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

Jesus’ Foundation:  The Jewish Story and God’s Faithfulness:   Mt.11:2 – 5

^11:2 Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples ³ and said to him, ‘Are you the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?’ ⁴ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Go and report to John what you hear and see: ⁵ the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.’

Jesus shows the basic foundation for belief in him in this passage with John the Baptist’s question.  He connects his miracles to the prophetic hopes of the Old Testament (in this case, Isaiah 35:5 - 6; 42:1 - 4; and 61:1 - 2).  Let’s look more carefully at those two elements, the Old Testament hope and Jesus' claim to fulfill it.

The Old Testament by itself is very unusual and significant, because peoples in the ancient and classical world didn’t believe in a good God who would defeat evil in the world.  They believed in gods (or a god) who brought about both good and evil in the world, and that you might escape this world along with its cyclical, circular patterns when you die.  But they did not believe that an utterly good God would renew this whole world through an ‘Expected One’ (Mt.11:3) – a messianic king, as Isaiah and the rest of the Hebrew prophets longed to see.  Sociologically, it’s remarkable that the Old Testament came into existence, because what human beings in the ancient world had the incentive to produce hope in a happy ending for the whole world, or to diagnose the human condition with such clarity, or to uphold a set of ethics that counteracted the norms of power and wealth?  However, the Old Testament isn’t enough by itself, because all the predictions and hopes that the Old Testament longed for needed to be realized.  Where is the ‘Expected One?’

Miracles are incredible, too, but by themselves, aren’t enough either to tell us who Jesus is.  Miracles only indicate that there are some spiritual and supernatural powers at work in the world, but they wouldn’t necessarily demonstrate that God is good, or that Jesus is who he said he was. 

But if you put these two things together, you get a powerful and firm foundation for believing that Jesus is who he said he is.  Jesus said, ‘the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them’ (Mt.11:5).  In other words, on the physical level, Jesus was restoring humanity to what God had always wanted us to be.  This is a summary of what Isaiah longed to see, and Isaiah himself was rooted in the larger tapestry of Old Testament hope.  Yet the physical miracles are connected to a deeper spiritual miracle:  Jesus was healing and transforming human nature on the most fundamental level, and these miracles of healing and transformation were signposts to his deeper work.  Jesus’ miracles punctuated his life to validate and symbolize his own person:  Within himself, Jesus’ divine nature was healing and transforming his human nature.   Ultimately, that was completed in his death and resurrection.  All Jesus’ miracles point forward to his own resurrection.  In the physical body of Jesus, human nature, which had been blinded and deafened to God’s call, became fully responsive to God’s divine love.  In the physical body of Jesus, human nature, which had been crippled by the corrupting disease of sin, was healed and cleansed.  In the physical body of Jesus, human nature, which had been impoverished by sin, had good news announced to it.  Jesus offers us what is in him:  his own new, God-soaked humanity.  Yes, ‘the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.’