BEMA 100: Healing at Great Cost

Transcription Status

4 Aug 23 — Initial public release

27 Jan 23 — Transcript approved for release

Healing at Great Cost

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we watch as our Rabbi Jesus brings the Kingdom to the brokenness of the world around Him, and see the surprising responses of those who encounter it.

Marty Solomon: Absolutely. All done with the Sermon on the Mount. We had to devote some attention to that. I feel like we should review the Gospel of Matthew. Get back to where we were.

Brent: I would actually like to make a request.

Marty: All right.

Brent: I’m feeling like we’ve been in this Matthew business for some time now.

Marty: Yes. We have.

Brent: I’m feeling a little lost. I don’t know, how does that phrase work? You lose a forest for the trees or…

Marty: For the trees. Yes.

Brent: I’m never sure of which one is the part that I’m seeing, and which is the…

Marty: Trees for the forest.

Brent: I don’t know. Anyway…

Marty: I understand.

Brent: We’re talking about this grand narrative of the scriptures, and I feel like I’ve lost perspective on it. Can we zoom out?

Marty: You’re requesting a full review?

Brent: A full review from the beginning.

Marty: Man, I used to do this every time I taught a class, and now I haven’t done it for a long time. We’re going to see if I still got the magic. I better. I’m the guy in charge of this. All right. We’re going to go back to the beginning. We start with a section we call the Preface, Genesis. People right now are going, “No, you’re not going to do this.” We are, in fact, BEMA listeners. Buckle up.

Brent: We got to keep perspective.

Marty: We got to keep perspective. Start with the section in Genesis called the Preface, Chapters 1–11. We encounter that creation is good and there’s an invitation to trust the story. We find a bunch of people that don’t. The story ends in tragedy. That leads us to the Introduction. We’re again introduced to the family of God—Genesis 12–50, the rest of the book of Genesis—people like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. These are people that demonstrate that although they’re not perfect, they can in fact trust God. That leads us in the book of Exodus. This is really where the narrative begins. We call the narrative, the Tale of Two Kingdoms: Empire vs. Shalom.

We introduce this narrative with a bunch of people that are in exile, in slavery, in exodus. God comes and rescues them in the Passover, leads them to Mount Sinai where there’s a wedding. Whole rest of the book of exodus is going to be about the tabernacle. That tabernacle is important because God said right before the tabernacle, God said, “If you will say yes to my commandments, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This tabernacle is, in one respect, where those priests work, because God gave them a physical place to work and a place where they could actually learn the lessons of priesthood.

It’s important because it’s a honeymoon suite in the marriage metaphor. It’s important because as a literary tool, it was a retelling of Genesis 1 through 3. All that stuff is important. We go back to this call of priesthood, because that’s going to lead us into the book of Leviticus. Leviticus is all about priesthood. We have a section on atonement, we have a section on a priesthood, a priest sandwich, we said, with a whole bunch of discussions about how to live eating kosher and farming your fields, and wearing particular clothing because we are supposed to be priests.

Just like they are physical priests, we are supposed to be living, breathing metaphors of priesthood, walking priests on another level. After that, we are told about how to party. We’re told about taking care of the oppressed in the book Leviticus. Then we jump into the book of Numbers, which is all about a desert honeymoon, which leads us to the book of Deuteronomy, which has a call to remember where we’ve come from. All of that was a setup. Torah was about God looking for partners, we said. All the books of Moses were about partnership.

We summed it up in that one word. About God finding a partner, choosing a partner, defining the partnership, inviting them to experience the partnership, and then asking them to remember it all. Then God takes His people and he plants them at the crossroads of the earth in the book of Joshua. Then He invites them at the crossroads of the earth to live out this kingdom, but they get stuck in this redemption cycle, book of Judges. This redemption cycle, it keeps circling around to God’s patience. I discovered God’s patience. because the people are struggling to figure out what it means to walk this path.

In the meantime, we have the book of Ruth, by the way. The book of Ruth zooms in on this love story about a Moabitess, and it shows that there are people in the midst of a whole bunch of people that are struggling to figure out what it looks like. There are people that do actually remember what it looks like. This sends us into a section of history. We actually have a bunch of books. We have 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, and 2 Chronicles. Two different stories. Story A, from Israel’s perspective, is Samuel and Kings. Story B, from Judah’s perspective, is Chronicles.

This section of history talks about the Kings. Starts with Saul and then David, and then Solomon. Saul was a donkey herder from Benjamin. David was a shepherd from Judah and Solomon had this lust for empire. After Solomon, the kingdom splits and we just kind of devolve into this story about mistrust in what God’s up to. Losing the plot, losing the mission, building all of our own empires. In the midst of that, God—before we race ahead to the prophets, we have to pause and we have to remember that there are some tools. Now, this is such a good exercise, by the way. Fantastic.

Psalms, we were told there are songs because if I’m going to get stuck in the cycle, I’m going to need songs. I’m going to need wise sayings that are generally true—book of Proverbs. I’m going to need meaning and purpose—book of Ecclesiastes. I’m going to need intimacy, dowd, relationship—the Song of Songs. That’s how we’re going to make it. In the midst of all this chaos, in the midst of all this brokenness, in the midst of losing the plot, God gives us tools to keep us together. Then out of that, we enter the prophets. We have all these sections of prophets.

We have pre-Assyrian prophets. We have Assyrian prophets. We have Babylonian prophets. We have exilic prophets, we have remnant prophets, and that’s going to take us through the whole rest of the Hebrew scriptures. The pre-Assyrian prophets, boy this is going to get tricky, all of a sudden, good review. I have Amos and I have Hosea, both Israel prophets to the Northern country of Israel. Obviously, Hosea being the prostitute image, and then Amos being the image of a plum line or ripe fruit. Then to Judah, we had 1 Isaiah, and we also had who? We had Micah. Micah was about the judge, and 1 Isaiah about the image of vineyard, which pushes us into Assyria.

I’m getting nervous here. Assyrian prophets, we had Jonah and Nahum, two sides of the Assyrian coin to Israel. Jonah was about potential, but Nahum was about diyn, which was the Hebrew word for retributive justice. Then we had the two to Judah which should include Zephaniah, and it should include 2 Isaiah. Zephaniah would be the Hebrew word t’shuva, which meant to return or repent, and 2 Isaiah would be all about woes. It’s a really depressing section, a long section of Isaiah. Leading us to the Babylonian prophets, where we had Jeremiah, the weeping prophet.

Followed by Lamentations, which was an alphabetic chiastic acrostic with lament and hope at its center, the treasure buried in the center. Then we had three smaller prophets, voices in the Babylonian period. We had Habakkuk, we had Obadiah, and we had Joel. Habakkuk being about the watchtower, Obadiah being the message to Petra and the people of Edom. Then we had—what did I say? I said Joel, which was the locust plague. Leading us to the exilic prophets, the prophets that are sent to God’s people now that everybody has been conquered, and they’re all sitting in exile.

We have Ezekiel and Daniel. Ezekiel’s about strength, Yezakiel. Then Daniel is about the son of man. Then we also had Job that we threw in there, which is about perspective, this drama about perspective, and we have third Isaiah, which we said was about the servant discourse. Leading us to the last section. I think we’re going to make it. We had six voices. I say that now, all of a sudden I got really nervous because I know I have six. We have Esther on one hand, which is all about the story of Purim. Then we have two books, a joined volume about passionate leadership, Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra who was that shepherd, and Nehemiah who was that passionate prophet.

Then out of that, we’re going to have three prophetic voices, Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi. We did it. Haggai being the message to build, Zachariah being apocalyptic literature, and we have Malachi who has a Q&A discourse. This of course is going to lead us into that section of the Silent Years, because God’s people ended up in exile because they lost the plot of the story. They didn’t trust the story. They didn’t remember what the DNA, their spiritual DNA going back to Abraham, that hospitality, that radical commitment to trust in this story, the forgiveness of Joseph, all of that stuff, they lost all of that and had to get taken back to Egypt in essence.

Only this time, it won’t be Egypt. It will be Babylon. They get taken to Babylon. In that place, they build synagogues, they get recommitted to the text. During that same time, Greece shows up on the scene, it’s going to become Rome, and it’s going to shake up the Imperial world quite a bit. The Jews are going to have to figure out in this new world where they have reclaimed a commitment and a devotion to the text, what’s going to happen in this new world, this new Greco-Roman world, and so you’ve got different responses.

You have the Sadducees, which basically are the corrupt priesthood. I believe that was where we started. We said they saw Rome coming and they were already corrupt. They had a mob mafia, seven-family ring, the people that were running the show. We talked about Herodians, which basically would say, “Yes, I’m all for the Greco-Roman world. I can love God and I can have theater. I can love God and I can have plumbing. I can love God and I can do it all.” We talked about the struggle of compromise there.

We talked about the Essenes who saw the corruption of the temple system and the Sadducees and said, “This is so corrupt that God can’t even work in this anymore. We’re going to go out into the desert and we’re going to prepare the way at places like Qumran.” We talked about them. The problem was, they separated themselves from the entire discussion. We talked about the two groups called the Hasidim which went up north to the Galilee: Pharisees and the Zealots. We talked about both of them having this unbelievable zeal and devotion to walk the path out. They were seen as charismatic fringe fanatics by those people, those Judeans in the south, and so they went up. The Zealots just thought they were going to overthrow Rome with the sword. They were literally going to lead a physical revolt and kill the Romans.

The Pharisees said, “We’ll let God deal with the Romans. We’re just going to walk out that same zeal and devotion with an absolute commitment to obedience.” From there, that’s where Jesus enters this whole big mess of five competing worldviews, all kinds of different ways. We see that Jesus shows up, He calls disciples from all these different worldviews. We’re told about these stories. We’re told about gospels. We said a gospel was a pronouncement of a new king and a new kingdom. We have four of them in our Bible. Greco-Romans had all kinds of gospels, many gospels. We have four versions in our Bible.

We have the Gospel of Matthew, which we said was about the mumzer we have the Gospel of Mark, which is a Roman Gospel written to a Roman audience. We have the Gospel of Luke, which we suggested was an ordered Gospel, maybe a parashah companion reading following the lead of MD Goulder from Harvard. Then we talk about John, which was a grafted—a Gospel to a grafted church, Jew and Gentile church in the middle of Asia, and bringing his own unique Asia-flavored Gospel to a unique audience. We’ve been doing this, walking through Matthew. How is that for a review, Brent Billings?

Brent: That was pretty good. The whirlwind.

Marty: Only took us 12 minutes. Not so bad.

Brent: Real quick, let’s just do the short review to condense that all. We have Torah, which was about…?

Marty: Partnership.

Brent: Partnership. Then we have the history.

Marty: Yes. History.

Brent: Which was about the cycle that God’s people went through. God’s redemption cycle, and His patience. Then we had prophets.

Marty: Almost.

Brent: Tools.

Marty: Tools.

Brent: Tools was…

Marty: Which we said was…?

Brent: Wisdom.

Marty: Wisdom. Love it.

Brent: Then we had the prophets which was? What did we say about that?

Marty: What we said, it was warning…

Brent: Warning, woes, and… hope.

Marty: Hope, you got it.

Brent: Then we had the remnant? Remnant, which was learning, returning, and yearning?

Marty: Let’s see here. How did we order it this last time? We need to get this right for Session 2. Let’s see, we had them returning, yearning, and then learning. That’s what we did.

Brent: I had it completely messed up.

Marty: You had an old version, which I’ve done that to you.

Brent: Is that how we had it before? Hang on… In our Session 3 Intro, we have it returning, yearning, learning.

Marty: All right. Wonderful. Love it. Then you left off the Silent Years.

Brent: Silent Years was Hellenism. The advent of Hellenism. Now here we are in the Gospels.

Marty: Here we are in the Gospels. Yes. You got it.

Brent: Are we going to give away our summary word for all the Gospels?

Marty: For all the Gospels, summary word’s going to be: Jesus.

Brent: Okay. Seems pretty straightforward.

Marty: Rabbi Jesus. I know we might dress it up a little bit. We don’t want to be flippant in our Jesus, but it should just be about Jesus. We should see nothing but Jesus. All the setup was to get us to Jesus. All of our study is to get us to Jesus. Understanding the scriptures is to get us to Jesus. Notice I’m not saying all the scriptures point towards Jesus, because that’s not the point. Jesus is the scriptures. The scriptures don’t point to Jesus. Jesus is the scriptures.

Brent: I have in my notes from a past BEMA session, or rather a BEMA cycle.

Marty: Call me back.

Brent: You said “the story in flesh.”

Marty: The story. I like that. Yes, man. I came up with some good stuff back then. Story. There we go. That’ll be our summary, the story in—that’s exactly what I was just talking about. Man, I’m amazed by my own brilliance all of a sudden. This is fantastic. All right. Story in flesh.

Brent: It’s almost like you’ve been talking about the same thing for a decade or more.

Marty: I know. Oh, man, I love it. I wonder if Jesus ever had those moments where Peter was like, “Actually back in that saying that you said,” I wonder if Jesus was like, “Oh yes, those were good days. I’ll say it that way.” Probably not.

Brent: The scriptures do say, in every way, He got to experience what it was like.

Marty: That’s right.

Brent: Maybe he did have one of those moments.

Marty: That’s right.

Brent: Just one.

Marty: That’s right. Just one. What a fun episode. All right, let’s dig in here. We have been talking about mamzer in Matthew. We haven’t in the Sermon on the Mount been calling a lot of attention to that. I want to do that now, because we said that Matthew’s agenda was mamzer. We started in the genealogy and we pointed out all the mamzers. I’m not talking literal mamzers. I’ve pointed out that before. I’m using that word very poetically. Very loosely.

The word technically means illegitimate child, a bastard child from an illegitimate Torah marriage. Or according to the Torah, an illegitimate marriage. What I meant to say was that I’m using the word poetically. The genealogy full of mamzers, the birth narratives full of mamzers. Jesus starts His ministry and crowds are coming. Do you remember where all the crowds are coming from, Brent?

Brent: All over the region.

Marty: All over. Judea and across the Jordan, and the Decapolis, and the Galilee. All over, because this Gospel is about the inclusivity of this Kingdom. Everybody is being invited, which makes sense, by the way, that the Sermon on the Mount is going to be all about transforming my heart and loving people. The whole thing’s going to be about people, because if this Kingdom is about inclusivity, what I immediately have to deal with is how in the world am I going to get those people in? Because those people are nasty, dirty, unclean, pagan, sinners, oppressors. How are they invited to the table?

Jesus spent this time talking about the beatitudes. Talking about mercy, talking about forgiveness, talking about loving your enemies, talking about not judging other people, talking about how hard of a road this is going to be to walk. It all fits, because if you’re going to believe in the Gospel of a mamzer, this is going to be hard work. I hope we’ve said that a few times, because that’s one of the themes of Matthew, is the cost of following Jesus. It was a theme two or three times in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s going to be a theme in our teaching today.

This is not easy. I just get so disturbed when Christians read the Gospels and they read the teachings of Jesus, and we’re not provoked, we’re not disturbed by them, because they’re unbelievably provocative. I think we hear these stories and we’re like, “I’m welcome.” Then we forget to apply that to—this message is for all the people across the Jordan. Who are our Decapolis folks? In this Gospel, they’re showing up and Jesus is healing them. Anyway, I’m ranting now. Go ahead, Brent, lead us into our next few verses.

Brent: All right. Chapter eight, When Jesus came down from the mountainside— so this is right on the tail of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus finished his teaching. He’s on the mountain.

Marty: Great point by the way. If He’s a rabbi, what are we going to need to expect? He just spent this whole time, three chapters worth of teaching, what do we now expect in a Jewish world? If we’re His town talmidim and He’s walking down off the mountain, what do we expect to be coming?

Brent: We’re going to apply what we just talked about.

Marty: Exactly. Whatever He just talked about, I better see it in the next encounter. Go ahead.

Brent: When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed Him. They were already there. They were gathering. They were following Him up on the mountain, and gathering around Him as he’s teaching His disciples, large crowds followed. A man with leprosy came and knelt before Him and said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” He said, “Be clean.” Immediately, he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, “See that you don’t tell anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them.”

Marty: Just right off the bat, what few things did we pick up hopefully in Session 1? What do you know about lepers, Brent, and leprosy? What just happened? He just comes down the mountain, and a leper comes up, and we’re like, “Cool, leper.”

Brent: That’s not good.

Marty: Tell me why.

Brent: Lepers are supposed to be in some isolated place.

Marty: Yes, horribly unclean.

Brent: So they don’t make someone else unclean.

Marty: Right. What do you suppose, this isn’t in the book Leviticus, Leviticus never commanded this stigma, but what do you suppose the stigma is after you’ve walked with this Torah for so long and you have people that are unclean? What is the popular stigma that shows up about surrounding this situation, lepers? How do we feel about them?

Brent: Being unclean is pretty inconvenient, so we don’t want to be around anything that will make us unclean if we don’t have to.

Marty: Absolutely, so we push them to the fringes. They are a very practical mamzer, using that word still loosely and poetically. They’re a practical outsider. They’re a practical outcast because they don’t get to come near me because I want to be able to worship God. I want to be able to follow God. Remember, Jesus just spent a whole chapter talking about rules out of Torah and how we’re supposed to apply them. Things like murder, adultery, divorce, taking oaths. Jesus always said, “Yes, the rule exists,” but what was Jesus’s point consistently, Brent? The rule is about what?

Brent: The condition of your heart.

Marty: The condition of your heart, and particularly how that heart applies to?

Brent: Other people.

Marty: Other people. Is there a rule about leprosy?

Brent: Not strictly, right?

Marty: Is there a rule in Leviticus about leprosy? Let me rephrase that question.

Brent: Just the fact that it makes you unclean.

Marty: Absolutely. There’s a really big chapter about what you can and can’t do as a leper. If you touch a leper, all kinds of uncleanliness that follows. Yet Jesus goes, “But the law wasn’t given to keep you away from people. The law wasn’t given so you don’t love lepers, so you don’t touch lepers. The law just tells you what to do if you touch a leper.” What does Jesus do?

Brent: Or perhaps when.

Marty: When you touch a leper. I like that. Much better choice of words. I think that’s what this Kingdom that Jesus is talking about. Jesus reaches out—what does it say? Reaches out and what?

Brent: Says, “Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man.”

Marty: He just touches him. “This is what this Kingdom looks like,” Jesus says. What I love about that is that now means—we’re not told in the next verse, you haven’t read it yet, but we’re not told in the next verse, and some Gospels were told, whenever Jesus hangs out with lepers, we’re then told that six days later, He does something. He just dealt with a leper or some other form of uncleanliness and we’re told that six days later He goes into the temple. Why six days later, Brent?

Brent: Because that’s the waiting period after being unclean.

Marty: Jesus is willing to be unclean. I always hear people go, “Oh no. Jesus wasn’t unclean. He was without sin.” Uncleanliness and sin are not the same thing. Not in Leviticus, not in Torah. It was very popular to be like, “You’re unclean. Eww. Get away from me.” Uncleanliness was not—my wife actually just gave me a hard time about this because I said in a podcast recently, maybe some other women caught this, that my wife, when she’s unclean—I apparently, in a podcast, I used the word, she’s dirty. That is completely incorrect, and she got me on it. She called me out on it. Said, “That’s not how you apply Torah in a Jesus world.”

For all those ladies that were listening, if you caught that, it was a passing comment I made to make another point. To my wife who listens to my podcast, I am sorry. That was theologically incorrect because Jesus—being unclean doesn’t make you dirty. Being unclean doesn’t make you sinful. Everybody spends time being unclean. It’s a role that you play in the community. A woman is unclean every month during her menstrual period. Is her menstrual period sinful, Brent? I don’t know, there’s a whole lot of things we don’t know about here so we’re going to tread lightly.

Brent: I would sure think not.

Marty: I would hope not. It’s not a sin just to be a woman, to biologically be a woman. It’s just that those women have an opportunity to be the picture. There’s all kinds of things in Torah that make you unclean. Smashing a bug makes you unclean. Masturbation makes you unclean. All kinds of things make you unclean in Torah. Everybody would at different points have been unclean for lots of different reasons. Everybody takes a turn being unclean. Uncleanliness doesn’t necessarily equate to sinfulness. Sometimes it can, many times it does not.

Jesus would have spent time being unclean. Every time Jesus wants to interact with a leper; he’s not breaking Leviticus. He’s not breaking a single Mosaic command. He breaks oral tradition in the Gospels. Jesus never breaks the commands of Torah. He always fulfills them. He says, “I’m willing to be unclean for six days in order to touch this leper because touching the leper is more important than My convenience.” Good stuff.

Brent: The leper says, or the man with leprosy, I guess I should say, because he’s not defined by leprosy.

Marty: Great point.

Brent: He says, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus reaches out and touches him. “I am willing. Be clean.” Immediately he was cleansed. When it says clean or cleansed in those situations, is it talking about being cleansed of the condition of leprosy or is it talking about the Levitical clean versus unclean idea?

Marty: Wonderful question.

Brent: Or both I guess.

Marty: Here’s a great place to look at it because he is cleansed of his leprosy. Tzara’at probably is the word that we would choose to use here in the Hebrew. Depending on the word, tells you what kind of leprosy we’re dealing with here. Severe acne can be leprosy in Levitical code. It all depends on what word would be used here in the Hebrew. He’s cleansed of his condition. Notice Jesus’s next words. What does he say to him? “Go show yourself to the…?”

Brent: “Go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded as a testimony to them.”

Marty: Notice, Jesus is adhering to the Levitical code even, and I think this would get John the Baptist fired up, because John the Baptist is rejecting the temple system and Jesus is affirming it. This is a corrupt temple system that He’s sending this leper to, completely corrupt, and yet He’s saying that’s what Leviticus tells you to do, so go worship God by following Torah.

Notice Jesus is adhering to the Levitical code the whole way through. His leprosy is now gone, but he still has to honor the commands of God by going to that temple, going to that system, getting the okay, getting the clearing of the priest, and now he can go back to his. There will be other rules he has to follow but he can now go back to life within—realize, he was outside the community. As somebody with leprosy, he would’ve been on the fringes, not in synagogue, not in worship service, not at the table eating with brothers and sisters. He’s an outsider and Jesus just made him an insider.

Brent: I’m a little unsure where I’m getting this information from, but I know I’ve heard talk about a leper colony or a specific town or whatever where lepers lived. Where does that come from?

Marty: It comes from other cultures like Mother Teresa was in Calcutta in a leper colony. That’s where she lived and worked. It’s a modern thing as well as a biblical thing, but also it’s true in the biblical world. The book of Numbers says to take the lepers and have them—most believe this was for practical infection purposes. We’re going to quarantine them. We’re going to put them outside the village in their own location. When Jesus’s day rolls around, there’s a huge discussion about this. Not all scholars agree. Beth’ani, Bethany, we say.

Later in the Gospel we’re going to be told about Lazarus. Lazarus was a leper and he lived with his two sisters, Mary and Martha. They live in Bethany. Now, there’s a huge discussion about whether it’s Bethany or Bethania, but if it’s Beth’ani, that would be “house of misery.” We don’t have a whole lot of scholarship to back this up archaeologically, but most of the theories that I’ve bumped into say that Bethany could have been a leper colony. Jerusalem’s leper colony. One of probably, maybe a few.

The lepers would have gone and lived in Bethany. Then the people that were going to give—notice Mary and Martha basically give their life to go take care of their brother, because they’re not going to be unclean. They can’t go into Jerusalem, not if they live with their brother every day. They basically said, “I’m going to be here to take care of you, my brother, as a leper.” That’s what Bethany could have been, is a leper colony.

Brent: Based on the meaning, place of misery, or house of misery, it might not have necessarily been an actual town. It could have just been a…

Marty: It probably would’ve been a town, especially at this point. You have enough lepers in a city like Jerusalem, you can have an established town, especially because a lot of leprosy isn’t going to be coming and going. Some of that leprosy is going to be basically a terminal state, a terminal illness like it was for Lazarus.

Brent: Then, because of that, my question is why is this guy here at the foot of the mountain?

Marty: At the foot of this mountain, eremos topos, he can still be well away from the crowds as long as he’s doing what Torah says, which is he needs to be letting everyone know. He needs to be shouting “Unclean. Unclean,” so that people know not to touch him. He could be adhering to all those rules. It’s also possible this guy’s got a whole bunch of chutzpah. We’re going to read another story later, I think, or maybe we won’t. I can’t remember which Gospel he shows up in all of a sudden.

Brent: If it’s in Matthew, we’re going to read it for sure.

Marty: I know. Every Verse™, right? There’s a story about a woman with an issue of bleeding that we’ll read about. She, with an issue of bleeding, should not be pushing through the crowds, the Gospel is going to say. She is unclean. She is way out of line, but she’s got a bunch of chutzpah because she believes this guy can heal him. This leper could have some—he could be a little out of bounds. He could be demonstrating some chutzpah or it’s possible he could be completely in bounds, observing the law as he ought to by letting everyone know, and he’s just—remember eremos topos was just a certain place outside of town. He could be totally okay. Not enough details to know for sure.

Brent: We should probably move on.

Marty: Keep moving.

Brent: When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him asking for help. ‘Lord,’ he said, “My servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.” Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?”

Marty: Let me just stop you right there. Who do we got? We got a Roman centurion. Jewish? Pagan?

Brent: Not Jewish, that’s for sure.

Marty: [laughs] It’d be a long stretch to think it’s—I guess it won’t be totally impossible, but he ain’t Jewish. That’s a Roman centurion. That is a pagan oppressor. This is the oppressor. There’s a chance he could be the Roman Centurion that loved the Jewish people. There’s a chance this could be that guy in the Gospels that we read about elsewhere, but this is a pagan. He is definitely not the person that you picture in the painting sitting at the great feast of Abraham. Go ahead.

Brent: He’s an officer. He has some authority, some power-

Marty: He’s got some clout. Absolutely.

Brent: In the Roman world. Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?” The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have You come under my roof, but just say the word and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority with soldiers under me. I tell this one go and he goes, and that one come and he comes. I say to my servant do this and he does it.”

Marty: Notice, this guy understands the Jewish—he realizes, “I can’t have”— If Jesus, who just touched a leper, by the way, I don’t know how many days have passed. I don’t know if this story is right on the heels of that. He’s willing to make himself unclean. Notice the centurion, he is aware enough that he’s like, “I can’t have you come to my house. You enter my house and now you become unclean as a Jewish rabbi. I don’t even need that.” The faith that this guy demonstrates, he doesn’t even think he needs Jesus to come. I understand how authority works. Excellent. Go ahead and keep going.

Brent: If eremos topos is where you think it is, how far is that from Capernaum?

Marty: 20-minute walk, if that.

Brent: This very feasibly could be later the same day.

Marty: All these places are well within a few hours walk. All these places are in this whole region. You can get anywhere you need to be on any day. It’s hard to know how much time passes.

Brent: Could be any amount of time, but maybe as little as half an hour.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: Basically.

Marty: Correct.

Brent: When Jesus heard this, He was amazed and said to those following Him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.”

Marty: What did you just say? [chuckles] I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.

Brent: A heck of a statement.

Marty: Catch the mamzer agenda here. We had a leper who was an outsider who just got brought in. Now we have a Centurion. Go ahead and keep finishing what Jesus says here.

Brent: “I say to you that many will come from the East and the West and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Then Jesus said to the Centurion, “Go. Let it be done just as you believed it would,” and his servant was healed at that moment.

Marty: That is a heavy mamzer agenda right there. Both the leper, and now with the Centurion, and Jesus’s words are, “To all these God people, all these religious folk, all the people who think they’re in,” He says, “I got to tell you who’s going to be at the feast of Abraham. It’s going to be everybody from the East and the West.” That’s all Gentile talk.

The East and the West means Gentiles. Remember the directions of the compass. “They’re all going to come. They’re all going to be at the feast, but I’ll tell you who’s not going to be at the feast, you religious people, because you don’t get it.” Again, I don’t know how we read the Gospels and we’re not totally disturbed by the things that we read. I just don’t think we internalize it enough. Anyway, enough, the right way.

Brent: When Jesus came into Peter’s house, He saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her. She got up and began to wait on Him. When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to Him, and He drove out the spirits with a word, and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah, “He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases.”

Marty: Right on. Notice what we talked about all the way back in Session 2 with Isaiah and the suffering servant discourse. When we read Isaiah 53, which is what Matthew intentionally quotes here and says, “In this is fulfilled,” Isaiah 53, we typically read Isaiah 53 and just immediately think of Jesus on the cross. By His stripes we were healed. He was pierced for our transgressions. Crushed for our iniquities. Then here it quotes the Septuagint, to take up our infirmities. Bore our diseases, in another verse. We often think of Isaiah 53 and immediately think of the cross.

Like I said before, I don’t want to take away from the cross connection to Isaiah 53. Please notice how Matthew the Jew references the fulfillment of Isaiah 53. He says Isaiah 53 is not fulfilled in Jesus’s death, but in Jesus’s life. In the way that Jesus is living. I don’t know how tired this guy must be. Touching lepers, talking to Centurions, goes into Peter’s mother-in-law’s house, right in the middle of Capernaum, and heals her of her sickness. Now, everybody brings out—the crowds just bring them demon-possessed people. We don’t need to get any stories.

I’ve had my own experiences as a pastor in different things. That’s not like easy light-hearted pastoral material. Healing of the sick. What is this thing that Jesus is doing? He is taking on what we read about in Isaiah 53. If we’re willing to suffer on behalf of other people, salvation will come. Kingdom will come. I just wanted to point out as we went through there, I don’t see Isaiah 53 fulfilled in His death, according to the Gospel writer, I see it fulfilled in His life in the way that He’s living. Apparently, that’s how we’re supposed to read Isaiah 53, just to go back and make that point again.

Brent: This is completely unrelated, but is this our first reference that indicates Peter is married?

Marty: In this Gospel, yes. We didn’t have any allusions in the list earlier when he was called, or necessarily any of those things. You would assume it is there. If he’s old enough that he’s fishing with his brother, Andrew, you would assume in their culture, the assumption would be that they’re married, because he’s not in schooling. You wouldn’t get married as long as you were in training, Jewish schooling. As soon as you went back home to ply your father’s trade, if you are of age, you would typically be married. You would expect anybody that’s of age to be married, but this is the first reference we actually get directly in.

Brent: We know where Peter’s house is, right?

Marty: We have what tradition says is his house. You’ve been with me at Capernaum. There’s a large catholic church suspended over the house that it says was Peter’s. It’s a pretty good option. Church tradition is often pretty spot on. Some have argued it’s a house about two insulas over from the one that’s identified, but the one that’s identified is as good of a guess as any.

The only reason that they argue for the one a couple houses away is because in one of the Gospels that says Jesus went immediately from the synagogue into the house. Some have argued that word suggests that He’s stepping out of the synagogue directly into the home, and the one that’s identified today is probably three homes away from the synagogue. That’s the only theory there, but I would go with the one that is marked today.

Brent: Either way, we’re still in Capernaum.

Marty: We are, in the smack dab right off the synagogue of Capernaum.

Brent: Jesus comes down the mountain. He heals the man with leprosy. He walks into Capernaum on His way to Peter’s house, takes care of the centurion on the way, now He’s in the house.

Marty: Yes.

Brent: Potentially, within 30 minutes of the Sermon on the Mount still?

Marty: Could be. Although the Jew in me has a problem with that if He touched the leper.

Brent: Good point.

Marty: I’m going to suggest He probably hung out in the wilderness for—again, I don’t think Matthew is recording this stuff chronologically, but Matthew is definitely wanting to give you the insinuation that you’re getting. The way you’re hearing the story is the way that Matthew is wanting you to hear it. Right off the mountain, boom, boom, boom, boom. Did it really happen exactly that way within half an hour? The Jew in me is going to say Jesus took six days.

Brent: Geographically, it’s possible.

Marty: It’s possible. Absolutely.

Brent: Moving on, When Jesus saw the crowd around Him, He gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. When a teacher of the law came to Him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go,” Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay His head.”

Marty: Now, we’re not told in the next verse what happens to this guy. We don’t know if he says yes or no. It would seem from the rest of the Gospels, unless this guy is one of the twelve, he probably said no. Be careful what you’re asking. You want to follow Jesus. Jesus says, “No. You don’t actually know what you’re asking because there’s no home. We have no Hampton Inn and Suites that we’re going to go stay at. I don’t stay here. I got plans. We’re going to go about doing things.” If you just want to like people—I used to have students when I was more involved in the student ministry on campus. They used to come and talk to me about discipleship.

I would love to mentor them and work with them, but in my understanding of discipleship and what I do in my ministry, discipleship was, you get up in the morning, you have breakfast with me and you follow me, and you do what I do, and you spend the day with me. At the end of the day you hang out with me. Then you do dinner together. We do what Jesus did, which was, “come, follow me.” Not to the extent that Jesus did, but we try to get as close to that as we possibly could. I would have students come up frequently and go, “Can you just disciple me but only a couple hours a day?” The answer would be, “No.” We can spend a couple hours a day together, but that’s not discipleship.

When somebody says, “I want to come follow you,” in this rabbinical world Jesus says, “That’s not something we’re doing. If you want to come follow me, you need to give it all.” Remember the disciples, they dropped their nets. They came and they left it all for the next few years. They didn’t know where they were going to go. They didn’t know what they were going to eat. They didn’t know when they would be back. They just knew they were following the rabbi. Jesus apparently is able to discern this in His response. One more response here and then we’ll wrap this thing up.

Brent: Another disciple said to Him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father,” but Jesus told him, “Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”

Marty: Seems harsh. The dead bury their own dead. There’s some context here, as it usually is when it seems like Jesus is being unbelievably unreasonable.

Brent: Surface level reading does not exactly make sense.

Marty: Yes. What you assume—

Brent: You don’t see a lot of dead people working on the burial plots of the other dead.

Marty: Right. Speaking of surface level reading, what does it appear on just a surface level reading, when you read that, Brent, that the person is asking? What do you assume that this person is saying to Jesus?

Brent: Let me go and bury my father. The father’s already dead.

Marty: Either the father’s already dead and, “Just give me a couple days because I need to go wrap up the funeral,” or possibly “My dad is on death’s doorstep and I want to be there through that, so let me finish that.” Jesus seems to blow it off like, “Let the dead bury their own dead. Come follow Me.” What is probably being referenced here, we can’t say this with absolute certainty, but with pretty good certainty, I would give it a whole 90% certainty here, in the Jewish world, when you died, they would take your body, they would go put it in a tomb.

They would—we say embalm, but it’s not an embalming process at all—they would cover your body in spices. The spices are designed to speed up decomposition. We’ll probably talk about this more some other time. The spices are designed to make your body break down, not to preserve your body. That was the Egyptians. Egyptians embalmed. We as Western Greco-Roman Americans embalm, but the biblical world, they broke the body down on purpose, so that on the one-year anniversary of your death, they visit your tomb, they roll the stone away, they cut all the tendons and the ligaments, all that stuff there as a skeleton.

They cut the tendons and the ligaments. They gather up all your bones. They put the bones in a box called an ossuary, you can look this up online anywhere, and that ossuary is then put in a hole in the tomb that’s designated for your family. A large cave-like opening where you can put 20 different ossuaries of your whole extended family tree. That’s how that whole thing works. That process was totally immersed in superstition in the Jewish world.

Many Jewish superstitions arose around that’s how redemption happens. If you’re not there to bury your father, if you’re not there to go in on the one-year anniversary of his death and put his bones in the ossuary, there were Jewish superstitions that he wouldn’t make it in the afterlife. His body wouldn’t be there when they call his name in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Redemption couldn’t happen. The resurrection would not be there for him, which we can understand because there’s a lot of weird superstition out there about death.

I will probably get emails after this episode about, is it okay to cremate? We have a lot of weird—like if I cremate, they’re not going to be able to come back. Now, the Jewish perspective has a whole teaching about cremation. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure the God who created the body is not going to have a hard time resurrecting, because we don’t want to run that line of logic all the way out.

Brent: Aren’t we supposed to get new bodies, anyway?

Marty: Exactly. We have some weird superstitions when it comes to all of our fears and insecurities around death. So did they.

Brent: Do these beliefs hold true in Jewish tradition today?

Marty: Not so much, not the same superstitions. Not that I would say they’re free of superstitions anymore than we are in our world, but these were more particular in the simple second temple period in rabbinic worldviews and that kind of thing like that. In this case, when he says, “Let me go bury my father,” it’s most likely what he’s referring to is that he is in that one-year window. His father has passed, he has been entombed, and there’s going to be a large family to take care of the dad on the one-year anniversary of his death. This guy’s saying, “I got to be there.”

Now, whether he believes in the superstition or not, he’s saying, “Can you just let me be there for the one-year,” and Jesus is like, “No, you got better—life is waiting. Death is calling, but life is waiting. Come follow Me and be a part of the Kingdom and life. Let the dead bury their own dead.” Not quite the icky, like Jesus is kind of a jerk. Not quite that tone that we get there. I will just close out with this thought. Again, we hear the same echo, which is, this whole section here was titled The Cost of Following Jesus. This call of following Jesus is not light, it’s not trivial, it’s not insignificant, it’s not easy.

The call to follow Jesus is counterintuitive. It’s going to lead to persecution. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s always telling you that you’re on the outside when you think you’re on the inside, and other people you thought were on the outside are actually on the inside. This whole counterintuitive thing the Kingdom is going to do is going to be difficult. It’s going to be costly. It’s going to be hard. It’s a good place to call it today. There you go.

Brent: That was a jam-packed episode.

Marty: Sure was. Full review at the beginning.

Brent: Yes, it’s good to remember that the story is good and that Jesus is showing us how to live in that story.

Marty: Yes. It’s good.

Brent: Good stuff. As always, get in a discussion group. Get in touch with us if you have any questions, we’re always here to help, whether you need help starting a discussion group, joining a discussion group, if you have random questions, whether about this episode or not, it doesn’t matter. Marty is on Twitter at @martysolomon. I’m at @eibcb. You’ll find more details about the show at bemadiscipleship.com. Thanks for joining us on the BEMA Podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.