Authority Reaches the Places People Cannot

The Greek of “when he was come down from the mountain” closely matches the Septuagint’s wording for Moses descending Sinai with the tablets (Exodus 34:29). The crowds that heard the words now follow the man, and chapters 8 and 9 go on to record ten mighty works in a row.

The law told a leper to tear his clothes, cover his upper lip, cry “Unclean, unclean”, and live alone outside the camp (Leviticus 13:45–46). This man comes close enough to kneel. The Hebrew term behind “leprosy” covered a range of skin diseases, not only what is now called by that name.

Under Leviticus 5:3 touching human uncleanness made a person unclean. Here the traffic runs the other way: the hand goes out, and the cleanness passes from Jesus to the leper. His reply takes up the man’s own words, “thou wilt” answered by “I will”, and “make me clean” by “be thou clean”.

The gift Moses commanded is spelled out in Leviticus 14: two living birds, cedar wood, scarlet and hyssop on the first day, then on the eighth day lambs, flour and oil. Restoration took a week and the priest’s formal inspection. “Unto them” could mean the priests or the people.

A centurion nominally commanded a hundred men, in practice around eighty. In Galilee under Herod Antipas he may well have served the tetrarch rather than a Roman legion, though he was certainly a Gentile (verse 10). Luke says he sent Jewish elders to ask for him (Luke 7:3); Matthew lets him speak for himself.

“Servant” is pais, which can mean a boy, a child or a household servant; Luke’s parallel uses the word for slave (Luke 7:2). “Palsy” is the English contraction of paralysis. “Tormented” comes from the same root as the “torments” of 4:24.

The Greek has an emphatic “I” and can be punctuated as a question: “Shall I come and heal him?” Several interpreters read it that way, as Jesus testing a Gentile’s request to have a Jew enter his house. The King James reads it as a plain promise, which the grammar also allows.

Peter later tells a Gentile household that it was “unlawful” for a Jew to come in to them (Acts 10:28), which may explain the centurion’s scruple. “Speak the word only” is literally “say it with a word”. His sentence passed almost unchanged into the Roman Mass as the prayer said before communion.

The Greek says “I also am a man under authority”. The “also” implies that he sees Jesus in the same position, standing in a chain of command under God and acting in its name. Three verbs follow, go, come and do, and each is obeyed with no further argument.

The Gospels record Jesus marvelling only twice: here at a Gentile’s faith, and in Mark 6:6 at the unbelief of his own town. The Greek of the last clause is sharper in many manuscripts: “with no one in Israel have I found so great faith”. He says it to “them that followed”, the crowd of verse 1.

“From the east and west” echoes Isaiah 43:5, “I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west”, and Psalm 107:3. There it was Israel’s scattered children coming home. “Sit down” means recline at table, the posture of the feast Isaiah promised to “all people” on the mountain (Isaiah 25:6).

“Children of the kingdom” means the natural heirs, those born to it. The feast is imagined as a lit hall at night; “outer darkness” is the street outside. Matthew uses “weeping and gnashing of teeth” six times, Luke once, and no other Gospel at all.

“The selfsame hour” is one of Matthew’s phrases for immediate healing. The only other healing at a distance in the Gospel is also for a Gentile’s child, the Canaanite woman’s daughter, “made whole from that very hour” (15:28). Both requests come from outsiders and both are answered without a visit.

Excavations at Capernaum found a house beneath an octagonal Byzantine church, with Christian graffiti suggesting it was venerated early as Peter’s home; the identification is a tradition, though an old one. Paul confirms Peter had a wife who travelled with him (1 Corinthians 9:5). “Laid” means lying ill in bed.

Nobody asks. Unlike the leper and the centurion, she makes no request; Jesus sees, and acts. Many manuscripts read “ministered unto him”, singular. The verb is the same one used of the angels serving Jesus after the wilderness (4:11).

Mark sets this evening at the end of a Sabbath (Mark 1:21, 32), when carrying the sick became lawful again at sunset. Other exorcists of the time used roots, rings and recited spells; Josephus describes one such. Matthew stresses that Jesus drove spirits out “with his word”, nothing else.

The line is Isaiah 53:4, translated straight from the Hebrew. The Greek Old Testament of the day had turned it into “he bears our sins”, but Matthew keeps the bodily words, “infirmities” and “sicknesses”, because he is reporting fevers and paralysis.

“The other side” is the eastern shore, largely Gentile territory. Jesus answers a pressing crowd not by staying to meet it but by ordering a crossing. That order is what leads into both the conversations that follow and the storm.

The Greek says “one scribe”, a Semitic way of saying “a certain”. He calls Jesus “Master”, meaning Teacher. In Matthew, outsiders and opponents tend to call Jesus Teacher, while disciples say “Lord”, as the next speaker does in verse 21 and the boat’s crew does in verse 25.

The first use in Matthew of “the Son of man”, Jesus’ usual way of speaking of himself, drawn from Daniel 7:13 and from the plain Hebrew idiom for a human being. The birds’ “nests” are literally roosts or lodging places. Even animals have an address; he has none.

Burying a parent was among the weightiest duties in Jewish life. The Mishnah exempts a man whose dead lies unburied from reciting the Shema and other commands until the burial is done. The request is not an obvious excuse but an appeal to the fifth commandment.

The saying plays on two meanings of “dead”: let those who are dead to the kingdom bury those who have died. The law forbade the high priest and a Nazirite to defile themselves even for a father (Leviticus 21:11; Numbers 6:7), so a call that outranked burial had precedent in holiness.

A fishing boat of the period was found in the mud near Magdala in 1986, about eight metres long and able to carry perhaps a dozen men. “Followed” is the discipleship verb of the last two conversations, now acted out in climbing into a boat.

“Tempest” is seismos, the Greek word for an earthquake, used for the shaking at the cross (27:54) and the tomb (28:2). Winds drop down onto the lake through the gorges to the east and can raise a storm quickly. Jonah also slept in a ship while a storm raged (Jonah 1:5).

“Save” is the verb behind the angel’s explanation of the name Jesus: “he shall save his people” (1:21). The cry is also the shape of Psalm 107:28, sailors who “cry unto the LORD in their trouble”. “We perish” is present tense: we are going down.

“Rebuked” is the verb used when Jesus commands demons, and Psalm 106:9 uses it of God at the Red Sea: “He rebuked the Red sea also, and it was dried up.” The “great tempest” of verse 24 is answered by a “great calm”, the same adjective on both.

Matthew calls them “the men”, not disciples, as though stepping back to show ordinary people facing something beyond them. “What manner of man” asks both what sort and from where. Psalm 89:9 answers in advance: “Thou rulest the raging of the sea.”

The manuscripts disagree on the name: Gergesenes, Gadarenes or Gerasenes. Gergesa is often placed at Kursi on the eastern shore, where a slope runs close to the water. Matthew has two men where Mark and Luke tell of one, as he has two blind men where Mark names only Bartimaeus (20:30).

“What have we to do with thee” is a Hebrew idiom of protest, literally “what to us and to thee”, used by the widow to Elijah (1 Kings 17:18). It means leave us alone, this is none of your business. The demons treat Jesus’ arrival as an intrusion on their ground.

Swine were unclean under the law, so a large herd shows the reader which side of the lake this is: Gentile country, where pork was raised for the cities of the Decapolis. The detail of distance, “a good way off”, sets up the request before it is made.

“Suffer us” means allow us. The demons cannot even choose a destination without leave; the request itself admits who holds authority. They ask for a place to go, which suggests they cannot simply exist without a host.

Ancient Israel thought of the deep as the realm of chaos, and Luke says the demons begged not to be sent “into the deep” (Luke 8:31). The herd rushes down into exactly that. The shore near Kursi has a steep slope close to the water, fitting the verb “ran violently”.

The herdsmen were probably hired hands answerable to the owners, which gave them reason to run. Mark gives the herd as about two thousand (Mark 5:13), a heavy loss for any town. Their report covers both the pigs and “what was befallen to the possessed”.

In 1611 “coasts” meant borders or territory, not seashore, as in the “coasts” of Bethlehem (2:16). The townspeople “besought” him, the same verb the demons used in verse 31. Both beg him, and both want him elsewhere.