Matthew8chapter 8

Matthew 8:1-4

When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed, and a leper meets him first, the opening of ten miracles Matthew gathers into chapters 8 and 9 as the works answering the words of the Sermon. The leper's plea concedes power and questions only willingness, if thou wilt, and the answer gives him both words back, I will; be thou clean. Jesus touched him, which the law said conveyed defilement, and the commentators state the reversal plainly: here cleanness runs the other way. The charge to tell no man but show the priest sends him through Leviticus 14, the offering Moses commanded for a healing no living priest had administered, for a testimony unto them.

Matthew 8:5-9

There came unto him a centurion, a Roman officer of a hundred, pleading for a servant he calls grievously tormented. His I am not worthy sits deliberately against his rank, and his argument is a soldier's theology: I am a man under authority, and I know a word of command needs no presence, so speak the word only. The bench notes he reasons from his own subordination, being under authority himself, he recognizes one whose word the unseen ranks obey. Matthew compresses the scene to the dialogue, because the dialogue carries verses 10 to 12.

Matthew 8:10-13

So great faith, no, not in Israel draws Jesus' marvel, one of only two times the Gospels record him marvelling, here at a Gentile's faith and in Mark 6:6 at Nazareth's unbelief. On this hinge he opens the east-and-west saying: many shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom, while the children of the kingdom are cast out, the first sounding of the weeping-and-gnashing refrain that returns five more times in this Gospel. The exposition carries both edges as the text does, the feast genuinely open to the nations, the warning genuinely aimed at presumption on descent, and John the Baptist's God is able of these stones already said it at 3:9. The servant was healed in the selfsame hour, the word arriving where the speaker never went.

Matthew 8:14-15

Peter's house: Peter's house in Capernaum held his wife's mother, sick of a fever, and the scene is the shortest of the ten miracles: he touched her hand, the fever left, she arose and ministered. The bench draws the two quiet facts the verse carries: Peter was a married man, which 1 Corinthians 9:5 confirms years later with his wife travelling beside him, and the healing's completeness is proved by service, no convalescence between the fever and the table. Capernaum's synagogue and shoreline made the house a base; archaeology has a strong candidate for it beneath the octagonal church, a claim the exposition reports as the evidence lane, not as certainty.

Matthew 8:16-17

He cast out the spirits with his word, the same word the centurion trusted, and Matthew reads the evening of healings through Isaiah 53:4: Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses, a rendering closer to the Hebrew than the Septuagint's spiritualized griefs, choliim, sicknesses, nasa, to lift and carry. The fulfillment claim is the chapter's argued center, for Matthew locates the Servant's burden-bearing not only at the cross but in the ministry, the healer entering under the weight of what he removes. The bench holds the two readings together rather than against each other, bodily healing flowing from the atonement's person with its fullness at the resurrection, and 1 Peter 2:24 carrying the same song to sin directly.

Matthew 8:18-22

He gave commandment to depart unto the other side, and two volunteers meet him at the jetty. To the scribe's I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest comes the homelessness saying, the foxes have holes, the Son of man hath not where to lay his head, the title's first use in the Gospel, and the exposition states its double register, Daniel 7:13's exalted figure and the plain Hebrew idiom for a man, the mystery being that both are true of the speaker who owns no pillow. To the disciple asking first to bury his father the answer is harder still, let the dead bury their dead; the bench reads the request as likely a delay until the father should die, and the saying as the kingdom's claim outranking the highest duty the law knew. One volunteer is warned of the cost, one denied the postponement, and following in the next verse is literal.

Matthew 8:23-27

When he was entered into a ship there arose a great tempest, seismos, the word for an earthquake, and the lake's geography explains the suddenness, six hundred feet below the sea with cold wind funnelled down the gorges onto warm water. He was asleep, the Gospel's one note of Jesus sleeping, exhaustion after the day of crowds; the disciples' cry is a creed in three words, Lord, save us. The rebuke lands on them before the weather, why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith, the refrain's third sounding, and then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and the commentators hear Psalm 89:9 and Psalm 107:29 underneath, the stilling of the sea being in the Scriptures the untransferable mark of God. What manner of man is this, the men ask, and the chapter leaves the question standing as its own answer.

Matthew 8:28-29

Two possessed with devils meet him among the tombs of the Gergesenes, and the exposition notes the synoptic surface honestly: Mark and Luke tell of one man at Gadara, Matthew of two, the country names varying in the manuscripts, and the old resolution stands without strain, two were there and one was the speaker. The ruins of Kursi on the eastern shore fit the steep place better than Gadara's six miles inland, which the exposition reports as evidence, not verdict. The demons' cry, asking what they have to do with Jesus the Son of God and whether he is come to torment them before the time, concedes everything the storm scene asked. They know the person, and they know there is an appointed time, a fixed judgment for the fallen powers confessed here by the powers themselves.

Matthew 8:30-34

An herd of many swine feeding a good way off marks the country as Gentile or lawless, and the demons beg passage into it; his answer is one word, Go. The herd's violent run into the sea is the scene's testimony, the destruction the man had carried made visible, and the bench declines to moralize the swine beyond what the text gives. The keepers flee, the city comes out, and the chapter closes on its bleakest response to Jesus yet: they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts, valuing the herd above the healed. Matthew, in restraint, does not even record the healed men's state; he lets the city's request stand as the counterweight to the centurion's, the chapter bracketed by a Gentile who begged him to speak and a Gentile city that begged him to leave.