It Is I

Herod hears about Jesus (14:1–12)

In Matthew's Gospel we are in the long stretch where the wonder and the hostility grow together. Jesus has told the kingdom parables (chapter 13) and then been shrugged off in his own hometown. Now Matthew turns the camera on a palace, where Herod Antipas — the Galilean ruler who had John the Baptist beheaded — hears the reports about Jesus and cannot sleep.

The chapter moves in four scenes. A birthday feast ends in a murder (14:1–12). A deserted place ends in a meal for thousands (14:13–21). A night storm ends in worship (14:22–33). A lakeside town ends with sick people reaching for the hem of a robe (14:34–36).

Watch the two tables. One is laid to protect a ruler's pride, and it serves up a prophet's head. The other is spread on grass for people with nothing, and there is more at the end of it than at the beginning.

"At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the report concerning Jesus, and said to his servants, 'This is John the Baptizer. He is risen from the dead. That is why these powers work in him'" (14:1–2).

Two small corrections keep the scene in focus. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is one of the standard modern works, points out that "at that time" is a very loose phrase in Matthew and should not be tied to whatever came just before it. And Herod was a tetrarch, the ruler of a quarter, not a king, however often people called him one. Galilee was his, which means Jesus had been preaching inside his jurisdiction all along.^*

So the news reaches the palace, and the first thing it stirs is not curiosity but dread. Herod's conscience supplies the explanation: the man I killed is back.

Then Matthew stops the story to tell us how that killing happened.

John had said the plain word to Herod's face: "It is not lawful for you to have her." Herod had taken Herodias, his half brother's wife, and Leviticus forbids exactly that (Leviticus 18:16). John would not soften the law for a ruler, and so he sat in a cell, kept alive by nothing better than the crowd's good opinion of him.

Then a birthday. A dance. An oath sworn in front of the dinner guests. A girl coached by her mother: "Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptizer."

John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, refused to describe this politely. "O diabolical revel! O satanic spectacle! O lawless dancing!" he said, and then named what the party produced: "the trophy of the devils was set on the table."^*

And here is the pitiful hinge of the scene. "The king was grieved, but for the sake of his oaths, and of those who sat at the table with him, he commanded it to be given" (14:9).

He did not want to do it. He did it anyway. John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, saw exactly what Herod could not afford to lose: "he has not the courage to give a refusal to a dancing girl, lest he should incur the reproach of unsteadiness; as if it were more dishonorable to retract a rash and foolish promise than to persist in a heinous crime."^*

It was never really the oath. Calvin saw that too: "though he had sworn a hundred times, yet if there had been no witness, he would not have held by his oath."^* It was the table. It was the faces watching him.

A man can fear everything except God and still be destroyed by his fears. Herod feared the crowd, feared his guests, feared looking weak. The one thing he never feared was the word that had been preached to him.

"His disciples came, and took the body, and buried it; and they went and told Jesus" (14:12).

Here two readings of the next verse part company, and it is worth knowing which one you have been handed. Most readers, and most older commentators, take 14:13 as Jesus withdrawing in grief at the news of John's death. Carson argues otherwise, on the grammar. Verses 3–12 begin with the word for, the ordinary way of opening a flashback, and 14:13 picks the story back up where 14:1–2 left it. On that reading, what Jesus heard was what Herod was saying about him, and he withdraws from a ruler's dangerous attention exactly as he had earlier withdrawn from the Pharisees (12:15).^* The Greek allows both, and the difference is not small: one Jesus is grieving, the other is being hunted.

Either way the grief is real. The forerunner is dead, and his disciples come to Jesus with the body barely buried. But on Carson's reading the boat is not only mourning. It is an escape.

Bread in a lonely place (14:13–21)

"He withdrew from there in a boat, to a deserted place apart."

It does not work. The crowds run around the top of the lake on foot and are standing there when he lands. And the man who came looking for quiet meets them with pity instead of resentment: "he saw a great multitude. He had compassion on them, and healed their sick" (14:14).

The word is splanchnizomai. It is a gut word, mercy felt low down in the body.

Calvin noticed that this costs Jesus something real. He had gone looking for rest, for himself and for his worn-out disciples; and "when urgent duty calls him to additional labor, he willingly lays aside that private consideration" and teaches the crowds instead.^* He did not spare himself. He almost never did.

Evening comes. There are no villages near. The disciples propose the sensible thing: send the people away to buy food.

Jesus refuses the sensible thing. "They don't need to go away. You give them something to eat" (14:16).

It is an impossible command, and it is meant to be. Chrysostom heard it as a step in their training. The place is a desert and the hour is late, and neither fact is an obstacle: "For although the place be desert, yet He that feeds the world is here; and although the time be now past, yet He that is not subject to time is discoursing with you."^*

Carson is blunter about where the disciples actually stand. Their answer — five loaves and two fish, so this cannot be done — shows both a failure to understand and a shortage of faith. They are standing beside the one who makes bread grow out of the ground, and the arithmetic is all they can see.^*

Then the King spreads a table in the wilderness. He takes the bread, looks up, gives thanks, breaks it, and hands it to the disciples to distribute.

Two cautions keep the scene from being over-read, and both come from Carson. The first is about the Lord's Supper: looking up to heaven, giving thanks and breaking bread were what any Jewish head of a household did at any meal, so the actions carry no special communion meaning at the time they happened. The second is about Moses. It is natural to hear manna here — a hungry multitude, a desert, bread out of nowhere — and a long line of interpreters has concluded that Matthew is painting Jesus as a new Moses giving a new exodus. Carson doubts it, for three plain reasons: none of the Gospel writers presses the desert setting, the manna was never to be kept overnight while here the fragments are deliberately gathered up, and in Exodus nobody is chasing Moses into the wilderness.^*

That is a live disagreement rather than a settled point, and the reading taken here leaves the canonical echo standing rather than silencing it. Israel once sneered, "Can he give bread also? Can he prepare a table in the wilderness?" (Psalm 78:19–20). Here is the answer, in a pair of hands. Elisha fed a hundred men from twenty loaves and had some left over (2 Kings 4:42–44); this is five loaves and five thousand men, "besides women and children." The echo is real. What Matthew does not do is build a system on it.

It has long been fashionable to shrink the whole thing to a miracle of sharing: a boy's honesty shamed a stingy crowd into opening their lunch bags. Carson says such reconstructions have "more in common with late nineteenth-century liberalism than with the text."^* The text counts five loaves, not a hidden picnic, and at the end there is more food than there was at the start.

"They all ate, and were filled. They took up twelve baskets full of that which remained over" (14:20).

Twelve baskets, twelve tribes. Carson thinks that can hardly be an accident, and says just as honestly that the precise significance is uncertain.^* At the least it says this: the Messiah's supply is so lavish that his leftovers would feed Israel.

The fourth watch (14:22–27)

"Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat, and to go ahead of him to the other side" (14:22).

The verb is strong. He compelled them. Then he climbed the hill alone to pray, and his grief and his danger finally got their solitude, spent in front of his Father.

Meanwhile the boat is out in the middle of the lake, "distressed by the waves, for the wind was contrary." They are exactly where he sent them, and it is terrible. Obedience has landed them in a storm.

Calvin puts their night in one sentence: "Their arms were not more fatigued by rowing than their faith was shaken by grievous terrors."^*

"In the fourth watch of the night" — the Roman reckoning, so somewhere between three and six in the morning — "Jesus came to them, walking on the sea."

Chrysostom read the timing as deliberate, and it stings a little: he came at the last watch, "instructing them not hastily to seek for deliverance; from their pressing dangers, but to bear all occurrences manfully."^* Help arrives late in this story, and that is part of the story.

He does not calm the water from the shore. He comes out into it, treading the waves that are drowning their courage. In the Old Testament this is something only God does. He "alone stretches out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea" (Job 9:8). "Your way was through the sea... yet your footprints were unseen" (Psalm 77:19). The sea in Scripture is chaos, the thing that will not be ruled. Carson draws out what the scene therefore claims about Jesus, and he is not timid about it: "Jesus is even now stilling the deep."^*

The disciples see him and scream. A man walking on water is more frightening than the water. "It's a ghost!"

Then the voice comes across the dark. "Cheer up! It is I! Don't be afraid" (14:27).

They could not recognize him by sight, Chrysostom says, so "He makes Himself manifest by His voice."^*

The middle phrase is egō eimi. In ordinary Greek it means no more than "it's me." It is also the name spoken at the burning bush, "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14), and the name God uses of himself in Isaiah. Carson holds both ends without forcing either: the Greek "can have no more force than that," and yet "any Christian after the resurrection and ascension would also detect echoes of 'I am,' the decisive self-disclosure of God."^*

That is how most of Jesus' self-revelation works in Matthew. Veiled at the time, unmistakable afterward. On the water, in the dark, the two meanings lie on top of each other. Everything the sea is saying to these men — you are alone, you are small, you are going under — is answered not by the storm stopping, which has not happened yet, but by a Person arriving in it.

Peter out of the boat (14:28–31)

"Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the waters" (14:28).

Carson notes that Peter's if is not really a hesitation. The Greek is a real condition, closer to "since it's you." The request is bold, but these men had been trained and sent out to do this kind of thing.^*

Calvin is less impressed, and the two readings are worth holding together. Peter's longing comes from love, he says, but it is not yet settled faith: "without the wings of faith, he desires to fly at will."^* He wants the water firm under his feet before the word of Christ has had its full weight in his heart.

"Come," says Jesus. And for a few impossible steps a fisherman walks on the sea.

Chrysostom saw what Peter was actually after, and it is the kindest thing anyone says about him: he came down from the ship "not rejoicing so much in walking on the water, as in coming unto Him."^*

Then "he saw that the wind was strong, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, 'Lord, save me!'" His eyes left the face and went to the weather. His heart failed, and then his feet failed, and up out of the water came the shortest and truest prayer in the Gospel.

"Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand, took hold of him."

Notice the order. The grip comes first. The question comes second.

Calvin refuses to let either half go. The Lord "does not connive at Peter's fault," and still he "indulges our weakness, and stretches out his hand, that the waters may not swallow us up altogether."^* Rescue and rebuke in the same motion, with the drowning man already held.

Then the question. "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" Oligopistos — little-faith — is Matthew's word for disciples with just enough faith to try and not quite enough to hold.

And the question is sharper than it looks in English. The Greek does not ask what caused the doubt — anybody could see that, the wind was howling. Carson shows that it asks what the doubt was for. "What was the point of his doubt, having come so far?"^* Peter was most of the way to Jesus. The doubt gained him nothing. It never does.

Tim Keller, the Manhattan pastor, made a neighboring point in a talk on faith and proof rather than on this chapter. Faith does not save by being impressive. "If you're about to fall off a cliff and you just reach out scared to death and grab a branch and it holds you up," you are saved — not by the quality of your grip but by the strength of the branch. "It's not the quality of your faith that saves you."

Peter's faith was poor. The hand that caught him was not.

Worship in the boat (14:32–33)

"When they got up into the boat, the wind ceased. Those who were in the boat came and worshiped him, saying, 'You are truly the Son of God!'" (14:32–33).

Carson is right about where the weight of the story falls: "The climax of the story is not the stilling of the storm." What the scene is after is the confession and the worship of the men in the boat.

And he adds a caution that keeps us honest. We should not assume these men meant by Son of God everything the church later meant. They are probably using the title in a messianic sense, with shallow comprehension. In the Gospels, Carson notes, the disciples understand only by degrees — coming around to the same truths again and again, each time deeper, each time still mixed with misunderstanding.^*

That is no criticism of them. It is a description of most discipleship, including ours. The verb Matthew chooses is proskyneō, the word for going down on your face before God, and it is the first time in this Gospel that the disciples together say the words.

The bread had shown them what he could do. The sea showed them who he is.

Only the fringe of his cloak (14:34–36)

The chapter ends quietly at Gennesaret, the fertile plain on the northwest shore. The people recognize him, word goes out through the whole region, and the sick are carried in, begging "that they might just touch the fringe of his garment" (14:36).

The kraspedon is the tasseled hem every devout Jew wore at God's own command, a reminder tied to the clothes to keep his words (Numbers 15:38–39). And that much faith — a trembling hand on an edge of cloth — was enough. "As many as touched it were made whole."

Carson points out what this little scene is also doing. The stricter groups counted it defiling to be jostled in a crowd at all, and Jesus simply does not care, which sets up the argument about clean and unclean that breaks out in the next chapter. He is the one person a crowd cannot contaminate: "he himself cannot become unclean."^* Touch runs the other way with him. Holiness is the contagious thing.

Where chapter fourteen leaves us

Set the two tables side by side one more time.

At the first table a ruler protects his face, and a prophet loses his head. The oath is kept and the man is killed. Everyone at that table goes home full of nothing.

At the second table a grieving King feeds thousands of strangers until they are satisfied, and the fragments fill twelve baskets.

Between the two tables is a man in the water, going under. That is where most of us actually live: having said yes to the call, out past the side of the boat, and sinking.

The word of this chapter is not "have more faith and you will not sink." It is a hand that closes on us before the question is asked. It is a voice that has not changed since the burning bush, saying the two things the dark cannot answer: It is I. Don't be afraid.

And both scenes point past themselves. The King who multiplies bread in a desert will take bread in an upper room, give thanks, break it, and say, "This is my body." The hand stretched out over the water will be stretched out and nailed down. He was not spared, so that we could be caught.

The bread proves that he can. The hand proves that he will.