Matthew 8-9: Jesus’ Authority (Part 1)

The kingdom of heaven, God’s rule, announced and described by Jesus, Matthew authenticates by a series of acts of power in which Jesus enacts his authority as kingdom bringer. He shows God’s rule by healing, exorcizing, calling, controverting, and proclaiming its advent throughout Galilee in chs.8-9. Ch.10 follows on this authentication by Jesus passing this power on to his followers and sending them in service of this kingdom. So we have a series of 

-announcement and description of the kingdom (chs.4:17-7:29),

-demonstration of the authority of the kingdom (chs,8-9), and

-sending followers out in service to and with the authority of this kingdom throughout Galilee (ch.10).

What we see unfold in this series and, indeed, throughout the whole gospel, is what C. S. Lewis famously described in Mere Christianity, “Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”[1]

These acts of power also serve to show the cost of following Jesus in this “great campaign of 

sabotage” and a variety of responses to Jesus’ authority. The cost of this commitment to Jesus, we must remember, is surviving the coming divine judgment at the hands of Rome and taking up the true form of Abrahamic Israel and its mandate to bless the world. These are not general warnings to everyone to “make a decision” for Christ. That’s not the part of the story we are in here.   

From the Mountain of Revelation to the Valley of Reconciliation

Jesus descends from the New Mt. Sinai after delivering his new torah (chs.5-7) into the hurly-burly of the world to put this torah into action. Mt.8-9 report 10 miracles or, as I prefer to call them, acts of power enacting God’s kingdom or freeing Israel from the Egypt of Herod’s oppression and injustice. These acts of power remind the reader of ten plagues visited upon Egypt.[2] These acts undo the oppression and slavery of Israel and restore it to vision and vocation God created it for.

The ten acts of power or liberation include cleansing a leper, healing a paralytic, a fever, calming a storm, exorcizing demons, raising a dead girl, healing a woman hemorrhaging blood, restoring sight toe two blind men. Recall our earlier discussion of these particular acts indicating the restoration of the image of God (humanity) to serve as royal priests in God’s creational temple. This is what we have here. These ten acts are typological reversals of the ten rebellions against God Israel performed in the wilderness on the way to the promised land (Num.14:22).[3] Thus they are acts of grace enacting both internal and external liberation for the people.

Healing a Leper (8:1-4)

Jesus comes down from the mountain joined by a great throng of people (v.1). Immediately an outcast from Israelite society, a leper, confronts him, kneels before him, and requests healing (v.2). That is, he wants his skin disease cured but he desires restoration to the life in the community of Israel. This first act of liberation in Israel’s New Exodus is the inclusion of the excluded. This forms an analogy with the “mixed crowd” (Ex.12:38) who left Egypt with Israel. The original Exodus community, therefore, was not a “pure” group. Here Jesus heals and includes an “impure” person in his community of followers. His willingness to perform this act of restoration (v.3), indicates his aim and purpose as his people’s liberator. Jesus’ directive for this man to go a make the appropriate sacrifice before a priest “as a testimony to them” (v.4). This “to” can be translated as “against” and might indicate Jesus sees this act of liberation as an attack on the religious system of Israel which enforced such exclusion. As such it may serve as a prelude to the later story in this section of a paralytic healed and the question of forgiveness (9:2-8).

Healing a Centurion’s Servant (8:5-13)

Here we get a hint of the ultimate goal of God’s New Exodus – the blessing and inclusion the Gentiles. A centurion, a leader of 60-80 troops in the Roman army - the “backbone” of that army[4] - comes to Jesus to request healing for his slave stricken with paralysis (v.6). The centurion recognizes the irregularity of a Jew entering a Gentile’s home and asks for a “long distance” healing (a rarity). He affirms Jesus’ authority drawing from his own experience of authority in the Roman army for the basis of his request. Impressed, Jesus declares, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith” (v.10). If the “ten rebellions” of Israel are in the background here, they form a perfect foil for this statement and Jesus’ subsequent declaration of the “many” who will come to the feast in the kingdom even though though its “heirs” will be left outside for their lack of faith (vv.11-12). Jesus performs the healing as requested on the basis of his faith (v.13).

Jesus Heals Peter’s Mother-in-Law of a Fever (8:14-17)

A domestic healing in Peter’s home follows. His mother-in-law has a fever. In contrast to the use of incantations and invocations of higher spirits to drive out lesser spirits utilized by pagan healers[5] Jesus merely touches the woman and she is healed. Matthew’s comment that she arose and
began to serve him” (v.15) is more than a patriarchal reference to a woman’s place and duty to serve a man. It has a paradigmatic function of the expected response to an act of liberating power from God. This story is a miniature discipleship tale. God’s New Exodus requires the response of serving the liberator. This particular story is followed by a general description of Jesus’ extensive healing and exorcism ministry in the area (v.16). Matthew ties these two stories together by citing all this as evidence of the fulfilment of Isa.53:4: “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” About this Wright comments: 

“But in this sequence we start to see, as well, a more rounded view of this authority. Jesus doesn’t have, as it were, absolute power for its own sake. He has authority in order to be the healer. And he is the healer by taking the sickness and pain of all the world on to himself. In verse 17 Matthew quotes from Isaiah 53.4, a passage more often associated in Christian thinking with the meaning of Jesus’ death, bearing our griefs and sorrows on the cross; but for Matthew there is no sharp line between the healing Jesus offered during his life and the healing for sin and death which he offered through his own suffering. The one leads naturally into the other.”[6]

Two Discipleship Stories (8:18-27)

Jesus’ mission to call and reconstitute Abrahamic Israel and at the same time bring unrepentant Israel to the brink of its final judgment created excitement among the people. Matthew again mentions the great crowd of people around him. A scribe comes, interested in joining up. Jesus lets him in one the “cost of discipleship.” Sure, it’s exciting. Certain people gravitate to the new and edgy. And little was edgier than what Jesus was up to. This fellow was ready to join up. Bob Dylan rallied many in the 60’s with his iconic song “The Times They Are A’changin.’” But few persevered in the struggle. Likewise this scribe who believed he wanted to follow Jesus. But when Jesus gave him the small print about what following him truly meant, we hear nothing more from him. That nowhere to live or sleep bit (v.20) seems to have dampened his desire to follow Jesus completely.

Another person, already attached to Jesus’ movement, a disciple (v.21), was ready to follow if he could but set agenda for doing so. He had other obligations to discharge before he could take off with Jesus’ band. “First” (v.21) is the key word here. Burying one’s father was a sacred duty in Israel. Bonhoeffer comments,

“The second disciple wants to bury his father before he follows Jesus. The law obliges him. He knows what he wants to do and has to do. First he has to fulfill the law; then he will follow. Here a clear command of the law stands between the one called and Jesus. Jesus’ call forcefully challenges this gap. Under no circumstances is anything permitted to come between Jesus and the one called, even that which is greatest and holiest, even the law. Just at that point, for the sake of Jesus, the law which tries to get in the way has to be broken through, because it no longer had any right to interpose itself between Jesus and the one called.”[7]

Jesus calls for a righteousness greater than the scribes and Pharisees. This disciple, however, cannot grasp that. He’s trying to fit Jesus into the system Jesus came to fulfill and take beyond itself. And that can’t happen. The risky, demanding proposition of following Jesus was too much for these wannabe followers.

Those who do follow him differ from these two only in the fact that they follow. They don’t have a much better idea of what they’re getting into than them. But they been captured by Jesus and his vision in a way that makes them get up and go when he calls, however little they may or may not know what they’re getting into. Matthew has a story to tell about them too (8:23-27).

These followers are all together in a boat on the sea when a great squall blows up. Jesus wanted to go to the other side of the sea to get away from the crowds and they were all for going with him. Jesus himself is asleep. The storm doesn’t awaken him. But it scares the bejeebies out of the disciples. It’s not just the storm that unnerves them. Jews were not a big sea people. They believed the sea was the haunt of the demonic and the terrifying great sea creatures that roamed its depths. Now here they’d taken courage in hand and gone out onto the sea with Jesus. And it was turning against them, nature and the demonic rising to confront them. And he slept! They woke him up with a shout upbraiding him for his lack of concern. “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” (v.24).

Jesus turns the tables on them, however, upbraiding them for their lack of faith! (v.26). And by that he means “Don’t you know who you’re with? This is God’s New Exodus movement! You remember that, don’t you? THE EXODUS! God harnessed the sea for Israel and used it for the good of his people and the completion of his purposes. Why does this bit of upset water frighten you then?”

Then, as an object lesson, Jesus rises in the boat and commands the storm to calm. And it did. Astonished disciples wonder among themselves “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” (v.27). They’ve answered their own question without fully realizing it. Who controls the winds and the sea? Israel’s God, of course (see Job 38:8-11; Psa.29:3-4; 65:5-7; 89:8-10; 107: 23-29). So why should these disciples be afraid? Faith is trusting that this is who is on their side whatever the circumstances suggest.

These disciples had the moxie to get in the boat with Jesus and launch out on the scary waters. They’ve got the two fellows in the story above this one beat there. But they haven’t yet begun to dare imagine the reality they’ve hitched their star to! But they will learn. Slowly and fitfully, they will learn. Easter will seal it for them. But that’s to get way ahead of our story. We best stand in the shoes of the disciples for now and ask ourselves do we really know who we’re dealing with in Jesus and what he’s doing in the world?

When they reach the other side the demons meet Jesus and his followers up close and in person. Now it is not the sea and the waves but two people whose lives had become nothing but dangerous, untamable, violent chaos, who lived among the dead, who confront Jesus and in their submission to his authority they seem compelled to answer the disciples’ question at the end of the last story of Jesus’ identity. He is the ‘Son of God” (v.29). Messiah, the one who will rule not only Israel but the whole world even the unclean and demonic worlds. “Contact with the dead rendered a Jew ceremonially unclean, which may have been the reason for the demon-possessed men to accost this Jewish contingent. The book of Jubilees views Gentiles as unclean because they “slaughter their sacrifices to the dead, and to demons they bow down. And they eat in tombs” (Jub.22:16–17).[8] The one who will set all things right in God’s world, however, instead of contracting uncleanness through such contact, makes the unclean clean and the unholy holy. Which means the end of these demons’ reign of terror.

[Matthew has two such demon-infested men confront Jesus while Mark and Luke have only one in their version of this story. Why? No one knows for sure. Maybe Matthew is indicating that Jesus dealt with such situations often in his ministry and the multiple demon-possessed men here indicate that. Or it may be that since Matthew uses this story in part to answer the disciples’ question about Jesus’ identity he has two demon-possessed figures because for a Jew every fact is confirmed by two or three witnesses (Dt.19:15). This multiply attested identification from those who though demonic, are assumed to have accurate information about the spiritual world from which they come, carries weight.]

Instead of outright destruction the demons beg Jesus to send them into a “herd of swine” (v.30). Unclean animals are a natural place for demons to want to inhabit. Jesus agrees to does banish the to the pig herd. But the demonic presence within this herd drives them berserk and they off over the cliff and into the sea, perishing and returning the demons to their watery haunt. It may not be the time for their ultimate, final destruction yet (v.29), as the demons aver, but Jesus can banish them to a holding place until till that time comes.

We are troubled by Jesus’ destruction of “private or economic property” here because it violates our sense of social and religious propriety. The text’s interest lies elsewhere however. The “swineherds” rush to town to report what has happened not to the herd of pigs but to the demon-possessed men (v.33). Doubtless that includes Jesus’ banishing them to the home in the sea via the pigs. But the city’s interest in having Jesus leave there are is certainly due to the battle waged on their turf between the Son of God and the powers of evil. The pigs are collateral damage in this struggle. These townspeople are not ready to participate in this struggle with Jesus and his followers and just want to get out of the line of fire.

Jesus’ movement is a real-world struggle with actual consequences in the places and among the people with whom we minister. And there is opposition to what we do and who we serve. To this point Jesus’ acts of power have met no opposition from either human or spiritual forces. Starting with this story, however, opposition from both sectors rises up to engage his work (8:34; 9:3,10-17,34).

The twin powers of Jewish religious leadership and powers of evil set out to contest Jesus’ work of gathering a reconstituted Abrahamic Israel in light of the crisis of judgment evoked by his coming. Again, this part of the biblical story and its dynamics and crisis are not ours. Still the reality of opposition, human and otherwise, to Jesus’ followers efforts to extend and implement the fruits of his victory (Eph.6:10-20) remind us that we have our own struggle to engage with its real-world consequences, costs, and collateral damage. Jesus’ authority is as important to us as it was to his first followers. They committed and followed in hope and trust that he was indeed the Messiah and truly had the authority he claimed and seemed to demonstrate. We commit and engage our part of the struggle in faith that such authority is indeed his, has been fully demonstrated, and is the basis on which we live out our discipleship (Eph.1:19-23). What they hoped was the case, we are assured in faith is. So both we and they engage our different struggles dependent on the authority of Jesus. More on this when we get to ch.10.

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[1] Mere Christianity, 46.

[2] George Wesley Buchanan, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol.1, 363.

[3] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 1: 2685.

[4] Keener, Background Commentary on Mt.8:5.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: 2499.

[7] Discipleship: 1431.

[8] Wilkins, Matthew: 2510.