3/9/25 - Matthew 12: Out of the Heart
In Matthew 12, Jesus and the disciples are back together. We’re not told exactly where they are. The context of chapters 10-11 seems to be that they have traveled separately throughout the Galilean countryside. The context of 12-13 seems to have them back together again in Capernaum. Not too long before this time, Jesus had a run-in with the Pharisees when Jesus was eating with Matthew and his friends. He called them out for following a religious form while having hearts far from God, set on injustice, and oppressive towards the innocent. They followed Him around, heard Him teach, saw a girl raised to life, saw the blind healed, watched a demon possessed man who was mute delivered and begin to speak, and rather than take to heart Jesus' admonition, despite all they had seen and heard, their response to Jesus was to slander Him and accuse Him of being demon possessed.
Jesus is back and it’s like they’ve been waiting for Him. They were so self-righteous and childish that despite Jesus being gone for weeks, perhaps months, they would not let the bruising of their egos at Jesus' correction go. Instead, they were waiting for Him, followed Him around again, and once again did everything they could to slander Jesus. Now, if you are sitting in your seats wondering at the audacity of the Pharisees, I want you to take a moment and think about this: how do you treat people when you believe you are right and there are no immediate consequences for your words? How easy is it to get onto social media or put decals on our cars, to slander, demean, and tear down people we disagree with? Or worse, what about when someone we disagree with offers an argument that turns out to be right? Do we tend to submit to the rightness of their words? Or do we tend to reject even the good they have to say because, generally speaking, they believe contrary to us? We have to be careful when reading passages about the Pharisees. Often, we stand off to the sidelines booing the actions of the Pharisees, not realizing that Jesus’ correction and rebuke so often applies to us, perhaps even more so to us, and not just the Pharisees.
This is how I know the Pharisees were following Him around. On a Sabbath day, just to make sure that this unruly Jesus would just follow the rules for once, they watched Jesus and the disciples traveling through grainfields, and were close enough to observe the disciples pick some grain. Wheat grows anywhere between 2-4 feet high. What your hands are doing in the middle of a grainfield wouldn’t be obvious if you weren’t close by. The Pharisees of Capernaum were just waiting for Jesus to slip up so that they could make a stink about it. They see the disciples picking grain and they pounce on Jesus. “Don’t you know your disciples are breaking the law?” Jesus' response is to tell them once again by quoting Hosea that their religion is meaningless and empty because their hearts are far from God. He then makes an extremely shocking statement: “The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.” Without directly saying the words, Jesus just proclaimed to the Pharisees, “I am God, I decide the rules.”
Jesus goes to the Synagogue and the Pharisees follow Him there. A man who has a shriveled hand is there. Jesus does not initiate this healing. Rather, the Pharisees interrupt the worship service to challenge Jesus. You can almost hear the snideness in their voices as they ask, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” This is a direct challenge to Jesus’ earlier proclamation. “Ok Jesus, if you make the rules then tell us, is it lawful to heal?” They thought they had Him. In the oral traditions they had what was called the 39 Melakhot. These were categories of creative activities that were prohibited under Sabbath law. The practice of healing was prohibited because the grinding of herbs and the application of salves was considered work. All forms of healing were prohibited, not by the law, but by tradition, just to make sure that potential vagueness of the Law was taken into account so that the Law wouldn’t be broken. So when the Pharisees are trying to entrap Jesus, they were splitting hairs.
Jesus meets their challenge with a challenge of his own. “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?” The answer is, of course, yes. The Law and the oral traditions make allowances for breaking the Sabbath rules if it saves life. Jesus then extends that reasoning to say that a person is more deserving of salvation than a sheep is and that it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. To take things further, the word that Jesus uses for “good” is the Greek word καλός (kah-los), a word that is associated with the highest form of virtue in Grecian culture. It is a word that describes an action that is pleasing to God and beneficial to others. And so, humiliating the Pharisees by sound reasoning, keeping the Law while trampling their burdensome tradition, Jesus tells the man with the shriveled hand to stretch it out, and as he does so, his hand is healed.
Once again, what is the response of the Pharisees? They see a shriveled hand heal on its own accord, no tricks, not gimmicks, a true miracle, and their response is to nurture their bruised egos with thoughts of murder. They are so sure in themselves that rather than listen to reason, rather than take into consideration the miracle that took place in proof of that reason, they despise the fact that they’ve been corrected, they hate the fact that their authority is being challenged, and since they can’t seem to get the upper hand on this Jesus to silence Him, they decide to take council amongst themselves on how to get rid of Jesus.
How often are we the same? How often are our egos bruised, our motives challenged, and our thinking critiqued, and we lash out in anger and bitterness rather than to receive correction? How often do we seclude ourselves into echo chambers where we only listen to those who agree with us? And how often do we let bitterness drive our actions to try to deplatform, silence, or perhaps even get rid of those who disagree with us? It’s so easy for us in our times to act like the Pharisees in Capernaum and yet be blind to the fact.
Knowing that the Pharisees were plotting to kill Jesus, Jesus leaves the privacy of the Synagogue and gets out in public where He is likely immediately surrounded by a large crowd. Jesus continues His problematic ministry by healing everyone who was brought to Him by the crowds. The Pharisees followed Jesus into the crowds and it’s almost certain that their anger and outrage only increased. As Jesus casts out a demon that made a man mute and blind, the crowds begin to talk amongst themselves, “Could this be the Son of David?” First Jesus calls Himself the Lord of the Sabbath and now the crowds are suggesting that Jesus might be the Messiah. The Pharisees have had it. They cry out for everyone to hear, “It’s only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this man drives out demons.”
Jesus confronts the Pharisees quite strongly. He shows them by solid reasoning that it makes no rational sense for demons to cast out other demons, that a demon can only be cast out by the Spirit of God. He calls them a brood of vipers to drive the point that they’ve been following Him around waiting for their chance to strike. He makes it clear to them that they speak evil because they are evil, with reasons like, “Make the tree bad and the fruit will be bad,” and “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of,” and “how can you who are evil say anything good?” Jesus doesn’t hold back. He warns them that they will stand before God and give an account for every unproductive word. And to hammer the nail into the coffin, He warns them that every evil word spoken against the Father and the Son will be let go, but accusations against the Holy Spirit for wrongdoing will not be overlooked.
What a sobering lesson for us all. The word used to describe “empty” words means idle, lazy, or unproductive. How easy it is to speak flippantly and casually. How easy and unthinking it is to make a crude joke or let slip a foul word. How easy it is to get into an argument, and from an undisciplined tongue let harsh words come out that are better left unsaid. How easy it is to be a skeptic, a slanderer, a gossip, or to speak evil of someone casually. Especially with the shield of technology allowing us by way of screens to hide behind distance and lack of consequences to speak more freely than we ought.
At the forefront of Jesus' confrontation of the Pharisees is an implicit affirmation to the Crowd’s musings. Could this be the Messiah? The Son of David? The One who is to receive the Kingdom of Israel and restore the nation to its standing before God and mankind? The Pharisees are aware of the fact that Jesus did not refute the crowd in His rebuke of themselves. Perhaps some of them are struck to the heart. But the Pharisees are studied and careful men. And so are the Scribes. So some members of each group say to Jesus, “We want to see a sign from you.”
Perhaps it is right to hear the accusation in these words. But I don’t think they were accusatory because only some Pharisees and only some of the Scribes made this request. I think that those who wanted the sign were genuinely desirous of it, but because of the conflict within their hearts, the war between two masters, and the hardness of heart that had built up by degrees, there is something wrong about their request and Jesus calls it out for what it is. It’s so easy to read Jesus' response with some heat. Perhaps those who dared such a request were genuinely conflicted and wanted some assurance. Perhaps they were being accusatory. Perhaps Jesus did speak confrontationally. He certainly did when reproving the lot for their empty words. Yet there’s something about this part of the passage that makes me think something has shifted in the conversation.
I see the group of Pharisees shocked and silenced, perhaps fuming in their indignation. But a few brave and conflicted souls venture to request, “If you are who you say you are, just prove it. I need to know.” And I see Jesus’ response, truthful yet compassionate, “a twisted and adulterous generation asks for a sign. But only one will be given.” The sign of Jonah, the sign of a man descending into death and ascending into life again. One greater than Jonah is here and you don’t recognize Him. One greater than Solomon is here and you don’t recognize Him. The evidence is in front of you but the wickedness and twistedness of your heart prevent you from seeing it. When a person is delivered from a demon, if that person is not filled with something else, the demon will gather others and make the person’s condition worse than before. What Jesus is saying to those who have asked for a sign is that they have everything they need right in front of them now. And if they miss it, if they pass it up and aren’t filled up with Him, their momentary release from their bitterness, accusations, and hard-heartedness, will result in them being even more deeply entrenched in it.
How often are we on the precipice of indecision, desperately desiring God to be real, the words of Christ to be true, and yet we are so twisted by our divided loyalties that we don’t quite go all in. Or perhaps we are twisted by our sins, our bitterness, our anger, or our pride. Perhaps like the Pharisees of Capernaum we are too busy nurturing bruised egos and harboring feelings of offense to see what’s right in front of us.
As if to drive His point home, Jesus' mother and brothers, blocked by the crowd, send word to Jesus that they wish to speak to Him. And He responds to the messenger, with His words directed towards the crowds, perhaps specifically the ones who had asked for a sign, “whoever does the will of my Father is my brother and sister and mother.” How do we escape the twistedness and wickedness of our hearts? We do the will of the Father, which is to believe in His Son whom He has sent. Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, the Son of David, the Son of God, to believe on His name, to allow His Spirit to transform our hearts from twisted by evil to be made pure and whole by His love. May we all be so responsive to His call.