Matthew follows Mark in presenting three “conflict stories” that are set in the midst of two sets of miracles stories. “Conflict stories” (and if you want to see a full discussion of this type of story, see Arland Hultgren, Jesus and his Adversaries) follow this pattern: (i) Jesus does something (or doesn’t do something) e.g. he forgives sins, he eats with tax collectors and sinners or his disciples don’t follow the practice of the twice weekly fast. (ii) Representative opponents get upset and take him to task: why is he doing this e.g. why does he forgive sins, or why does he eat with the tax collectors and sinners, or why do your disciples not fast. (iii) Finally Jesus comes back with a wise or memorable saying that ends the sequence e.g. the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, or “Those who are well have no need for a physician” or “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is present”.
(i) He forgives sins (9:2 – 8)
Who are ‘they’ Matthew has cut off the detail of Mark’s “Five guys on a roof” story. The confidence of the paralytic’s associates that Jesus will heal him, despite all the trouble they have to go to, exhibits great faith. The scribes, who can write and therefore can create and copy documents, are like law clerks. Their particular hot button is “who authorized this?” Why do the scribes say Jesus is blaspheming? God alone can forgive sins. Jesus is acting as a source, not merely as a channel for forgiveness.
Why does Jesus forgive the man first? The simple answer is “so that the story will work”. (The paralytic comes looking for a healing and instead he gets a forgiving! The punchline of the conflict story is about the Son of Man being authorized to forgive sins on earth. Issues of authority aside, forgiving sins is the easier task since it is not verifiable – unlike telling him to get up and walk. Carrying out the more difficult healing serves to underscore the power that has been given to the Son of Man. The view that sickness proceeds from sin does not play a part in this story. The healing is a vehicle for the controversy/conflict. “Son of Man” here is equivalent to “I”: “I have been given authority in earth …”
(ii) He eats with sinners (9:9 – 13)
Why are “tax collectors and sinners” linked? Toll collectors are well known sinners because of their need to handle unclean material as a part of their job. Who are the Pharisees? The Pharisees are the lay religious order who, with a lot of popular support, seek to bring the religious distinctiveness out of the Temple and into the home. The father at the table is as the priest in the Temple. The sanctity of table fellowship is a hot button for the Pharisees. What is the issue with eating with tax collectors and sinners? It’s an issue of identification: we don’t just invite anyone to share our table, do we?
Why do they talk to Jesus’ disciples? They ought to be able to explain what Jesus is about. Why does he eat with sinners? There are three pronouncements Did the first one attract the second and so on? (i) Those who are well have no need of a physician, do they? How can you argue with that? (ii) Go and learn what God desires. (iii) I have come to call …Is one more original than the others?
(iii) He does not fast or mourn (9:14 – 17)
Who are the disciples of John? Their hot button was preparing for the end of the age, the parousia. Why do they and the Pharisees fast? Why do the disciples of Jesus not fast? Is it a matter of capturing the moral high ground, ducking the onus of proof? Jesus no longer numbered himself among the disciples of John. As great as the Baptist was, Jesus had moved on. He was no longer into baptizing or fasting. There will be a time for that later. It is now honeymoon time, time for partying.
We are to learn from the two metaphors. (i) What is the wedding guest metaphor saying? Who is the bridegroom: presumably Jesus? With the advent of the “absence of Jesus”, things have changed. Is fasting and mourning now appropriate in a way it wasn’t when Jesus was about? (ii) Matthew makes a total hash of the piece of cloth metaphor: it is unclear what is of value. Luke gets the wineskin metaphor totally right and makes the spoiling of the old cloak flow on from this.
As Luke reminds us “the old wine is best”. There is a hierarchy of values at work here: new wine is rubbish and can easily be replaced. Of more value are the new wine skins whose sole function is to flex and expand under the pressure of fermentation. Of much greater value is the old wine which is lip smacking good. It gets that way by being stored within the articles of greatest value, the old wineskins that are brittle with age but encrusted with all the goodies of vintages past. Prima!
Is Jesus sighting himself alongside the good old wine from the past and dismissing his opponents as mere new wine? Maybe yes!
9:18 – 34 Three more healings
(i) The two daughters (9:18 – 26)
This story occurs in all three (synoptic) gospels. Mark has the most detail and Matthew the least – Luke is in between. Mark and Luke call the synagogue leader “Jairus” and hence it is the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter. In Matthew he is just an unnamed ruler and the daughter is already dead: the supplicant has great faith and he is not located in the synagogue. In every case, this raising from the dead story, for that is what it is, thoroughly intertwined with a story of the healing of a woman who has had bleedings for twelve years. It looks like they have always been linked together. Matthew leaves out a great deal of detail, including the secret touching of the hem of Jesus’ garment (which is almost the longest part of the whole story). Jesus’ perceives her interior dialogue (“If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well”) and says “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well”. In Matthew, he doesn’t touch an unclean person.
In going through Mark a couple of years ago [check out the Mark blog: http://www.interactive-mark.blogspot.com/ on Mark 5] I noted evidence for suggesting that this woman was Jairus’ wife, and hence the mother of the young girl and that she had been suffering from vaginal bleeding since the birth of the young girl twelve years ago. In this case, the two stories really do belong together because a family is healed and brought back together. The two daughters are healed.
(ii) The two blind men (9:27 – 31)
This story is a “doublet”, not meaning a doublet of finest Lincoln green but a story that occurs twice. Let me explain. Mark has two distinct giving of sight stories and he places them at the beginning and end of the centre piece of his story, on following Jesus.
Read this doc on Scribd: All the blind men
Mark uses these two separate stories as metaphors for coming to faith. The first story is set in Bethsaida and the man is unnamed: we can call him “Bethsaida guy”. This story shows us that coming to faith is a multistage affair. The second story, which is placed at the end of the central section, takes place at Jericho and involves a man called Bartimaeus who, when his eyes were opened, gets up and joins Jesus “on the way” – he becomes the archetypal disciple of Jesus. Matthew and Luke don’t use the story of “Bethsaida guy”, they ignore him completely. Luke uses the Bartimaeus story, but leaves the man unnamed, (“Jericho guy”) when he gets to the point where Mark uses Bartimaeus. Matthew does the same thing.
But in addition, Matthew uses this story a second time, much earlier in the story, in the section of the story we are currently reading. So the Bartimaeus story is used twice; it’s a doublet. But that’s not all. Instead of talking about a single character called Bartimaeus, Matthew has two, unnamed blind men. He doesn’t do this because “in the real world” there were actually two people whom Jesus healed. No, Matthew has used Mark’s story and he has changed it. (He creates other doublets 9:13, 12:7. See Luz, Vol 1pp. 6f for a full list and discussion of doublets.) So Matthew adds to the mystery of the big story of the healing of two women with the small story of two men who receive their sight – in neither story in the doublet do they follow Jesus on the way. The mystery deepens.
(iii) The two demons (?) 9:32 – 34)
In the case of the third story we have a man who, for whatever reasons, was mute, unable to speak. The story attributes this disability to the presence of a demon. Demons don’t form a part of our mental furniture and particularly they don’t play a part in our medical diagnoses. But in the first century Mediterranean world they did: remove the demon and the man can now speak. Matthew’s details are very skimpy because he wants to get to the slander at the end of his story:”By the ruler of demons he casts out the demons”. Social anthropologists have a grand name for this: “deviance labeling”. We might call it “negative stereotyping” or “bad mouthing” and we might say “give a dog a bad name and hang him” (and we might even recall our parents saying the opposite “Sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you”). Each culture and each generation has its own set of “bad names”, mud that gets thrown and sticks forever.
This story is also a doublet, so if we look over to Matt 12:22-30 we see Jesus pursuing some of the options available to him to reject this deviance label, this sticky little demon of a bad name. He launches a multi-pronged attack on the gainsayers:
- To attribute Jesus’ activity to the “master demon” would imply a civil war, a kingdom divided against itself, which would be a recipe for disaster
- Do you say the same thing about your own exorcists, “your sons” who cast out demons
- Jesus has already “bound up the strong man” in the “temptation stories”. What you see now is Jesus plundering his house
- In fact, what you are seeing is the activity of the Spirit of God ushering in the reign of God
- To speak against the activity of this Spirit by name calling then it’s blasphemy.
Is it stretching too long a bow so say we are intended to see a “second demon” here, the bad mouthing of the activity of the coming of the reign of God. This second demon, this bad naming, will also cut off all speech and render us mute – if it is not cast out, if it is not refuted. Reflect on that, if you will.
Two daughters bonded by blood, two blind men waiting to come to faith and now two demons of which the more insidious is the negative stereotyping that can crush us into silence.: arithmetic rules!
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