Matthew 9

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What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
Forgiveness, healing. Healing, forgiveness. Which is easier to say? Are the two interchangeable? I don't completely get it, Matthew.
      This chapter has some striking passages, most made more difficult to appreciate because Matthew again cuts events to the bare bones, like the index page in a magazine without access to the actual articles. Take verse 9: “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. 'Follow me,' he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.” Wow! Maybe Matthew's just being modest, or maybe he only had a little bit of paper and a stub of a pencil left? What did his wife have to say about this, and who was going to feed the chickens from now on??
      As in Chapter 8, the performance of magical cures takes centre stage unless you read for some universal principles. Most striking to me is Jesus' reference to Hosea 6:6 and I've included the footnoted reference in context here:
    What can I do with you, Judah?
    4.Your love is like the morning mist,
    like the early dew that disappears.
    5. Therefore I cut you in pieces with my prophets,
    I killed you with the words of my mouth—
    then my judgements go forth like the sun.
    6. For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
    and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.
    7. As at Adam, they have broken the covenant;
    they were unfaithful to me there.
If we assume that Jesus means the trappings of repentance and forgiveness of sins represented by ritual sacrifice, then is he saying that the rituals of the establishment religion of his time mean less to him than the understanding that mercy trumps all that? Heaven knows, his merciful acts to those who approached him for healing brought on nothing but rebuke from the church leaders who followed him around, searching for transgressions against the laws of SACRIFICE by which to condemn his ministry.
      Can love for religion result in love for God fading “like the morning mist?”
      I spend little time in reading about miraculous cures, driving out of demons, etc. My distinct impression is that these stories fit somehow into a worldview of the time, a storytelling style common to the time in which Matthew wrote this. The teaching legends of their day. In our world of hard news and the demand that we burrow down to the facts and the facts only, people are not raised from the dead, Huntington's, Alzheimer’s, Paralysis run their course under the principles of biology, of entropy.
      Others will find comfort in the possibility that it only happened then because it was the Son of Man walking among us—and he the very maker and master of the laws of nature that control our day to day. But certainly we believe this is still a true description of God.
      But any consternation about absorbing these stories needn't deter us from some universal principles:
  • God is about mercy, not religious ritual (13).
  • Forgiveness and mercy are inseparable; two sides of the same coin (4).
  • Decaying, calcified religions have difficulty incorporating new insights and revelations (16 & 17).
  • In the task of spreading the gospel of compassion, we're always short of fellow travelers (38).
Matthew may be economical, even cursory, in his narration, but given that a 1,000 page biography of Jesus doesn't exist, this does well enough to point us in a direction worth following.

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