Mercy, Not Sacrifice

Matthew 9 is the second half of a single exhibit. Across chapters 8 and 9 Matthew gathers nine miracles to show what kind of King he has been describing — and this is the half where the King's authority stops being about weather and leprosy and turns to a man's sins and a tax collector's dinner table.

It opens quietly. The previous chapter had ended with a whole town asking Jesus to leave; chapter 9 begins with him getting into the boat and going home.

The authority that touched a leper and stilled a sea now turns in two directions nobody expected. It turns inward, toward a man's sins. Then it turns outward, toward a tax collector's dinner table. The same people are scandalized both times, and Matthew wants us to see that it is one scandal, not two.

Three movements: authority claimed (9:1–8), authority spent on the wrong company (9:9–17), and authority pressed until the King looks at a crowd and says there are not enough workers (9:18–38).

It is worth saying plainly that this is an arrangement rather than a diary. R. T. R. T. France, the New Testament scholar, argues that chapters 8 and 9 are a collection assembled by theme, gathering nine miracles to exhibit the authority the Sermon on the Mount had only claimed.^* Matthew is not writing down a fortnight. He is making a case.

A word aimed past the body (9:1–8)

Some men carry a paralyzed man to Jesus on a bed. Matthew tells it in a sentence; Mark and Luke are the ones who open the roof.

Jesus looks at the stretcher and speaks to something else entirely. "Son, cheer up! Your sins are forgiven you" (9:2).

Nobody asked for that. The man came about his legs.

Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, noticed the order and would not leave it alone. Christ "healed first that which is invisible, the soul, by forgiving his sins."^* The body was the smaller errand.

The scribes say nothing out loud. They only think it: this man blasphemes.

Jesus answers the thought. The point is not that he won an argument he was never handed. The point is that he read a silence, which Israel's own Scriptures said God alone could do.

Then comes the question that organizes the scene. Which is easier to say: your sins are forgiven, or get up and walk? (9:5)

The word say is where the weight sits. Anyone can say the first, because no one can check it. So he does the checkable thing in order to prove the uncheckable one.

Calvin, the Geneva reformer, asks a different question of the same verse. Why speak the pardon at all, rather than simply grant it? Because our problem was never that mercy is far away. It is that we cannot believe it has come near. "So strong is our inclination to distrust, that we never venture to believe that God is merciful to us, till he draws near, and speaks familiarly to us." Forgiveness, he adds, is not a thing to be sought from a distance.

The Greek keeps that nearness in the tense. Aphientai is present, not past: your sins are being forgiven, here, at this bed, while everyone watches.

The crowd's reaction is the oddest line in the paragraph. They glorify God "who had given such authority to men" (9:8).

Men. Plural. Matthew keeps the word, and he is not being careless with it. D. A. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar, takes the plural as Matthew's own emphasis, pointing ahead to the moment the authority is delegated.^* The authority announced at 7:29 and claimed at 9:6 is handed to twelve men at 10:1. The crowd praises God for something broader than it can see, and is right by accident.

Called at the table he was still sitting at (9:9–13)

"He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax collection office" (9:9).

Sitting. Still working. Mid-transaction, as far as the sentence tells us.

This is the detail Chrysostom refuses to hurry past: "it was not when he had left off or forsaken this wicked trade, but from the midst of the evils He drew him up."^* The call arrives before the reform, not after it.

Calvin looks at the same moment from the other end and credits the word rather than the man: "In the great readiness and eagerness of Matthew to obey, we see the Divine power of the word of Christ."^*

It is worth being clear-eyed about what the trade was. A telōnēs bought the right to collect and kept whatever he took above the contracted sum. Leon Morris, the Australian New Testament scholar, makes the point that the offence was structural rather than incidental: the profit was the overcharge, so contempt for the profession was a judgment about the system and not merely social snobbery.^* Cicero, the Roman senator and orator, listed the work among the occupations that earn men's hatred. Matthew, alone of the Gospel writers, keeps the label attached to his own name in the list of the twelve disciples (10:3).

Then dinner, and the objection: why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?

Jesus answers with a proverb, an assignment, and a mission statement, in that order. The healthy have no need of a physician. Go and learn what Hosea meant. I came to call sinners.

The middle one is the sharpest. "Go and learn" was a rabbi's phrase for a student who had not done the reading, and he says it to the professionals.

What he sends them to learn is Hosea 6:6: "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice."

Matthew is the only Gospel writer who quotes that verse, and he quotes it twice. Here, and again at 12:7, where the Pharisees are objecting to hungry disciples in a grainfield. The Greek word for mercy, eleos, appears exactly three times in this Gospel: 9:13, 12:7, and 23:23, where the charge is that the Pharisees have neglected "justice, mercy, and faith." Twice as an assignment, once as a verdict. That is not vocabulary. That is a case being built, and these men are given two chances to do the reading before it closes.

Calvin puts the physician image where it finally goes: "Why then was Christ himself made a sacrifice and a curse, but that he might stretch out his hand to accursed sinners?"^*

Old skins (9:14–17)

John's disciples ask the fasting question, and Jesus answers with a wedding.

Chrysostom marks the change of title: "Before, He called Himself a physician, but here a bridegroom; by these names revealing His unspeakable mysteries."^* Two pictures inside one conversation, and both of them are about who is in the room.

Then the patch and the wineskins. Unshrunk cloth tears the old garment. New wine still working will split skins that have already done their stretching.

The point is not that the old is worthless. The point is that it has no give left.

Two children (9:18–26)

A ruler's daughter has just died. On the way to the house, a woman who has bled for twelve years comes up behind Jesus and touches the fringe of his cloak.

Matthew braids the stories deliberately. A man with a name, standing, and a public request. A woman with none of the three, reaching from behind, saying it only to herself: If I just touch his garment, I will be made well (9:21).

Her verb is sōzō — the same verb the angel used of this child before he was born, when he said Jesus "will save his people from their sins" (1:21). She means her body. The word means more than she means.

And she gets the same greeting the paralyzed man got. "Daughter, cheer up! Your faith has made you well" (9:22).

That imperative, tharsei, occurs three times in Matthew, and two of them are in this chapter. He says it to a paralyzed man and to a bleeding woman, and then not again until the boat in the storm (14:27). Both times here it is a vocative of family. He calls the first one teknon, child, and the second one thygater, daughter. Neither of them was kin when the sentence began.

Chrysostom on her: "though she was bound by her affliction, yet her faith had given her wings."^*

Calvin will not let her faith be tidier than it was. It was mixed with error; she wanted to take the cure quietly and go. And that is the use he makes of it, which is a pastoral one: "Though we have not such abundance of faith as might be desired, there is no reason why our weakness should drive away or discourage us from prayer."^*

At the house the flute players are already working. They have been hired, and quickly.

"The girl isn't dead, but sleeping," he says, and they laugh at him.

Chrysostom heard the room exactly: "Noble tokens, surely, these, of the rulers of synagogues; in the moment of her death pipes and cymbals raising a dirge!"^*

What the blind ones could see (9:27–34)

Two blind men follow him down the road calling him Son of David. It is the first time anyone in this Gospel has used the title since the genealogy that opens the Gospel (1:1–17).

They cannot see him. They name him correctly anyway.

Chrysostom puts the irony where it belongs: "when these men, though their eyes were struck out, receive the faith by hearing alone."^*

Then a mute man speaks, the crowds say nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel, and the Pharisees say he casts out demons by the prince of demons (9:34). The chapter of nine miracles closes with the people who can see everything explaining it away.

The look, and the shortage (9:35–38)

Matthew ends the cycle with a sentence that repeats 4:23 almost word for word. Teaching, proclaiming, healing every disease. The frame closes on both sides of chapters 8 and 9, and we are meant to feel it close.

Then: "when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them, because they were harassed and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd" (9:36).

Splanchnizomai is the verb, and this is its first appearance in the Gospel. It is a word about the gut, not the sentiments. It will be used five times in Matthew, and the first time is here, looking at a crowd of nobody in particular.

The two participles under it are worth slowing down for. Eskylmenoi describes something flayed or worn ragged. Errimmenoi describes something thrown down and left where it fell. Both are perfect passives: this was done to them, and they are still in that condition.

Sheep without a shepherd is not a new image. It is Moses asking God to appoint someone to lead Israel after him (Numbers 27:17). It is Ezekiel's charge against shepherds who fed themselves and let the flock scatter (Ezekiel 34:5). Matthew sets it here, immediately after the leadership of Israel has objected, in one chapter, to a healing, a dinner, and an exorcism.

Chrysostom states the charge without softening it: "This is His charge against the rulers of the Jews, that being shepherds they acted the part of wolves."^*

And then the closing line is not a solution. It is a shortage.

"The harvest indeed is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore that the Lord of the harvest will send out laborers into his harvest" (9:37–38).

He does not say the crowd is too big. He says the workers are too few.

Which is a strange way to end a chapter about authority. He has just forgiven sins, raised a dead girl, opened two sets of eyes, and loosed a tongue. The last word is a prayer request.

Unless the shortage was the point being made all along. At 9:8 the crowd praised God for giving authority to men, and at 10:1 he calls twelve of them and gives it away. The lack named in 9:37 is answered on the next page, and the answer is people.

The King who forgives a man at his stretcher and eats at a tax collector's table is the same King who looks at a shepherdless crowd and asks his friends to pray for help. Mercy is what he says he wants. Mercy is what he spends the chapter handing out. Mercy is the work he is hiring for.