2/9/25 - Matthew 9: The Three Witnesses

Up to this point, Matthew has portrayed Jesus as the Greater Moses, ushering in a new Kingdom with a clarified law and a creed marked by love for God and neighbor. Now, Matthew begins to show Jesus as the Greater Joshua, our Savior who ushers us into the Promised Land, bringing us into the lived-out experience of the Kingdom in our midst.

After Jesus is rejected in the town in the Gadarenes, he goes to his new hometown, Caperanaum. Pretty soon after arriving, Jesus is brought a man who is paralyzed. Up to this point, Jesus’ ministry has been met with awe, amazement, and acceptance. But this begins to mark a shift in Jesus’ ministry and in Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as well. Whereas we had seen a scribe desiring to join Jesus, this attitude of tolerance, if not acceptance, by the religious leaders begins to take a different turn.

Matthew’s narrative here gives us back-to-back stories of ministry that accompany interactions with the Jewish religious leadership, culminating in a heart-wrenching assessment of the state of things. These stories contrast faith with doubt, joyful acceptance with dubious suspicion.

In this first scene, Jesus is met by a group bringing a paralyzed man to him for healing. Instead of outright healing him, Jesus announces, “Your sins are forgiven.” There were Scribes present who heard Jesus say this, and some of them had a pretty visceral reaction. Remember, the Scribes were the group of people responsible for preserving the Law, the history, and the religious rites during the Exile. The Scribes knew the Law like the back of their hands. They were no strangers to the reality that forgiveness of sin came only by God through the shedding of the blood of goats or lambs. Jesus is making a very serious claim by this announcement.

Jesus then does something to support this claim. He not only shows the Scribes that he knows their thoughts but invokes the title, “Son of Man,” which the Scribes would have known to be a title of the hoped-for Messiah. He heals the paralyzed man to prove that he has the power to forgive.

We might assume that the Scribes went away angry and humiliated, but Matthew doesn’t claim this. He relates that the crowd was amazed and gave glory to God for giving the authority to forgive sins to mankind. Luke also shares this optimistic view that it wasn’t just the people who were amazed and gave glory to God, but the Scribes as well. Something new and different was beginning to take shape, transitioning from forgiveness by the blood of animals to forgiveness by a gracious word.

The unfortunate part of this tale is that the scribes who reacted so strongly, though they knew the law, weren’t expecting this. The prophets had spoken of a time when forgiveness of sin would no longer be gained by sacrifice, when the law of God would be written on the hearts of the people, and when the Messiah, the Lord’s Servant, would walk among them. Perhaps what's sadder still is the fact that the people are praising God for the authority that He had given to man. Truly, the words of John ring true: “He came to His own, but His own did not know Him.”

In the second scene, we see Jesus calling a tax collector as one of His disciples. As if this is not bad enough, He then goes to Matthew’s house and sits down to eat with other tax collectors and various social outcasts. The Scribes had been responsible for preserving the Law and the traditions, but the Pharisees exemplified them, added to them, and enforced them. To avoid breaching a Law, the Pharisaical order added 10 additional rules to ensure that the people would not be guilty of going near “the line.” Outward appearances were very important. Paul writes to us to avoid even the appearance of evil. The Pharisees took this to the ‘enth degree.

So when Jesus is found to be sitting to eat with tax collectors, the Pharisees saw this as a breach of tradition, a breach of conduct, and perhaps even sin by association. Jesus gently rebukes their wayward legalism by announcing that the healthy don’t need doctors, and the righteous don’t need the guiding hand of a rabbi. It’s the sinners who need righteous influence; it’s the sick who need ministration.

He challenges them concerning their over heightened value of tradition by quoting the prophet Hosea, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” A quote that Hosea announced as a judgment against the Israelites’ tendency toward the right form of worship with no love in their hearts. And while this is going on, some disciples of John question Jesus on the tradition of fasting, a twice a week occurrence during which it was also tradition to give money to the poor. Jesus’ answer to them with the allegories about unshrunken cloth and new wine was to say that traditional forms without devotion to God and others are self-deceptive and make things worse in the end.

Before the Pharisees have time to react to Jesus and before He’s even finished, a synogogue leader comes and kneels before Jesus, asking for healing for his daughter. Jesus’ words to the Pharisees were offensive enough, but the synogogue leader kneeling to Jesus would have been a downright slap in the face to them. The Scribes, the Pharisees, and the Synagogue Leaders were the trinity of the preservation and enforcement of the Law and traditions. The primary function of the synagogue leader beyond the physical preparation of the synagogue was to sit in and listen carefully to the teaching to ensure that what was being said was accurate. If they caught wind of error or deception, they would interrupt and, in extreme cases, throw the errant speaker out. They were no simpletons nor was their positition a small one. The Pharisees, having just been told that their traditions are a facade to hide their straying hearts, are now witnessing a respected leader who’s trained to notice and act against error, pay homage to Jesus, and ask him for help as if He’s one of the prophets of old.

Jesus follows the man, and it’s easy to surmise that the pharisees followed behind. They were not yet done with Jesus. Along the way, Jesus is accosted by a woman who has had an issue of bleeding for some years. Yet another strike against Jesus. He was touched by someone unclean, and instead of excusing himself from entering the synagogue leader’s home based on being unclean by contact with uncleanness, he not only announces her as healed (an announcement only the priest's were permitted to give) but he enters the house of the leader making it, in the minds of the Pharisees, and all within unclean.

Jesus brings the little girl back to life, a very exciting event that spread all around, and the response of those who heard was to come to Jesus for healing. The blind men sought Jesus and were restored their sight. The demon man who was mute was brought to Jesus, and He drove the demon out. The crowd who had been around him perhaps since he healed the paralyzed man were once again struck with amazement at all Jesus had done. And yet, Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees' hard hearts proved true. Rather than recognize the wonder and the power of God on display around them, they were hyper fixated on the fact that Jesus was going about it in the wrong way, according to their standards. Instead of responding to Jesus with awe and praise for God like the crowds around them, they resorted to bitter guile and going after Jesus’ reputation. As the crowd gave credit to God for these wonderful works, the Pharisees justified themselves by brushing it all off to the work of demons.

Of the three categories of leadership in the Law and traditions, the Pharisees were the head. The Pharisaical order was started to stand in the place of Moses in terms of the interpretation and enforcement of the Law. They were the shepherds of Israel. And what we see throughout the narrative of this chapter is that the shepherds were not doing their jobs. Jesus went throughout Galilee, visiting towns and villages, healing, teaching, and proclaiming the Gospel, and His assessment of the crowds surrounding Him was that they were helpless and as good as shepherdless. Jesus instructs His disciples to pray for workers in the bountiful harvest.

The crowds in Capernaum recognized Jesus as having power and authority from God. The Scribes there recognized it, the synagogue leader yielded to that recognition, and yet the shepherds of Capernaum, those who should have recognized who Jesus was the most clearly, rejected him out of envy, spite, and bruised egos. May the Lord send more workers into the harvest, and may He preserve us from such pitfalls.