The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

 

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

   

The Two Men Who Saw Jesus:  Mt.9:27 – 31

 

9:27 As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, crying out, ‘Have mercy on us, Son of David!’ 28 When he entered the house, the blind men came up to him, and Jesus said to them, ‘Do you believe that I am able to do this?’ They said to him, ‘Yes, Lord.’ 29 Then he touched their eyes, saying, ‘It shall be done to you according to your faith.’ 30 And their eyes were opened. And Jesus sternly warned them: ‘See that no one knows about this!’ 31 But they went out and spread the news about him throughout all that land.

 

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn very slowly and very carefully disclosed his true identity as the rightful king of Gondor.  After the great battle outside the City of Gondor, he chose to camp outside the City to avoid any controversy about whether he was entering as its king at that point.  But because so many lay wounded and dying within the City, Aragorn was persuaded to enter because he had skills at healing.  Curiously, an old saying had circulated in the City from ages past, saying, ‘The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.’  Aragorn stepped into that hope and began healing people: 

 

‘Now Aragorn knelt beside Faramir, and held a hand upon his brow.  And those that watched felt that some great struggle was going on.  For Aragorn’s face grew grey with weariness; and ever and anon he called the name of Faramir, but each time more faintly to their hearing, as if Aragorn himself was removed from them, and walked afar in some dark vale, calling for one that was lost…Then taking two leaves [of a healing herb], he laid them on his hands and breathed on them, and then he crushed them, and straightaway a living freshness filled the room, as if the air itself awoke and tingled, sparkling with joy.  And then he cast the leaves into the bowls of steaming water that were brought to him, and at once all hearts were lightened.  For the fragrance that came to each was like a memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in Spring is itself but a fleeting memory.  But Aragorn stood as one refreshed, and his eyes smiled as he held a bowl before Faramir’s dreaming face… Suddenly Faramir stirred, and he opened his eyes, and he looked on Aragorn who bent over him; and a light of knowledge and love was kindled in his eyes, and he spoke softly, ‘My lord, you called me.  I come.  What does the king command?’ ...Whether Aragorn had indeed some forgotten power of Westernesse, or whether it was but his words…, as the sweet influence of the herb stole about the chamber it seemed to those who stood by that a keen wind blew through the window, and it bore no scent, but was an air wholly breathed by any living thing and came new-made from snowy mountains high beneath a dome of stars, or from shores of silver far away washed by seas of foam.’[1]

 

          In a similar way, Jesus stepped into the Jewish prophetic hopes that their Messiah would be a healer.  Indeed, to quote Tolkien, ‘The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.’  In this passage, the two blind men call Jesus the ‘Son of David’ and he heals them (Mt.9:27).  Why is this short episode here?  How are we to understand this?

First, according to Jewish law, two witnesses were essential for establishing a fact in a legal trial (Num.35:30; Dt.17:6; 19:15).  These two men bear witness to the cumulative case Matthew builds, that Jesus is the heir of David, i.e. the ‘Son of David.’  These two men don’t understand what that means exactly.  Neither do the disciples at this point in the story.  But getting the title right is a good start, because Jesus (and Matthew after him) is arguing that the idea of Messiah needs to be resubmitted to the Hebrew Scriptures and to Jesus’ claims to fulfill it. 

At the time, all other Jews thought of Messiah Son of David as a military liberator.  ‘Surely,’ they thought, ‘he will conquer the Romans and finally win us our freedom like God did back in Egypt.’  Yet the prophets also expected the Messiah to be a healer.  Isaiah wrote that when the Son of David comes:

 

‘Then the eyes of the blind will be opened

And the ears of the deaf will be unstopped.  

Then the lame will leap like a deer,

And the tongue of the mute will shout for joy.’ (Isaiah 35:5) 

 

And Isaiah even recorded the Messiah’s first-person perspective on his mission:

 

‘The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,

Because the LORD has anointed me

To bring good news to the afflicted;

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to captives

And freedom to prisoners.’ (Isaiah 61:1)

 

This dense sequence of Jesus’ miracles (Mt.8 – 9) is Jesus’ case that he is the Jewish Messiah.  Look at the patterns:  lepers are cleansed, the sick are healed, the lame get up to walk, the oppressed are set free, the brokenhearted are made joyful, and now the blind see.  In the next story (9:32 – 33), a mute man shouts for joy.  This evokes everything Isaiah envisioned.  Just to make sure that we don’t miss the connection to the Old Testament, Matthew explicitly quotes from Isaiah.  He already quoted the great Suffering Servant passage, Isaiah 53:4, near the start of this section (Mt.8:17).  In case we missed that, which is hard to imagine of any Jewish reader, Matthew quotes from Isaiah 35:5 and 61:1 at the beginning of his next major section (Mt.11:4 – 5).  Matthew will remind us of what we learn of Jesus here in this section.

In fact, secondly, Matthew provides witnesses to satisfy the demands of Jewish law to establish Jesus as the Messiah that Isaiah foretold.  Recall that Jewish law requires at least two witnesses to establish a fact in court.  Therefore, Matthew substantiates his own quotation of Isaiah 53:4, ‘He himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases’ (Mt.8:17), by providing five stories of two people immediately afterwards:  Jesus challenged two would-be disciples (8:18 – 22); he freed two Gentile men held captive to demons (8:28 – 34); he called two paralyzed men to ‘get up’ (9:1 – 13); he healed two ‘daughters’ of the Jews (9:18 – 26); and now he cures two men of blindness (9:27 – 31).  The five pairs of ‘two people’ throughout Mt.8:18 – 9:31 serve as witnesses to the fact that Jesus is indeed the one who takes our infirmities and carries away our diseases, as Isaiah foresaw.

But how exactly would Jesus resolve the ‘Messiah as conqueror’ and ‘Messiah as healer’ themes together?  To answer that question, we look at Matthew’s third point.  The two blind men are the culmination of this pattern of ‘two people’ whose bodies are healed while their illnesses are conquered.  Jesus’ healing miracles are ‘signs,’ or ‘pointers’ to substantiate his mission and identity.  To Matthew, this sequence of healings challenges the ‘military Messiah’ idea that most Jews of the time had.  This sequence points to Jesus’ claim that the Messiah would be a ‘conqueror’ of evil within human nature itself, and a ‘liberator’ of humanity from enslavement to sin, death, and the devil. 

          If we saw this, then we would not only ‘see’ Jesus correctly but the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole, as well.  And perhaps we too would say, ‘My lord, you called me.  I come.  What does the king command?’ 

 

[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, New York: Ballantine Books, p.172 – 173, 176