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Matthew 9 — The chapter where Jesus couldn't stop and the critics couldn't keep up
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fresh.bible editorialJesus proved he could forgive sins by healing a paralyzed man — using a visible miracle to validate an invisible one.
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had just come back across the water to — his home base. And what happened next was one of those stretches where everything seemed to accelerate. Healings stacked on top of healings. A controversial dinner party. A dead girl. Blind men. A mute man. And right in the middle of all of it — a question nobody expected Jesus to answer the way he did.
This chapter reads like someone was following Jesus around with a camera and couldn't stop hitting record. Every scene matters. And by the end, you'll see something shift in Jesus himself that sets up everything that comes next.
A group of people carried a paralyzed man on a stretcher and brought him straight to . They couldn't walk him in — they had to carry him. And when Jesus looked at them, what he saw wasn't just a medical case. He saw their :
"Take heart, my son — your Sins are forgiven."
That was not what anyone in the room was expecting. This man couldn't move. He needed healing. And Jesus started with ? Some of the in the room immediately bristled. They whispered to each other:
"This man is blaspheming."
But Jesus knew exactly what they were thinking. He turned to them:
"Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? Which is easier — to say 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say 'Get up and walk'? But so you know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins —"
Then he turned back to the paralyzed man:
"Get up. Pick up your stretcher. Go home."
And the man stood up and walked home.
Here's what just happened. Anyone can say "your are forgiven" — there's no way to verify it. You can't see forgiveness. But Jesus essentially said: let me prove the invisible thing by doing the visible thing. He healed the man's body to prove he had authority over something far deeper. The crowd was stunned. They were afraid. And they praised God — because they'd just seen something that wasn't supposed to be possible.
kept moving. And then he did something that would have made headlines — for all the wrong reasons. He walked past a tax booth and saw a man named sitting there. were despised. They worked for , they overcharged their own people, and they were considered traitors. Jesus looked at him and said two words:
"Follow me."
And Matthew got up and followed. Just like that.
That evening, Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house. And the guest list? It was full of and people the religious establishment called "sinners." They were all eating together — laughing, talking, reclining at the same table as Jesus and his .
The saw it from the outside and went straight to the disciples:
"Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"
Jesus heard them and responded himself:
"Healthy people don't need a doctor — sick people do. Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' I didn't come to call the righteous. I came to call sinners."
Think about what's happening here. The religious leaders had built their entire system around staying — right associations, right rituals, right appearances. Jesus walked straight past all of it and sat down at the table everyone else avoided. He wasn't endorsing the behavior. He was going where the need was. A doctor who only visits healthy people isn't much of a doctor.
showed up next with a genuine question. It wasn't hostile — they were just confused:
"Why do we fast, and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don't fast at all?"
answered with a picture:
"Do wedding guests mourn while the groom is right there with them? Of course not. But the time is coming when the groom will be taken away — and then they'll fast.
Nobody patches an old garment with unshrunk fabric — it'll just rip worse than before. And nobody puts new wine into old wineskins. The skins will burst, the wine spills, and both are ruined. New wine goes into fresh wineskins. That way, both are preserved."
This is one of those moments where Jesus quietly revealed something massive. He wasn't just a new teaching to bolt onto the existing system. What he was bringing couldn't be contained by the old structures. New wine needs a new container. The religious framework they'd been operating in — the schedules, the rituals, the performance-based spirituality — wasn't designed to hold what Jesus was pouring out. He wasn't patching the old wineskins. He was replacing it.
Right in the middle of that conversation, the room shifted. A ruler — a community leader, someone with real standing — came in and dropped to his knees in front of :
"My daughter just died. But if you come and lay your hand on her, she will live."
The weight of that. A father who'd already lost his daughter, kneeling in public, betting everything on a man he'd probably heard mixed things about. Jesus got up immediately and followed him.
But on the way, something happened. A woman who had been suffering from severe bleeding for twelve years — twelve years of being considered , twelve years of isolation, twelve years of doctors and treatments that changed nothing — came up behind Jesus in the crowd. She didn't ask for attention. She didn't call out. She just reached forward and touched the edge of his garment.
She had told herself:
"If I can just touch his clothes, I'll be healed."
Jesus turned around. He saw her. And instead of recoiling — which is what the purity would have demanded — he spoke to her with tenderness:
"Take heart, daughter. Your Faith has made you well."
And she was healed instantly.
Two things are happening in the same scene. A powerful man knelt publicly and begged. A forgotten woman reached out secretly and hoped. Jesus responded to both. Status didn't matter. Method didn't matter. What mattered was that they came to him — and they believed he could do something about it.
arrived at the ruler's house. The scene was already set for grief — professional flute players were there, mourners were wailing, the commotion of filled the room. Jesus walked in and said:
"Everyone leave. The girl isn't dead — she's sleeping."
They laughed at him. Out loud. The people who had just been weeping were now mocking.
But when the crowd had been cleared out, Jesus went in quietly, took the girl by the hand, and she got up.
No dramatic speech. No theatrical display. Just a hand and a command and a girl breathing again. The people who laughed watched a dead child walk out of her room. News of it spread through the entire region.
There's something worth sitting with here. The mourners were so certain of death's finality that they literally laughed at the idea of anything else. And Jesus didn't argue with them. He just put them outside and did what only he could do. Sometimes faith doesn't look like convincing the skeptics. Sometimes it looks like closing the door and trusting Jesus with the impossible.
As left the house, two blind men started following him, calling out:
"Have mercy on us, Son of David!"
They followed him all the way into a house. And when they finally stood in front of him, Jesus asked them a single question:
"Do you believe that I am able to do this?"
Their answer:
"Yes, Lord."
Jesus touched their eyes:
"According to your Faith, let it be done to you."
Their eyes opened. They could see. And then Jesus gave them a firm warning — don't tell anyone about this. But they went out and told everyone in the entire district.
Notice the question he asked. Not "do you deserve this?" Not "have you earned this?" Just — do you believe I can? That's the threshold. Over and over in this chapter, the common thread isn't perfection or pedigree or performance. It's faith. The friends who carried the paralytic. The woman who touched his garment. The father who knelt. The blind men who followed. Every single one brought the same thing: belief that Jesus could actually do what nobody else could.
As the blind men left, someone brought a man who was mute and -oppressed. cast out the Demon, and the man spoke. The crowd's reaction:
"Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel."
But the had a different take:
"He casts out Demons by the prince of Demons."
Same . Two completely opposite conclusions. The crowd saw God at work. The religious leaders saw a threat they needed to explain away. And here's the uncomfortable truth — the Pharisees weren't stupid. They were threatened. When someone is doing something that doesn't fit your categories, you have two options: expand your categories or discredit the source. They chose the second one every time.
That pattern hasn't changed. When God shows up in ways that don't fit the script, people still divide into the same two groups — the ones who marvel and the ones who look for a reason to dismiss it.
Then pulls back and gives us this wide-angle view. traveled through every city and village — teaching in , proclaiming the of the , healing every disease and every affliction. Everything.
And then this:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them — because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Let that image settle. He looked at people and didn't see problems. He didn't see projects. He saw exhausted, leaderless, beaten-down people who had no one guiding them. And he felt it. The word Matthew used for "compassion" is one of the strongest in the Greek language — it's a gut-level ache, the kind of feeling that physically moves you.
Then he turned to his and said:
"The harvest is huge, but the workers are few. Pray — earnestly — that the Lord of the harvest would send out workers into his harvest."
Here's what's remarkable. Jesus had just spent an entire chapter doing the work himself. Healing. Teaching. Restoring. Casting out . He could have kept going solo. But instead, he looked at his followers and said: I need you to ask God for more people. The answer to the world's need isn't one person doing everything. It's more people stepping in. And the first step isn't action — it's . Ask to send workers. That prayer is still waiting to be answered — and you might be part of the answer.