Class #7  -  Matthew 9

 

 The Authority of the Son of Man (Matthew 9:1-8)

This story is derived from Mark 2:1-12. Both the story and the issue it addresses, namely the authority of Jesus, was an important one in the debates between early Christians and their Jewish contemporaries – which is why in John 5 the same issue is addressed, and a much fuller reply is given to the charge of ‘blasphemy.’ In this context, Jesus tells a paralyzed person who has shown great faith (or has had great faith shown by his friends at least!) that ‘His sins are forgiven’. This passive is presumably to be understood as a divine passive: Jesus tells the man that God forgives him, rather than merely saying ‘I personally forgive you for your sin’. This appears to be the best way of taking the statement, even though slightly later Jesus speaks of the authority of the Son of Man to forgive sins. In interpreting this latter phrase, the saying about the Christian community having authority to bind and loose in the context of sin and forgiveness in Matthew 18:18 must also be taken into consideration (see also John 20:23). No one had any doubt that the priest in the Temple, after a person had offered the appropriate sacrifice(s), could reassure a person that his sin is forgiven, that God has forgiven his sin. What is blasphemous about Jesus’ words is that he is claiming to do what only God has the right to do or to appoint others to do on his behalf. Jesus is acting and speaking outside of the structures of authority and of divine action set forth in the Torah, and this is what is controversial. A story about an action similar to that of Jesus is told in the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. There part of the small fragment that remains of the story attributes the following words to the last king of Babylon: “I was afflicted [with an evil ulcer] for seven years…and an exorcist pardoned my sins. He was a Jew from…” This text is interesting because it likewise links healing of an illness with the pronouncing of sins forgiven. In this time, it was generally assumed that sin and sickness were associated, an idea that the Book of Job worked hard to counteract, apparently not entirely successfully. Jesus in this story does nothing to challenge this understanding of the interrelationship between sin and sickness (cp. John 9:2-3). Yet the point of the healing is not that it results automatically from the man’s sin being forgiven, but that Jesus doing this more difficult thing through the authority he has been given by God, shows thereby his authority to do the ‘easier’ thing of pronouncing sins forgiven.

            In light of our discussion last time of the meaning of ‘son of man’, notice the reaction of the crowd to Jesus’ words in Matthew 9:6. Jesus says ‘The son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ and the crowd concludes that God has ‘given such authority to human beings’. Obviously, in the present context the focus is on Jesus as having authority to forgive sins, but the way the crowd interprets his words very likely accurately reflects how an Aramaic-speaking audience would have perceived his meaning: God has given such authority to human beings, therefore there is nothing blasphemous about Jesus telling someone that his sins are forgiven.

 

The Call of Matthew, the guy who works for the IRS (Matthew 9:9-13)

It is probably the fact that this version of the story calls the tax collector Matthew whereas Mark has Levi that led the early church to attribute this Gospel to Matthew, one of the Twelve. The King James Version called them ‘publicans’, presumably deriving it from the Latin term publicanus. However, this term properly refers to a member of a tax-collecting organization, and these were abolished by Julius Caesar in 30 B.C.E. At any rate, it is often assumed that tax collectors were hated primarily because they were ‘collaborators’ with the occupying power of Rome. However, tax collectors were universally hated in the Roman Empire (they aren’t particularly popular today either!), because they were prone to use extortion and to collect more than was required of them. The tax collectors were considered ‘sinners’ because their job usually led them into malpractice and extortion, and were considered unclean because of their regular association with Gentiles and their need to work on the Sabbath.

            Tax collection in the Greco-Roman world worked through a system known as ‘tax farming’. The Roman authorities would auction the right to collect taxes, and the bidders would need to have resources or financial backers in order to make a prompt initial ‘down payment’ or ‘first installment’. The chief tax collector would add an appropriate ‘fee’ onto the amount he had to pay the Romans. He would then ‘sub-let’ areas to subordinates, who would thus in turn be responsible for obtaining payment (by whatever means necessary), and of course an appropriate ‘fee’ to make up their own salary as well. Neither Jesus nor John the Baptist suggested that those employed as tax collectors should give up their jobs. The collection of taxes is legitimate, provided greedy extortion of excessive sums and other abuses of power are not practiced. [Just as an aside, taxes were probably officially in the region of 6-13% during this period, as an estimate. Of course, this would have been inflated by the tax collectors’ ‘fees’. It may seem like relatively little, but to those living from subsistence farming at the edge of starvation, it must have seemed like an incredible burden, especially as many farmed land that was not their own and thus paid a large percentage of their crops as rent.

Jesus calls Matthew to follow him, and Matthew does so, and offers Jesus and those who are already following him hospitality. This act was, like those we surveyed in chapter 8, one that was not undertaken lightly. Jesus clearly already had worked out an understanding of purity and of his mission that was significantly different from that of the Pharisees. His action, in view of the fact that he had quite some popularity, would inevitably have been noticed by some, and the word would have spread. However, it would be wrong to assume that there was a large Pharisaic presence in Galilee or that the scrupulous avoidance of all uncleanness typical of the Pharisees would have been part of the common practice of Judaism for most Jews in Galilee. Note that it is specifically the Pharisees who object to Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners (9:11). Jesus’ reply is recorded as “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” By saying this, there are at least two implications that hearers needed to draw: (1) doctors inevitably need to come into close contact with those whom they are treating; (2) the Pharisees may feel they are doing a good job in instructing one another, but if they wish to actually help others rather than being merely what we today might call a ‘holy huddle’, then they would need to instruct those who disagree with them! Jesus did not suggest that everyone is OK as they are. But a doctor who avoids the sick will obviously not actually help anyone get well, either. He thus says that his mission is not to call the upright, but sinners. To these statements found in Mark (Mark 2:17) Matthew adds a rejoinder that the Pharisees need to go and learn what Hosea 6:6 means. As already noted, this was an important verse in post-70 Judaism, and thus there is surely an element of irony and sarcasm in the way Matthew portrays Jesus’ comment here: the Pharisees who have focused on this slogan (“I desire mercy and not sacrifice”) actually do not understand it, but still need to learn what it means.

 

Fasting (Matthew 9:14-17)

Matthew (following Mark) continues the theme of contrasting the religious practices of Jesus and his disciples with those of others of his contemporaries. On the point of fasting, apparently, the teachings of John the Baptist and of the Pharisees are more similar to one another than to that of Jesus. Jesus’ disciples did not fast, and John’s disciples asked him why this was so. The reply is that Jesus’ presence is like the presence of the bridegroom, the guest of honor at a wedding. A wedding was a time for celebration. Jesus’ ministry, likewise was a celebration of the drawing near of the Kingdom, and a foreshadowing of the ‘heavenly party’ that would follow. Jesus’ meals sound like they were a lot more fun than those of other religious groups in his time, and Jesus ate while others fasted too. To fast is a sign of mourning, inappropriate in the presence of Jesus.

            The time will come, however, when they will no longer have Jesus with them, and then they will fast. This saying (especially in its Markan form) has provided the basis for fasting on Fridays (the day Jesus was ‘taken away’) and immediately prior to Easter. However, it is unclear that Matthew understood it to mean that fasting was inappropriate to the pre-Easter ministry of Jesus but would become appropriate again thereafter. If there is one thing Matthew’s Gospel emphasizes, it is the abiding presence of Jesus with his Church. Thus for Matthew, one imagines that to practice fasting any longer would be an implicit denial of the ongoing presence of Jesus! And so Matthew probably interpreted this saying to mean that mourning and sorrow are appropriate only for that brief period when Jesus is taken from them and before he was restored to them after Easter.

            To illustrate this point, two parables are told: a patch of new cloth on an old garment, and new wine in old wineskins. In both examples the same point is being made: adding the new within the context of the old has the effect of destroying both. To put a patch of new cloth on an old garment seems to presuppose the tearing of new cloth in order to mend the old. This detail shows the harmony in the message of the two parables in the form in which they are found in Mark: the concern is not with what will happen to the old garment or wineskin, so much as with the preservation of the new garment and new wine. If the “newness” of Jesus’ teaching and practice were simply poured into traditional religious practices, it would do damage to both: his message would be lost, and presumably in reacting against the new, the practitioners of the old might simply become more conservative than before! In Matthew’s Gospel, though, there is an emphasis on both the old wineskin and the new wine being preserved, which shows that for Matthew the idea that Jewish practice is simply being replaced is out of the question.

 

Two Healings – A Story Within A Story (Matthew 9:18-26)

Matthew’s Gospel transforms the faith of the ruler (of the synagogue) from faith that Jesus can heal into faith that Jesus can raise the dead, since in Matthew’s version (in contrast with Mark’s) the girl has already died. While on the way to respond to this request, a woman who has been suffering not just pain and discomfort but also the stigma of being a constant source of ritual uncleanness, comes to touch Jesus in order to be healed. Perhaps she has already heard that Jesus touched a leper and healed him. Nevertheless, note that Matthew eliminates the crowds present in Mark’s narrative: for Jewish readers influenced by Pharisaic tradition, it would have been troublesome to think of this woman brazenly communicating uncleanness through the crowd in order to obtain healing for herself. This is why, in Matthew’s Gospel, she is terrified of being found out. In Matthew’s Gospel, there is a stronger emphasis on the element of personal faith in Jesus: it is Jesus who tells her that it was her faith and not simply the touch that has saved her, and from that moment she was saved (from her disease). The language of ‘salvation’ is used not only for the idea of eternal salvation, but also of being rescued from the grip of disease, as in this present context.

            Jesus tells the mourners that the girl is not dead but sleeping. This led rationalist approaches to the Biblical text in the 19th century to posit that Jesus did not raise someone who was actually dead, but simply restored a girl who had been in a coma and mistakenly presumed dead. Now, it must be acknowledged that in a pre-scientific context the possibility of diagnosing someone in a coma as dead was a very real possibility. [Some missionaries to rural Africa had the experience of their discussion of Jesus rising from the dead being met with stories of friends and relatives of local people who had also ‘risen from the dead’ – i.e. they had been unconscious or in a coma, and had recovered]. If this were the case here, then one would still have to reckon with Jesus’ apparently supernatural knowledge of this fact and his ability to revive the girl (which presumably others will have tried before she was pronounced dead). So unless one is willing to discount the story in its present form altogether, one must recognize that it is certainly a miracle story. At any rate, on the level of Matthew’s Gospel, the raising of the girl is a response to her father’s faith in Jesus’ ability to raise the dead, and thus from Matthew’s perspective that is what he understood to have happened. To ask from a historian’s perspective whether a young girl who lived 2,000 years ago did have a faint, undetectable pulse before Jesus touched her hand is to ask for details that are purely and simply inaccessible to historical research from our vantage point.

            Finally, note also that Mark’s distinctive ‘secrecy motif’ is not taken up by Matthew. The word spreads openly about what Jesus did. Presumably in Mark’s Gospel the reader would assume that, although the parents may have obeyed Jesus, the appearance of the girl restored to life would at least have been noticed by those who not long before had attended her funeral! Matthew does include a similar injunction to secrecy (which is not obeyed) at the end of the following story, which is not found in Mark or Luke.

 

The Healing of Two Blind Men (Matthew 9:27-31)

The Healing of a Mute Demon-Possessed Man (Matthew 9:32-34)

 

The New Moses as Shepherd (Matthew 9:35-37)

Worth noting in this brief summary of Jesus’ ministry is the description of the crowds as ‘like sheep who have no shepherd’. In Numbers 27:16-17, Moses prays to God that he would provide a leader for the people, so that his community will not become like sheep who have no shepherd. The answer to this prayer is…Jesus! This is true, in a sense, even in the original context, where ‘Jesus ben Nun’ (= Joshua son of Nun) is ‘ordained’ to fill this position. The Jesus/Joshua parallelism ties in with the ‘new Moses’ motif so prominent in Matthew’s Gospel.

 

NEXT TIME WE WILL SIMPLY JUMP AROUND A BIT THROUGH THE REST OF MATTHEW, STOPPING AT POINTS OF PARTICULAR INTEREST. WE WILL ALSO DISCUSS ANY OTHER POINTS OF INTERPRETATION THAT MAY HAVE BEEN LEFT UNTIL LATER AT SOME POINT EARLIER IN THE COURSE...