Matthew9chapter 9

Rome did not collect its own tolls. It sold the right to collect them, and the man who bought the contract kept everything he could squeeze above the sum he owed. The collectors were fellow Jews, working for the occupier against their neighbours, and Jewish law treated them as unfit to give testimony in court. Capernaum sat on a trade road at a border between territories, so a booth there was a lucrative posting.

Sharing a meal was not a casual act. Reclining at table with someone declared you his associate. That is the whole scandal of the dinner at Matthew's house: not that Jesus spoke to such men, but that he ate with them.

The wineskin saying is practical chemistry. New wine kept fermenting and gave off gas; a fresh skin could stretch, but an old one had already stretched and gone brittle, and it would split.

The two intertwined healings both involve contact that made a person unclean. A woman with a twelve-year flow of blood was permanently impure and could not worship or be touched; she reaches for the tassel on the corner of his outer garment, the fringe the Law commanded every Jewish man to wear. And a corpse was the strongest impurity of all — yet by the time Jesus reaches the house, the professional mourners and flute players are already there, because even a poor family was expected to hire them.