Matthew 9

Today’s Passage: Matthew 9

Matthew has been gathering the works of the King, one after another, and in this chapter he keeps gathering them. But something new comes in alongside the miracles, and once you notice it you cannot unsee it. Opposition. Three times in these thirty-eight verses somebody objects. The scribes object to a word of forgiveness and call it blasphemy, though they only say so inside their own heads. The Pharisees object to a dinner table and the sort of people sitting around it. John’s own disciples object to a fast that is not being kept. And at the end of the chapter the objecting hardens into an accusation so dark that it will come back in chapter twelve and never really leave. Now set all of that against what the King is actually doing while they mutter. He forgives a paralyzed man before He heals him, and heals him only to prove He had the right to forgive him. He calls a tax collector out of his booth with two words. He sits down to eat with people the respectable had crossed off. He turns in a crowded street and speaks tenderly to a woman who had been unclean for twelve years and had not expected to be seen at all. He walks into a house full of professional mourners and takes a dead girl by the hand. He opens the eyes of two blind men and gives a mute man back his voice. And then, at the very end, Matthew lifts your eyes from the miracles to the Lord’s own face as He looks out over the crowds. Watch for that. Everything in this chapter grows out of what He sees when He looks at people.

As you read, hold this: The King who has authority on earth to forgive sins calls a tax collector out of his booth and lays His hand on the unclean, the dying, and the blind, because He did not come for the healthy but for the sick, and because when He looks at harassed and helpless crowds He is moved with compassion.

Matthew 9:1–8 (BSB)

¹ Jesus got into a boat, crossed over, and came to His own town. ² Just then some men brought to Him a paralytic lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.” ³ On seeing this, some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming!” ⁴ But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said, “Why do you harbor evil in your hearts? ⁵ Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? ⁶ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” Then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your mat, and go home.” ⁷ And the man got up and went home. ⁸ When the crowds saw this, they were filled with awe and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

Notice first whose faith is mentioned. “When Jesus saw their faith.” The paralyzed man says not one word in this whole account, from beginning to end. He is carried in, spoken to, healed, and sent home, and every bit of the initiative belongs either to his friends or to his Lord. There is a great kindness in that for anyone who has ever felt too weak to bring himself anywhere. These men had faith enough to haul a grown man on a mat through a crowd, and the Lord saw it and honored it, and He did not despise the one who arrived carried. Then comes the word nobody in the room was expecting. They had come for legs. What He gives him first is a name and a pardon: “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven (ἀφίημι) aphiēmi, pronounced af-EE-ay-mee. Strong's G863, to send away, release, let go completely. Aphiēmi is not a religious word at all in ordinary Greek. It means to send away, to let go, to leave behind, to drop a thing out of your hand and walk off. A farmer let go of his plow; a man left his house; the fishermen back in chapter four “left their nets and followed Him” with this very verb. In the commercial world it was the word for cancelling a debt, striking it off the ledger so that nothing remains owing, and that is exactly how Jesus uses it when He teaches His disciples to pray, forgive us our debts. Hold both pictures together and you have the shape of it. Forgiveness is not God deciding that the debt was not so large after all, and it is not God agreeing to overlook it while it quietly stays on the books. It is a release. The account is closed and the thing itself is sent away, dismissed, put at a distance from you, and the God who sends it away does not go looking for it again. Every soul in that house understood the scandal of a man claiming to do that, because only the creditor can cancel a debt, and the debt of sin is owed to God. The scribes had the theology exactly right. They only had the identity of the Speaker wrong. .” Not cheer up, your troubles are over, but something far deeper and far more urgent, because the Lord always begins where the real ruin is. Understand, He is not telling this man that his paralysis was punishment for some particular sin; nothing in the text says so, and elsewhere Jesus flatly refuses that reasoning. He is simply going to the bottom of the man’s need before He touches the top of it.

That is why the scribes react as they do, and it is worth admitting that their logic was sound. Only God can forgive sins, so a man who forgives sins is either God or a blasphemer. There is no third door. But look at what they do with it: they say it “to themselves,” silently, safely, and it is the silence that gets answered. “Jesus knew what they were thinking.” Sit with that for a moment, because it is a quieter claim than the one about forgiveness and every bit as enormous. Then He asks His question. “Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?” The word is say. Anybody can say the first one, because nothing visible happens and no one can check it. The second sentence puts you out where the whole room can see whether your word carries. So He speaks the sentence that can be checked, in order to prove the sentence that cannot. And Matthew does something wonderful with the grammar in verse six: the Lord’s sentence is left hanging, unfinished, “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” and then He simply turns and talks to the paralytic instead. The man standing up is the end of the sentence. The crowds go home filled with awe, glorifying God, which is right, though even their praise falls a little short of the mark; they marvel that God has given such authority to men, when the truth standing in front of them was that this authority had never been on loan.

"He who forgives all your iniquities and heals all your diseases," Psalm 103:3 (BSB)

Matthew 9:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ As Jesus went on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax booth. “Follow Me,” He told him, and Matthew got up and followed Him. ¹⁰ Later, as Jesus was dining at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with Him and His disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw this, they asked His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹² On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. ¹³ But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Stop and remember who is holding the pen. The man writing this book is the man in that booth. His own conversion, the hinge on which his entire life turned, gets one sentence, and it is the plainest sentence in the chapter. No account of what he was feeling, no description of the sums in front of him, no scene of him packing up. He saw. He said. Matthew got up and followed. Luke tells us he left everything and threw a great banquet; Matthew mentions neither. What he does do, twice, is refuse to let his old job be forgotten. He writes down that he was sitting at the tax booth, and when he lists the twelve apostles in the very next chapter he is the only one who hangs a job title on his own name, Matthew the tax collector. Mark and Luke, telling the same story, call him Levi and spare him. He will not spare himself. That is not self-loathing. That is a man who has looked at the mercy of God for long enough that he no longer needs to be thought well of, and who wants you to know precisely what sort of raw material the Lord recruits from. Two words at a booth, and the man who had spent his working life taking from his own people is the man who hands them their King in writing.

Then the dinner, and the objection. The Pharisees do not ask Jesus; they go around Him and ask His disciples, which is its own small portrait. And their question is not manufactured outrage, either. In that world, to eat at a man’s table was to accept him, and here was a teacher of God’s law reclining among the openly compromised as though they were friends. His answer comes in three pieces, and each is worth its weight. First a proverb, and a slightly amused one: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Of course the physician is where the illness is. Where else would you have Him be? Then a rebuke aimed with great precision, because “go and learn” was the phrase a rabbi used with a student who had not done his homework, and He says it to the men who prided themselves on knowing the text: “go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy (ἔλεος) eleos, pronounced EH-leh-oss. Strong's G1656, mercy, loyal covenant kindness toward the needy. Eleos is the Greek word the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures reached for again and again to carry chesed, that great Old Testament word for God’s loyal, covenant-keeping, steadfast kindness. So it is a bigger word than pity. Pity feels something; eleos does something, and it does it because of who the merciful one is rather than because of what the miserable one deserves. It is help that flows downhill to genuine need, and it is help that keeps flowing because the helper has bound Himself to it. Hosea had thundered it at a nation that was very religious and very cruel at the same time, a people whose sacrifices smoked away on schedule while the poor among them were being ground down. God says there, in effect: I never wanted the ritual instead of the reality. And now the Lord picks that line up off Hosea’s page and lays it across a dinner table in Capernaum. The men objecting were meticulous about the machinery of religion and had no room in their hearts for a repentant tax collector. Take the warning gently and take it personally, because a heart can be scrupulous and hard in the same beat. Whenever careful religion makes us less glad to see a sinner come home, we have got the sacrifice and lost the mercy. , not sacrifice.’” They knew the words. He tells them to go and find out what they mean. And then the sentence that gathers up the whole chapter and, in a sense, the whole Gospel: “For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

"For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6 (BSB)

Do not misread that last line as though the Lord were saying some people are righteous enough not to need Him. He is answering men who believed they were, and He is telling them, with a straight face, that a doctor has no business at the bedside of the healthy. If you are well, He has nothing for you. The moment you know you are sick, He has everything. That is why the tax collectors were at the table and the Pharisees were outside it, complaining. The door into the kingdom is very low, and it is only awkward for the tall.

Matthew 9:14–17 (BSB)

¹⁴ Then John’s disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Why is it that we and the Pharisees fast so often, but Your disciples do not fast?” ¹⁵ Jesus replied, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while He is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast. ¹⁶ No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. For the patch will pull away from the garment, and a worse tear will result. ¹⁷ Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will spill, and the wineskins will be ruined. Instead, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

This question comes from a better quarter, and it comes with real bewilderment behind it. John’s disciples were serious men. Their teacher lived in the wilderness on locusts and wild honey and was at that very moment sitting in Herod’s prison, and the strict Pharisees fasted twice a week on top of the one fast the Law actually required. And here is a Teacher whose followers seem to be at a party. The Lord answers with a wedding. “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while He is with them?” In a Galilean village a wedding ran for days and the whole town knew it, and the one thing nobody did at a wedding was fast. Then hear who He has just quietly claimed to be. All through the prophets the LORD is the husband of His people, and Israel is the bride, faithless and still beloved. John himself had said he was only the friend of the bridegroom. So when Jesus says that the fasting has stopped because the Bridegroom is in the room, He is not excusing His disciples. He is telling you why joy is the only reasonable response to His presence.

And then, before you can settle into that, comes a shadow. “But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” That verb is not gentle. Nobody takes a bridegroom away from his own wedding without violence, and this is one of the earliest hints in Matthew of where the road is going. The Lord knows. It sits there in the middle of a wedding image, unexplained, and He moves straight on to cloth and wineskins. Both little pictures make the same point from opposite ends. A new patch of cloth that has never been washed will shrink the first time it gets wet and tear the old garment worse than before. New wine still working and giving off gas needs a fresh skin with some stretch left in it; poured into an old skin already stretched hard and gone brittle, it splits the skin and loses the wine, and you are out both. What Jesus brings cannot be sewn onto the religious system as one more observance among the others, another fast on the calendar. He is not repairing the old garment. He is not topping up the old skins. This is the new covenant arriving in person, and it needs everything new, which is exactly why the men most invested in the old arrangements found Him so intolerable. Notice too the tenderness in that last clause: “and both are preserved.” He is not careless with anything. He simply will not be reduced to a patch.

Matthew 9:18–22 (BSB)

¹⁸ While Jesus was saying these things, a synagogue leader came and knelt before Him. “My daughter has just died,” he said. “But come and place Your hand on her, and she will live.” ¹⁹ So Jesus got up and went with him, along with His disciples. ²⁰ Suddenly a woman who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak. ²¹ She said to herself, “If only I touch His cloak, I will be healed.” ²² Jesus turned and saw her. “Take courage, daughter,” He said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed from that very hour.

Read these two stories as the one interrupted story Matthew wrote. A father breaks in on a conversation about wineskins with the worst sentence a father can say. He is the leading layman of the synagogue, a man with a reputation to protect in a village where the new Teacher was already controversial, and he kneels in the road in front of everybody. “My daughter has just died. But come and place Your hand on her, and she will live.” That but is one of the bravest words in the chapter. Jesus gets up and goes, and the whole crowd surges after Him, and the clock is running, and a father is trying to move a healer through a mob toward a house where the mourners are already gathering. And right there, in the worst possible moment, someone slows Him down.

Now count the years. The child has been alive for twelve years; Mark and Luke tell us her age, and Matthew, telling it briefly, still keeps the number twelve on the woman. For as long as that little girl has had a life, this woman has had an illness. Twelve years of being ceremonially unclean, which was not a private matter. Here is the law she had been living under.

"When a woman has a discharge of her blood for many days at a time other than her menstrual period, or if it continues beyond her period, she will be unclean all the days of her unclean discharge, just as she is during the days of her menstruation." Leviticus 15:25 (BSB)

Everything she sat on, everyone who brushed against her, became unclean too, and had to wash and wait until evening. Twelve years of that is twelve years of being a problem to everyone you love. So she does not call out. She comes up behind Him in the crush, where she cannot be identified, and reaches for the very edge of His clothing, the tassel at the corner of the cloak that every observant Israelite wore.

"“Speak to the Israelites and tell them that throughout the generations to come they are to make for themselves tassels for the corners of their garments, with a blue cord on each tassel." Numbers 15:38 (BSB)

Those tassels were given to Israel as a memory aid, something to look at so that a man would remember the commandments of the LORD. She takes hold of the fringe of the Law made flesh, thinking, “If only I touch His cloak, I will be healed (σῴζω) sōzō, pronounced SOZE-oh. Strong's G4982, to save, rescue, heal, make whole. Sōzō is one of the great two-handed words of the New Testament. In ordinary Greek it meant to rescue a man from drowning, to bring a ship through a storm, to save a life on the battlefield, and also to bring a sick body back to health. The New Testament uses it for both, and often in the same breath, because the Bible has no interest in a salvation that leaves the body behind or a healing that leaves the soul where it was. What the woman says to herself is literally I will be saved, and what Jesus says to her is literally your faith has saved you. It is the identical verb the angel had used over the child’s name back in the first chapter, that He would save His people from their sins. So Matthew is not making a pun. He is showing you one work with two visible edges. Notice as well what the Lord credits: not the tassel, not the reaching, not the correctness of what she believed about how it would work, for her theology of healing was rough and quietly superstitious. He credits faith. Poor, frightened, half-informed faith that nonetheless went to the right Person. That is deeply encouraging, and it should be. What saves is not the strength or the polish of your grip. It is the One you have hold of. .” And by every rule she had lived under for twelve years, her touch should have made Him unclean. It runs the other way instead. He is not defiled; she is made whole. Then He does the thing she was trying to avoid: He turns and finds her. Not to scold her, and He does not leave her a story about a garment with power in it. He speaks to her face and gives her a name in front of the whole crowd, the same word He gave the paralytic and one no other person in the Gospels receives from His lips: “Take courage, daughter.” She had been a case, an inconvenience, a walking source of contamination, for over a decade. He calls her family, in public, on the road, with a dying child waiting.

Matthew 9:23–26 (BSB)

²³ When Jesus entered the house of the synagogue leader, He saw the flute players and the noisy crowd. ²⁴ “Go away,” He told them. “The girl is not dead, but asleep.” And they laughed at Him. ²⁵ After the crowd had been put outside, Jesus went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. ²⁶ And the news about this spread throughout that region.

The professionals have arrived. Flute players and wailers were hired for a funeral even by families with almost nothing, and Matthew’s word for the crowd suggests exactly the din you would expect. Into that noise the Lord says, “Go away. The girl is not dead, but asleep.” And they laugh at Him. Do not miss what their laughter proves: these people had seen the body. Their scorn is the strongest possible witness that the child was truly dead, and Matthew, who is a careful writer, lets it stand in the text rather than tidying it away. As for what Jesus means, He is not correcting their diagnosis. He is telling them what death has become in the presence of the One who is about to speak to it. Sleep is a thing you are woken from. It has a morning on the other side of it. That is not a soft word chosen to spare a father’s feelings; it is the truth about death now that this Man has come into the world, and the whole New Testament will go on speaking of dead believers as sleeping ever afterward.

Then the room is cleared, and the miracle happens almost without ceremony. He went in, and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. There is no incantation, no struggle, no long prayer. He takes a dead child by the hand the way you would wake a sleeping one, which is precisely what He said He was doing. And touching a corpse was the deepest ceremonial defilement in the Law, the thing that put a man outside the camp for a week. Twice in a single afternoon the Lord has walked straight into what should have made Him unclean, and twice the flow has run backward: life going out from Him into death, wholeness going out from Him into ruin. That is the whole gospel in miniature, and it is the reason the cross had to be a cross. He takes what is ours by touching it, and what is His comes out to meet us.

Matthew 9:27–31 (BSB)

²⁷ As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed Him, crying out, “Have mercy on us, Son of David!” ²⁸ After Jesus had entered the house, the blind men came to Him. “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” He asked. “Yes, Lord,” they answered. ²⁹ Then He touched their eyes and said, “According to your faith will it be done to you.” ³⁰ And their eyes were opened. Jesus warned them sternly, “See that no one finds out about this!” ³¹ But they went out and spread the news about Him throughout the land.

Two men who cannot see are following Him down the road by the sound of the crowd, and shouting a title. “Son of David.” Matthew opened his book with that phrase in the very first verse, and here is the first time in this Gospel that a human voice cries it out at Him. It is a royal, messianic name, and it is the blind who use it. There is a gentle irony in the chapter’s arrangement: the scribes are watching Him closely and cannot see; these two cannot see and know exactly who has walked past them. Notice that He does not stop in the street. He lets them follow Him all the way to the house before He turns and asks His question, and the question is not about their eyes but about Him: “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They say yes, and He touches their eyes, and says, “According to your faith will it be done to you.”

Take that sentence carefully, because it is easily twisted. It is not a formula that makes your faith the engine and God the machinery, as though enough believing could compel heaven to move. Nothing in this chapter would let you say that: the paralytic contributed no faith of his own that we are told of, and the dead girl certainly contributed none. He is speaking to two men who have just confessed that He is able, and He is telling them that their confidence in Him was not misplaced. Faith is never the power. It is the empty hand. And then the strange ending. He warns them sternly, and Matthew’s verb is a strong one, almost harsh, and they go straight out and tell the whole region anyway. We should be honest that this is disobedience, however warmly we sympathize with it. The Lord had reasons for the silence He asked; a crowd looking for a wonder-worker to make a king of would have pulled His ministry off its course toward Jerusalem long before the hour had come. Enthusiasm is not the same thing as obedience, and the Lord asks for the second even when the first is sincere.

Matthew 9:32–34 (BSB)

³² As they were leaving, a demon-possessed man who was mute was brought to Jesus. ³³ And when the demon had been driven out, the man began to speak. The crowds were amazed and said, “Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel!” ³⁴ But the Pharisees said, “It is by the prince of demons that He drives out demons.”

The last of the miracles is told in a single breath, and Matthew clearly wants the reaction rather than the scene. A man who could not speak is brought in, the demon is driven out, and the man begins to talk, and the crowds put into words what the whole run of chapters eight and nine has been building toward: “Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel!” They are right. Not in the days of Elijah, not in the days of Elisha, never. Something is happening in Galilee that the nation’s whole history has no shelf for.

And then verse thirty-four, which lands like a stone. The same evidence that made the crowds marvel makes the Pharisees say the darkest thing said about Jesus so far in this Gospel: “It is by the prince of demons that He drives out demons.” Look closely at what has happened in their reasoning. They do not deny the miracle. They cannot; the man is standing there talking. So they keep the fact and reverse the source, and they take a work of pure liberation and hand the credit for it to hell. That is not a mistake of the intellect. It is what a heart does when it has decided in advance what it will not accept, and it will do it with the evidence in plain sight. Mark this verse and keep your finger in it, because this accusation does not go away. It comes back in chapter twelve, sharper and more deliberate, and there the Lord answers it at length.

"But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “Only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, does this man drive out demons.”" Matthew 12:24 (BSB)

Here in chapter nine He does not answer it at all. He simply goes back to work, which is its own kind of answer.

Matthew 9:35–38 (BSB)

³⁵ Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness. ³⁶ When He saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. ³⁷ Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. ³⁸ Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest.”

Verse thirty-five is almost word for word what Matthew wrote back in chapter four before the Sermon on the Mount began. He has closed a circle. Between those two matching sentences he set three chapters of the King’s words and two chapters of the King’s works, and now he sets the frame back down. This is what the ministry of Jesus looked like: town after town, village after village, the same three things over and over. No village was too small.

And then Matthew turns the camera around, and for one verse we are not looking at what the Lord did but at what the Lord saw and what it did to Him. “When He saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion (σπλαγχνίζομαι) splanchnizomai, pronounced splangkh-NID-zom-ahee. Strong's G4697, to be moved with compassion in the inward parts. Splanchnizomai comes from splanchna, the inward parts, the gut. It is not a decorous word. Where we would say a thing broke our heart, the Greek said it moved the bowels, because they located the deep involuntary feelings in the middle of the body, and anyone who has ever received terrible news knows the ancients were describing something real. This verb is used a dozen times in the Gospels, and outside of three parables the subject is always Jesus. Nobody else in the New Testament is ever said to feel this. He feels it over hungry crowds, over lepers, over a widow burying her only son, over the blind at the roadside, and here over an ordinary tired multitude with no particular crisis on them at all. Be careful to say only what the text says: it does not tell us what else was in His mind on that road, and we have no business inventing it. But it does tell us this much, plainly, and it is a great deal. The King is not a distant administrator moved by principle. When He looked at worn-out, unshepherded people, something turned over inside Him, and out of that came everything He did next. Praise God for a Savior with those insides. And know that He has not changed, for the One who looked at those crowds looks at us. for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Weigh both of those words. Harassed carries the sense of being worn down and torn at, worried the way a flock is worried on an open hillside. Helpless is the picture of sheep thrown down and unable to get up on their own. And who were these people? They were the covenant people of God, with the Scriptures, with the synagogues, with the shepherds of Israel supposedly over them, and the Lord looks at them and sees a flock nobody is caring for. The phrase itself is an old one. Moses had used it when he asked God to appoint someone over the congregation so that the LORD’s people would not be like sheep without a shepherd, and Ezekiel had thundered it at the shepherds of Israel who fed themselves and let the flock scatter. It is not the crowds who are being scolded in verse thirty-six. It is everyone who should have been feeding them.

Then, out of that compassion, comes an instruction, and it is not the one we expect. He does not say go, at least not yet. He changes the picture from sheep to a wheatfield and says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest.” Notice whose harvest it is. Twice in one sentence, His. He is the Lord of it, the field is His, the grain is His, and the workers are His to send. Our part is to ask. And you can hear, in that word plentiful, that the Lord did not look at those wandering crowds and see a hopeless case. He saw a field standing white and ready and not enough hands to bring it in. Then read on into the next chapter, and see what happens to the men He told to pray. He calls the Twelve and sends them out Himself. That is very often how it goes with this Lord. He puts the burden of a prayer into your heart, and then He makes you part of the answer.