you know, and what happens is with every plague, especially the early plagues, you have this challenge where Pharaoh is disbelieving and he's not believing that Moses is the messenger from God and that God has a message for Pharaoh and that he should obey it. And so Moses before, for example, the first plague, is so that you may know that there is a God that you know, the God of the Hebrews is the God in heaven above, and earth below the Nile shall turn to blood so that you may know. And so that refrain gets echoed during the plagues, especially in the early plagues. And for Jesus to say to the scribes and Pharisees, so that you may know, he is basically saying, I'm the new Moses doing a new exodus here. And God's, you know, God is active here, but that means that the scribes and the Pharisees are cast in the role of Pharaoh. Right? And so that I wanted to say that so that you may know what's going on in the biblical narrative here, which is a drama of a new kind of exodus. There's a new manifestation of God's power at work, and how will we respond?
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And, of course, that theme is something that the church has picked up in her own teaching, Right. That miracles are what we call a motive of creation credibility. Right. What we have in the gospel is the proclamation of supernatural truth that we could not come to know using our reason alone. Right? We have to go beyond what just the evidence can tell us, right? What our natural reason can tell us in fact and accept supernatural truths. God is three persons. Here we see Jesus acting in a way that only God himself is able to act. But we know the Son of Man is deceiving, extinct from the Father. Miracles are what prompt us to be able to look deeper. And so, not just with Pharaoh, but throughout the history of the church, it's always been recognized that miracles are a way to help us come to a recognition that there is something Authentic here in the work of, in particular, Jesus Christ.
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Yeah. I love those modes of credibility, Michael, because as we reflect on these scenes, it's to build our faith, right? It's to build our faith up so that we have a deeper trust in God. Now, part of what Jesus says there in verse six, you know, after he says, so that you may know, and then he says that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. And so Jesus refers to himself under this title, Son of Man. And I think, Michael, this confuses a lot of people because they think, well, why is Jesus, if he's the second person of the Trinity? Why does Jesus refer to himself all the time as Son of Man? And there's a reason why he refers to himself as Son of Man. It goes back to the prophets, to an ancient prophecy. You want to talk about that?
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Yes. This goes back all the way to the book of Daniel. In Daniel, chapter seven, we read about how in the future day, the kingdom of God is going to be given to the saints. And that coincides with the coming of a figure who rides on the clouds and is presented. And that figure is identified as the Son of Man. Now, oh, my goodness, there's been so much ink spilled over this passage. So much we could say about it. We'll talk more about it as we move on. But one thing to highlight, and that is in Jesus Day, it was understood that the Son of Man figure had a number of different implications, right? So we read books like one, Enoch. In First Enoch, the Son of man exists before he arrives on Earth, and he's hidden by God and then he's made known. And we see that idea in the Gospels that Jesus is revealed. St. Paul uses that imagery in particular, and so you definitely see that theme there. But something else that's interesting about the Son of Man is he rides on clouds. In the Old Testament, only God rides on clouds. And so we actually have some versions of Daniel 7 in Greek where the Son of Man doesn't come to the ancient of days, but he comes as the Ancient of Days, which is really interesting. And then finally, the last thing we'll say is the Son of Man also represents all of the saints. He, like kings in the ancient world, represented all of their people. So in Daniel 7, the son of man only comes after we read about these four beasts that come up out of the sea. And the four beasts are understood to be four kings, but they're also described as four kingdoms, so they could be four kings. The kings represent four kingdoms. And ancient Jews understood The four kingdoms to be Babylon, Medo, Persia, together the Medes and the Persians, the Greeks and then the Romans. So the Son of Man appears and receives the kingdom at the time of the fourth kingdom, which Jews thought as they saw this as Rome. And so this is why in Jesus day, Messianic hopes were at a fever pitch. The time is fulfilled. Jesus will say in the Gospels what time? Prophetic timetable. The fourth beast is upon us. Rome is at hand. And so the Son of Man is that figure who receives the kingdom. So he's a king, but he also represents the whole kingdom. And so the Son of Man is identified with the saints.
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That's a great summary of the possible Son of Man traditions.
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Yes.
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You know, and I think for people, first off, I'll just say for people who don't know, Enoch was a book that you refer to that is not in the Bible, but it's an ancient Jewish writing from this time. So it gives you a perspective of what a lot of pious Jews were thinking and expecting in terms of reflecting on the Book of Daniel and this idea that there is this important Son of Man who's going to be a messianic figure, as you said, king. And I love how you mentioned that he's a king and yet he also represents the people. And so it's if these beasts represent gentile kingdoms, then who does the Son of Man represent as a nation? It's Israel, because Israel is the true humanity. That's right, you know, the authentic humanity. And of course the king, the Son of Man represents the Messiah who will lead Israel as well as Israel. So when Jesus refers to himself as Son of Man, it's not a self effacing kind of aw shucks humble title, is it?
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I'm just a little Son of Man over here.
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He's referring to himself as the Son of Man, who is the Messiah of Israel, for those who have ears to hear.
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Right.
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And he's also saying that, and what I love too is in Daniel, as you mentioned, you know, the Son of Man comes on the clouds, which is remarkable, as you mentioned, and is presented before the ancient of days. But here Jesus says so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority earth. And here Jesus is giving a little twist to Daniel 7. Right. Because in Daniel, the Son of man appears as taken up in a sense on the clouds before God. But here Jesus is saying that the Son of Man is on earth. And so he's saying he's the Son of Man. And that by the way, in that vision in Daniel 7, as you know, the Son of Man is given all authority. And here Jesus talks about so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority forgive sins. So you know, God, the ancient of days, gives the Son of Man all authority and dominion and power and kingdom. So Jesus is saying, so that you may know that the Son of Man, who I am, has authority to forgive sins on earth.
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That's right.
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Right. And so this sign that he performs of this healing of the, of the paralytic is to signify that Jesus is the true Son of Man and that he has the authority on earth. And so that's remarkable because he's not just proving he has authority to forgive sins, he's really proving who Jesus is. He's establishing his identity as the Son of Man.
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I'm so glad you want to talk about the Son of Man, because it's actually Jesus favorite self designation for himself, Right. He calls himself the Son of Man more than any other title, doesn't call himself the Prince of Peace. He doesn't call himself the Lord here. Throughout the Gospels, the term he uses more than anything else is Son of Man. And in fact, no one else ever calls him the Son of Man. When you get to the Book of.
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Acts, you never see Peter doesn't go up and say, hey, Son of Man, I have a question for you. Or you know, there's not a scribe who says, son of Man, I have a question for you. You're right. No one addresses him as that tells us how significant this title is.
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This is very significant for Jesus. And yet how often do we talk about Jesus as the Son of Man? Hardly ever. Right. So there is a gap there between what Jesus thinks is important and what we seem to latch onto. And I think part of the reason is a lot of people don't know that Old Testament backdrop. One more thing about the Son of man in Daniel 7, he's one like a son of man, which implies that he's more than just a Son of man. And that's who Jesus is.
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Yeah. You know, it's so important because I think a lot of people miss this in a lot of modern translations, right? Because in the desire for a lot of translations to be politically correct, like the NRSV as an example, they want to be politically correct, but then they translate it as a human being.
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As a human being. One like a human being.
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One like a human being. And then when you hear Daniel 7 and it's one like a human being, and then, you know, then you don't catch the Christological connection with Jesus with those inclusive translations. That's one of the problems with these overly inclusive translations. Sure, is you lose the title that Jesus is using for himself, and something's lost there. But we've got the esv, so we don't have to worry about that in our translation.
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All right, we better move on, because we've got not much time left. And we've only talked about the first eight verses. So we've talked a bit about Jesus calling of Matthew. We talked about that when we started our Bible study.
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We did.
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So I propose we move on and talk about the next story, which is when the disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus and they say, why do we and the Pharisees fast? But your disciples do not fast. And Jesus said, can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch would look ugly. No, that's not what he says. For the patch would tear away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is the. The skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed, but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved. Thoughts about that?
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Well, you know, I always think when they come up to Jesus and they say, why don't your disciples fast? Are they saying that Peter's fat? Peter and John look a little thicker on the rim there.
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So how do they know that they're not fat?
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Exactly. Exactly. But I love how Jesus then responds with, you know, a wedding feast, because a Jewish wedding feast. A lot of people don't know this. A Jewish wedding feast lasted seven days because seven was the number that signified covenants, and a marriage is a covenant. And so the idea is that if you're going to celebrate this marriage, you're going to celebrate it for seven days, which is why they've run out of wine.
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When.
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When Jesus invites his friends at Cana. But that's a different story for a different gospel. But the idea here is that when you are invited to a wedding feast, you celebrate for seven days. Now, the Pharisees had the custom of fasting two days a week. But if you were invited to a wedding feast, you were exempt from fasting that week. And so Jesus is asked the question, why don't your disciples fast? Well, Jesus is going to use a custom, a loophole that they're very aware of that when you're invited to a wedding feast, you can't fast when you're with the bridegroom. And Jesus is going to say he's the bridegroom. Now that's going to be very significant. Again, Jesus just called himself the Son of man, but what does it mean that he's calling himself the bridegroom? Michael?
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Well, it is significant that in the Old Testament, of course, it's the Lord, the God of Israel, who's identified as the bridegroom. So here we.
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It was Isaiah 63, I think.
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Of course. Yeah. And Isaiah in particular. But we see this in other places as well. In the book of Ezekiel.
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Hosea.
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Hosea, absolutely. So the fact that Jesus is identifying himself as the bridegroom may be quite significant here and maybe pointing to the same idea that we saw in the earlier scene where he not only forgave sins, but knew people's thoughts. Who is this man? Who does he think he is? Moreover, what's interesting is, okay, so there is a custom of fasting, and that fasting is rooted in Old Testament traditions. It was appropriate. In fact, it was actually mandated that Jews fasted on certain days of the year. So what the Pharisees were trying to do was lead Israel into a kind of repentance which they hoped would trigger God's restoration of his people.
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But what's interesting, I can't help this digression. I don't know what you think of this, but, you know, part of that Jewish, the Pharisees tradition of fasting two days a week is it started even with reference back to the prophet Zechariah, that the fasting two days a week came after the temple was destroyed and God's spirit left the temple. And so they're mourning the absence of God in the temple. And by fasting they're reminding God that you've yet to come back. Even though Ezra and Nehemiah resettled the temple, God's spirit hadn't visibly manifested itself and come back and returned to the temple. And, and so the fasting, if the fasting here is the fasting for mourning God's absence in the temple, the fact that Jesus is going to suggest that his disciples need not fast because the bridegroom is with them. And if the bridegroom is Yahweh, he's saying they don't need to fast right now because I'm with them. In other words, Jesus marks the return of God's presence.
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Yeah, that'll be a major theme and already has been. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us from the very beginning. But what I find interesting, where I wanted to go with that, was that they were deriving these traditions of fasting from a desire to keep to the righteousness that's prescribed by the Torah. It's interesting that Jesus goes on to say, no one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. The patch tears away from the garment and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into new wineskins. Now, what's interesting is Jesus is saying, when the bridegroom is taken away, then they will fast. And it seems that the righteousness that Jesus is talking about pertains not simply to the Torah, but to new covenant righteousness. When the bridegroom is taken away after his death, after his resurrection, then there will be ascetical practices that will be appropriate to the new covenant. But here's the thing. You can't. Thomas Aquinas writes this in his commentary. You can't apply the standards of the new covenant to the old creation. It'll tear apart the old creation. Why? Because what Jesus is going to expect of us in the new covenant goes beyond what is expected in the Torah. It's going to go beyond. It's going to transcend the righteousness demanded of the old creation. So it's not appropriate to impose that now. That's why if it's put into old wineskins, it will break. So Jesus shows tremendous pastoral wisdom in teaching the disciples. He doesn't impose upon them the fasts. He doesn't impose upon them the ascetical requirements that, well, later Christian tradition will embrace. Why? Because they're not ready for it yet. Right. And so Jesus respects where they are in their. In their state. It's interesting. In the Old Testament, this idea of a garment being torn is linked to the idea of creation. In Isaiah, chapter 51, the creation wears out like an old garment. Right. Jesus is going to bring about a new creation. But in order for that new creation takes take place, we're going to need new wineskins. We're going to need to be transformed. And in fact, Jesus is going to provide not just new wineskins, but new wine.
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The Last Supper of the Eucharist. Yeah. No, this is a great illusion to anticipate where that new creation is going to be founded, which is at the Last Supper and at the table there. We want to talk about this. I think we've got time for one more scene.
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One more scene.
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The hemorrhaging woman.
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Right. It's a Dual story. Right? So it's a 2, 4. We got a double play here. Right. Where we've got. The ruler comes and asks Jesus to heal his daughter who just. Or save it, raise his daughter from the dead. She just died. And as Jesus is on the way to heal or to bring, to see this daughter who's died, a woman comes and seeks to touch Jesus garment. She grabs his tassels, his tzitzit, his tassels that Jews would wear in accordance with the Torah.
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Those tassels were a sign of the commandments of the Torah.
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That's correct.
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By seeing it, they were to remember the law. And by not forgetting the law, they are to keep the law. That's the Jewish custom. So if you go to Jerusalem today, you'll see a lot of the Hasidic Jews and they have tassels.
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Scholars also recognize it falls in a place in numbers where the priesthood is discussed. And in particular, you're supposed to wear blue, which the priests are also supposed to wear. It's interesting. In Ezekiel, chapter 44, we read that in the future day when the Messiah comes, when God renews his people, the priests are to keep their garments locked up, lest they communicate holiness to the people through their garments. We see that's what's going to happen in the New Covenant priesthood. Jesus communicates holiness. He communicates wholeness through his garments. Because he is a priest of the New Covenant, the new wine is being given through him and healing is coming through his ministry.
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It's a great way to read it in light of this last story. Keep going.
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Yeah. Well, okay. So then Jesus, of course, is interrupted. You can imagine what the ruler is thinking. We got to get to my house. My daughter is dying. Come on, Jesus, what are you taking? There's an allusion here to the story of Elisha, right? Elisha heals the Shunammite's dead son in the Old Testament. And in particular, as they're going to the house of the dead child, Elisha says, don't be interrupted. Don't let anyone get in your way.
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Right.
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There's great urgency. What's wrong with Jesus here? And he's interrupted. He stops because Jesus has more power than Elisha, right? And he is able to deliver healing by just a word. Where Elisha has to go through this whole process of laying down on the boy and trying to communicate life to him again.
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It's so powerful. I love that idea that as you mentioned, that Michael, that Elijah is concerned about Elisha, Elisha is worried about the time frame because he's got to get there before he dies. Jesus, he's the Lord of life and death, and he doesn't have to rush. You know, he can deal with this. Whether dead or alive, he can bring life. And it's such a powerful scene. You know, we're just about out of time here, which is amazing. And I just want to mention that this scene, there's an image that is used in the original catechism. When Cardinal Ratzinger was in charge of the catechism of the Catholic Church, he had this scene from the catacombs of this hemorrhaging woman reaching out and touching the hem of Jesus garment, and power comes forth from Jesus and heals her. And that image is the doorway into the second pillar of the catechism, which is on the sacraments and liturgy. And the idea is that, as Michael mentioned earlier, that the invisible realities going back to the. The healing of the paralytic, that the invisible realities of Jesus healing our soul, which we can't see and oftentimes we can't feel, and yet it's real, it's a spiritual reality. And these physical healings of the hemorrhaging woman or of the paralytic are proving that God's word that heals our heart and heals us of our sin is just as powerful. And so I want us, as a takeaway, that, to just be grateful for the power of the sacraments that we have, and they might be harder to avail ourselves of right now because of some of the challenges going on in the world, but we want to avail ourselves of confession. We want to avail ourselves of the Eucharist, because if we receive them with faith, the faith of the hemorrhaging woman, we will have the power of God and the grace of God flow into our lives, which is transformative. And so we hope that the word of God is flowing into your heart right now and that grace comes with that and that you are encouraged in your faith by the credibility of the faith as we see these great signs. Jesus is performing. And we'll continue in this narrative next time. And I want to thank everybody who supports us and is a mission partner with us, with the mission circle. Thank you so much for your support. And we pray that the Lord bless and keep you and thank you for being with us. God bless.