After Jesus finishes his great Sermon, he comes down from the mountain—followed now by crowds of people—and begins performing a series of miracles. Matthew had mentioned earlier (4:23-25) that Jesus was healing and exorcising people, but there were no actual miracle stories until now. And they are odd miracle stories.
Yes, looking ahead, I notice something odd in the story of the Gadarene swine (vss. 28-34). I remember it as being a longer and more detailed story than this. And I thought there was just one demoniac, but in Matthew there are two.
Good observation! Mark and Luke both narrate this same episode and, frankly, make a more gripping story of it. Matthew doesn’t seem very interested in the human details here, and the way he uses two demoniacs in his version instead of one is rather like a story-teller in English starting off with “There were a couple of . . . ” The individuals aren’t important in themselves; they’re types. Matthew also keeps his telling of the story (and of other miracle stories, too) quite brief and shapes the stories in a way that underlines the troublesome quality of Jesus’ actions—troublesome from the point of view of the very pious and the religious authorities.
Why would they be troublesome?
For a variety of reasons, many of them centering on questions of purity. In the first story—the cleansing of a leper—Jesus touches the man, thereby violating the most basic principle of purity systems, namely that impurity always trumps purity. That’s why lepers were exiled from their communities—so that they wouldn’t make everybody else unclean. Touching a leper makes you dirty, but it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t make a leper clean by touch. Except that Jesus can and does! With him, the “contagion” flows the other way; he makes cleansing contagious, not dirt. Interestingly, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to want to make a public issue of this. He tells the cleansed leper to keep matters quiet and just go to the priest to perform the ritual that will certify that he’s no longer a leper and can be welcomed back into the community.
So Jesus isn’t going to abide by the rules. But does he really expect to go unnoticed?
Perhaps not. He certainly doesn’t avoid awkward situations in this chapter. But breaking the rules isn’t the point in itself. It’s an expression of his message that God loves everybody, even the unclean and sinful. Even Gentiles—a potentially divisive claim in a Jewish community that had been subject to the domination of Gentile empires for centuries.
Gentiles like the centurion in Capernaum?
Exactly. It’s interesting that Luke also tells this story (7:1-10), but carefully buffers the interaction between Jesus and the centurion by saying that the centurion sent local Jewish leaders to plead with Jesus on his behalf rather than coming himself. Matthew, however, (who in many ways seems the most self-consciously Jewish of the four gospel writers) brings the two men into direct interaction with each other. Jesus even volunteers to go to the centurion’s house. To understand how unsettling this suggestion was, just re-read the story of Peter’s visit to the house of the Gentile Cornelius, also a centurion, in Acts 10. Peter hated the idea of entering a Gentile house so much that he had to be given a special revolution to persuade him to do it. And the revelation had to be repeated three times just so he’d be sure God really meant it.
Jesus not only grants the centurion’s plea for help. He announces to all within hearing distance that this Gentile has just shown more faith than any one Jesus has met in the Jewish community. Jesus even has the temerity to suggest that people like this man might well replace some of the less faithful of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hard words for his hearers! It’s like suggesting to modern Christian that some non-believers may get better seats at the heavenly banquet than they will. So Jesus isn’t evading controversial issues. He’s quite willing to address them as occasion warrants.
I see that there are some other big miracle stories ahead—Stilling of the Storm, Gadarene Demoniacs, the Paralytic—but the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a disappointment. It’s so short it’s barely a story.
I agree. Even by Matthew’s standards, it seems like a nub, not a real story. Still, there’s more to it than first meets the eye. It’s not a flashy miracle and it’s done in private, not on the street. But Jesus’ touching of this woman is problematic in its own way. She could have been in a state of contagious impurity—something that menstruation occasioned. There seems to have been a widespread expectation that male religious leaders would avoid contact with women outside their own households—if only as a defense against becoming accidentally unclean.
Of course, there’s also an element in the story that can irritate modern readers—the phrase “and she got up and began serving him.” Some see it as one more reduction of a woman to a servant’s role. I always wondered if she shouldn’t at least have gotten a bit of recuperation time. Perhaps part of the point is that the healing was so complete that it was as if she’d never been sick at all. But, as I grow older and experience a bit more infirmity myself. I find myself reading it another way. Now I think, “Yes, exactly.” When I’ve been under the weather and unable to work, this is exactly what I want—I want to be out working in the garden. Maybe in honor of having a guest and a miraculous healing, I’d have gone a step further: “and he got up and served tea in the garden.”
Now, we’re not through with this series of troublesome miracles. But the scope of the trouble is about to broaden out. It isn’t just the pious and the religious authorities of Israel that Jesus is disturbing. He’ll be doing it to his own disciples and to some neighboring pagans, too.
Next up: MORE TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:18-9:1)
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