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Book III, Chapter 1: The Wonderworker (Matt. 8:1-22)

Book III, Chapter 1: The Wonderworker (Matt. 8:1-22)

Last updated on: November 12, 2026 at 2:03 am by Gabriel Blanchard

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Book III, Chapter 1: The Wonderworker (Matt. 8:1-22) 2026-11-12T02:03:36-04:00 Gabriel Blanchard

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Book III, Chapter 1: The Wonderworker

We now pass into what I’ve labeled “Book III” of the Gospel of Matthew*, leading up to the formal commission of the Twelve Apostles as Christ’s apprentices and envoys that will take place in ch. 10 (the second of the five Matthean discourses). If you need a refresher, here’s the broader structure we’re assuming:*

א Book I. Matthew chs. 1-2
• IA: 1:1-25
• IB: 2:1-23
ב Book II. Matthew chs. 3-7
• IIA: 3:1-4:11
• IIB: 4:12-7:29—the Sermon on the Mount
ג Book III. Matthew chs. 8-10
• IIIA: 8:1-9:34 ⇐ YOU ARE HERE1
—· i) 8:1-4, a miracle: the cleansing of a leper
—· ii) 8:5-13, a miracle: the cure of a centurion’s slave
—· iii) 8: 14-17, a miracle: the cure of Peter’s mother-in-law and many others
—· iv) 8:18-22, teaching: forsaking all for the Kingdom
—· v) 8:23-27, a miracle: the stilling of the storm
—· vi) 8:28-34, a miracle: the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniacs
—· vii) 9:1-8, a miracle and teaching: the cure of the paralytic and Christ’s authority to absolve
—· viii) 9:9, the vocation of Matthew
—· ix) 9:10-17, teaching: the welcome of sinners and the new wineskins for new wine
—· x) 9:18-26, two miracles: the cure of the hemorrhaging woman and the raising of Jairus’ daughter
—· xi) 9:27-31, a miracle: the cure of two blind men
—· xii) 9:32-34, a miracle: the exorcism of the mute demoniac
• IIIB: 9:35-10:42—the Commission of the Twelve
ד Book IV. Matthew chs. 11-13
• IVA: 11:1-12:50
• IVB: 13:1-52—the Parable Compendium
ה Book V. Matthew chs. 14-18
• VA: 13:53-17:27
• VB: 18:1-35—the Discourse on the Kingdom
ו Book VI. Matthew chs. 19-26
• VIA: 19:1-23:39
• VIB: 24:1-25:46—the Olivet Discourse
ז Book VII. Matthew chs. 27-28
• VIIA: 26:1-27:66—the Passion
• VIIB: 28:1-20—the Resurrection

Wonder-workers—or, to give them their Greek name, thaumaturges*—were not unknown in the eastern Mediterranean at this time. The minor Neopythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, who was born some time in the early first century and lived until around 100 CE, reputedly enjoyed extrasensory perception, and later tales credited him with rescuing a Corinthian youth from marrying an Ἔμπουσα [Empousa], a shape-shifting demon in disguise. Within the Judaic world, Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, a student of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (who was smuggled out of the siege of Yrushalem during the First Jewish War), was known as a faith healer. Strikingly, although the author has alluded to them in brief, general terms, it is only at this point that this gospel begins to show us his miracles.* Mark and John both furnish us with an inaugural miracle nearly at the beginning (though in both cases, this is done after he has formed some kind of connection with his earliest disciples), whereas Matthew and Luke both place detailed descriptions of his preaching before any miracle accounts.

Portrait of St. Matthew the Evangelist
from the Mac Durnan Gospels (c. 900?),
a late example of Hiberno-Saxon art.

Now that we’re in the Synoptics, I’d also like to note direct parallels among them. In this week’s text, they are as follows:

Matthew *8:1-4—*Mark *1:40-45—*Luke 5:12-16
Matthew *8:5-13—*Luke 7:1-10
Matthew *8:14-17—*Mark 1:29-31
Matthew *8:18-22—*Luke 9:57-62

Matthew 8:1-22, RSV-CE

When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him; and behold, a lepera came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And he stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to any one; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to the people.”b

As he entered Capernaum, a centurionc came forward to him, beseeching himd and saying, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, in terrible distress.” And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion answered him, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof;e but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard him, he marveled, and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness;f there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; be it done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment.

And when Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever; he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and served him. That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.”

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. And a scribeg came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of the disciples said to him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”h But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”

Matthew 8:1-22, my translation

As he came down from the mountain, many crowds followed him. And behold, a lepera came up and prostrated himself, saying: “Sir, if you want to, you can cleanse me.”

He extended his hand and touched him, saying, “I want to—be cleansed”; and straightaway the leper was cleansed by him. And Yeshua says to him: “See that you tell no one, but go show yourself to the priest, and bring forward the gift which Moshe ordered, for a witness to them.”b

When he went into K’far-Nachum, a centurionc came to him, imploring himd and saying, “Sir, my boy in the household is overthrown, paralyzed, terribly tormented.”

And he said to him: “I will come heal him.”

But the centurion said in response, “Sir, I am not fitting that you should come under my roof;e but only say [it] by word, and my boy will be healed—for I am also a person under authority, with soldiers under me, and I tell this one ‘Journey there,’ and he journeys, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does.”

Hearing this, Yeshua was amazed, and he told his followers: “‘Amin, I tell you, this kind of faith, I have found with none in Yisroel. I tell you that many will arrive from the dawn and the sunset and sit down beside Avraham and Yitzhak and Yakov in the kingship of the heavens; yet the sons of the kingship will be thrown into the outer dark:f there will be wailing there, and the grating of teeth.” And Yeshua said to the centurion, “Go—as you have had faith, be it so for you”; and the boy was healed in that hour.

And Yeshua came into the household of Rocky and saw his mother-in-law, overthrown and fevered; and he touched her with his hand, and the fever quit her, and she rose and served them. When evening came, they brought to him many demoniacs; and he threw out the spirits by a word, and healed everyone who was doing badly; thus the message through Yshaya the prophet was fulfilled, [that] says: “He took our infirmities and carried our sicknesses.”

Yeshua, beholding many crowds around him, bade [his students] to come away to the far [shore]. And one scribeg came to him, saying: “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go to.”

And Yeshua said to him, “Foxes have dens and the birds of heaven have homes, yet the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Another of his students told him, “Sir, allow me first to entomb my father.”h

Yeshua said to him, “Follow me, and permit the dead to entomb their own dead.”

Textual Notes

Domine, Non Sum Dignus [Lord, I Am Not Worthy]
(c. 1890), by James Tissot.

a. a leper | λεπρὸς [lepros]: Today, leprosy normally means a skin infection, Hansen’s disease. The Greek λέπρα [lepra], “scaliness” or “peeling,” likely referred to a variety of skin afflictions, psoriasis being the most obvious. Though λέπρα was used to translate it in the Septuagint, this is generally agreed not to have been the same thing as צָרַעַת [tzåraɜath], the disease (or collection of diseases?) discussed in Leviticus 13-14. That disease, which could afflict garments and houses as well as people, is now usually given its Hebrew name, tzaraath, to avoid confusion with leprosy in the modern sense. I’ve written about tzaraath and its significance in late Second-Temple Judaism before, commentating on both the Marcan parallel to our text and St. Luke’s story of the cleansing of a group of ten lepers; according to the Oral Torah, tzaraath was not an ordinary disease, but a divine punishment that only Jews were susceptible to, levied for specifiable sins (later outlined in the Talmud):

- Slander (a vice we casually dismiss at our peril).
- Murder.
- Perjury (which, yes, ranked with murder in antiquity).
- Illicit sexual relations (particularly adultery and incest).
- Hubris (typically expressed in the form of sacrilege2).
- Theft.
- Stinginess.3

On this view, the separation of lepers from the community was not a matter of preventing them from passing on a contagion, but was part of the consequences of their antisocial behavior. The New Testament seems to be talking about tzaraath in the Levitical sense, rather than λέπρα “proper,” though it’s not 100% clear (at least, not to me).

b. for a proof to the people/for a witness to them | εἰς μαρτύριον αὐτοῖς [eis martürion autois]: This is a slightly strange thing to include (whether you follow my ambiguous rendering or the RSV’s). It makes sense that a rabbi would remind someone of the provisions made in the Law addressing their circumstances; what’s less intuitive is that he should cite a reason for it. This makes me wonder whether this might be the evangelist’s own explanation of what Yeshua is doing—especially if Matthew was written in a time when observing the Torah had recently been determined not to be a universal expectation for Christians.

c. centurion | ἑκατόνταρχος [hekatonarchos]: As the Latin and Greek names suggest (from centum and ἑκατόν, which both mean “hundred”), this rank in the Roman army initially indicated command of a company known as a centuria or “century,” consisting of one hundred men, give or take. Changes in military organization over Roman history meant that in the early Empire, a century actually had about eighty men in it. As best I can tell, the nearest equivalent rank in the US Army today would be that of a First Sergeant.

A historical reënactor dressed as a centurion.
Photo by Luc Viatour, used via a CC BY-SA 3.0
license (source).

d. beseeching him/imploring him | παρακαλῶν αὐτὸν [parakalōn auton]: Probably it is only a coincidence, but (though I couldn’t figure out a way to represent it gracefully in English) the participle here, παρακαλῶν, is based on the same verb from which we get Παράκλητος [Paraklētos], “Advocate, ‘Paraclete'”—the title of the Holy Ghost given in John 14.

e. I am not worthy to have you come under my roof/I am not fitting that you should come under my roof | οὐκ εἰμὶ ἱκανὸς ἵνα μου ὑπὸ τὴν στέγην εἰσέλθῃς [ouk eimi hikanos hina mou hüpo tēn stegēn eiselthēs]: This appears to be motivated by this centurion’s sensitivity to Judaic rules about ritual impurity. We know from the Lucan parallel that he was well-liked by the populace and had funded the building of a synagogue, so he may have been a “God-fearer” (a Gentile interested in Judaism who did not pursue full conversion); this would give him ample opportunity to become familiar with said rules. Open-air interactions between Jews and Gentiles were lawful. More private dealings were treated with suspicion: one who consented to be a Gentile’s guest might be violating kashrut, if not worse, especially considering that Roman houses in particular always had a shrine to the family’s penātēs and larēs; these were probably seen as analogous to the Hebrew Bible’s תְּרָפִים [t’råfiym]—teraphim, household idols (thought by some modern scholars to have started off as literal shrunken heads). The centurion’s courtesy, not wanting to cause scandal or inconvenience for a practicing rabbi, is given room to operate by his faith that Yeshua can perform the healing he requests.

This text is the source of the Domine Non Sum Dignus, a line used in the Mass before the distribution of Communion. In Episcopal and Anglican-Use liturgies, it is preceded by the Prayer of Humble Access:

THE PRAYER OF HUMBLE ACCESS
All. We do not presume to come to this, thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness,
but in thy manifold and great mercies.
We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.
But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.
Grant us therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son, Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood,
and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
(THE PRIEST SHOWS THE HOST AND CHALICE TO THE PEOPLE)
Priest. Behold the Lamb of God, ✠ behold him that taketh away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb.
DOMINE NON SUM DIGNUS (SAID THREE TIMES)
All. Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.

f. many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness/many will arrive from the dawn and the sunset and sit down beside Avraham and Yitzhak and Yakov in the kingship of the heavens; yet the sons of the kingship will be thrown into the outer dark | πολλοὶ ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν καὶ δυσμῶν ἥξουσιν καὶ ἀνακλιθήσονται μετὰ Ἀβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ Ἰακὼβ ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν· οἱ δὲ υἱοὶ τῆς βασιλείας ἐκβληθήσονται εἰς τὸ σκότος τὸ ἐξώτερον [polloi apo anatolōn kai düsmōn hēxousin kai anaklithēsontai meta Abraam kai Isaak kai Iakōb en tē basileia tōn ouranōn: hoi de huioi tēs basileias ekblēthēsontai eis to skotos to exōteron]: This suggests a pattern familiar from the Hebrew Bible, exemplified in Genesis 25:

Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived. The children struggled together within her; and she said, “If it is thus, why do I live?” So she went to inquire of the LORD. And the LORD said to her,

“Two nations are in your womb,
…..and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
…..the elder shall serve the younger.”

When her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb. The first came forth red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they called his name Esau. Afterward his brother came forth, and his hand had taken hold of Esau’s heel; so his name was called Jacob.4
—Gen. 25:21-26

“The elder shall serve the younger”: this ran counter to the normative assumptions of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. The elder was supposed to be the position of honor, the illustrious, the favored, the dignified. Yet the pattern of the Old Testament, time and time again, is to exalt the younger instead. In the genealogies of the Patriarchs, it is Isaac who takes precedence over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over all his brothers, Ephraim over Manasseh.

So who exactly are the “many” who “will arrive from the dawn and the sunset” to dine with the Patriarchs? and who are the “sons of the kingship” who “will be thrown into the outer dark”? One view would be that the former are Gentiles and the latter, the Jews; however, this interpretation doesn’t make a lot of sense. For one thing, the reward of “sitting down beside Avraham and Yitzhak and Yakov” only makes sense when explained in Jewish terms. Then there’s the fact that, in all those cases—the Ishmaelites, Edomites, the rest of the Israelites, the half-tribe of Manasseh—God did still bless the elder son, albeit not in the same way or to the same degree as the younger. Or the fact that another recurring pattern in the Bible is that people are judged for their own conduct, not that of their ancestors; still less do entire ethnicities get a single Pass/Fail from him. So trying to interpret these two groups in fundamentally ethnic terms is probably a mistake in the first place.

A view of the Tomb of the Patriarchs (a.k.a. the
Cave of Machpelah or the Mosque of Ibrahim),
located in Hebron in the West Bank. Photo by
Djampa, used via a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (source).

I think it might help to shift focus momentarily. In the book’s version (a.k.a. the good version) of the Council of Elrond,5 the councilors reach this in the end:

…..Gandalf [said,] “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire … Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.”
…..“At least for a while,” said Elrond. “The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

…..… Still no one spoke. Frodo glanced at all the faces, but they were not turned to him. All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if deep in thought. A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen … At last with an effort he spoke …
…..“I will take the Ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”

…..Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance. “If I understand aright all that I have heard,” he said, “I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will. This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great. Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it? … But it is a heavy burden. … I do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choice is right; and though all the mighty Elf-friends of old, Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin, and Beren himself were assembled together, your seat should be among them.”

Beautiful. Heart-wrenching, even, if you’ve read The Silmarillion, and know something about those names. Hador Goldenhead, the lord of Dor-Lómin, died protecting the retreat of the High Elves from the disastrous Battle of Sudden Flame. Beren One-hand lost the other hand robbing the Enemy of one of the great Jewels, and became the first mortal to win an Elvish princess as his bride. Húrin the Steadfast stood over the wreckage of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, felling Orc after Orc and crying aloud in the tongue of the Elves from beyond the sea, “Aurë entuluva!“, “Day shall come again!”, until he was overwhelmed and captured.

And now imagine the crassness of someone taking that last sentence of Elrond’s and trying to use it in an argument about whether Elves or Men or Hobbits are “the good race.” That’s so aggressively NOT the point. That, I believe, is what the “Gentiles vs. Jews” interpretation of Yeshua’s remark in Matt. 8:10-12 is like.

So what, according to me, is the point? Simply the same as the one Elrond is making: some of the names who figure among the Great will surprise you, because God does not measure us by temporal standards of success—respectable birth, money, looks, fame, high office, intelligence, artistic talent. Even virtue isn’t it. Some of the greatest in heaven (you may be sure of this) will be trailer trash, panhandlers, the ugly, the forgotten, the powerless, stupid people, uncultivated people, people who can never quite get the words right at Mass. And some of those who, put crudely, failed at life will prove to have been aristocratic, wealthy, attractive, prestigious, smart, creative, and pious. At least, they’ll have been what the world understands as “pious.” But, just pages ago, we were warned not to chase the finite rewards afforded to performative piety.

g. a scribe/one scribe | εἷς γραμματεὺς [heis grammateus]: The RSV here ignores the specificity of εἷς γραμματεὺς, “one scribe”; I’m not sure why. Matthew does represent the scribal class as being, in very general terms, ill-disposed toward Yeshua and his followers. He normally groups them together with the Pryshaya, with whom they doubtless largely overlapped: the scribes were the scholarly-secretarial class in antiquity, which in the Jewish world overwhelmingly meant studying the Torah (and therefore having not only a professional interest in theological debates but the training to engage in them), while conversely the Pryshaya were much concerned to press learning upon fellow Jews as much as they could. Still, the scribes could not have been monolithic. The Sadducees needed secretaries like anybody else did, and presumably at least some scribes sided with them doctrinally, whether out of sycophancy or due to real conviction; the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls implies that quite a number of scribes became Essenes, or vice versa; and the Gospels show us in passages like this that “Beyt Yeshua” had scribal sympathizers too.

h. let me first go and bury my father/allow me first to entomb my father | ἐπίτρεψόν μοι πρῶτον ἀπελθεῖν καὶ θάψαι τὸν πατέρα μου [epitrepson moi prōton apelthein kai thapsai ton patera mou]: I think it was in the notes to the New Geneva Study Bible I once possessed that I first ran across the suggestion that “allow me first to entomb my father” may have been metaphorical: i.e., the father may have been elderly, not actually dead, and this request an elliptical way of saying Let me tend my father in his declining years, and once he dies, I will come and follow you. That the Lord does not grant this, despite the immense weight laid on duty to one’s parents in Scripture (including by the Lord himself, in Matthew—cf. 15:1-9), is an index of how important a prompt, wholehearted response to his calling was in this context. This ministry was only going to last three years; after that …

Footnotes

1I’ve divided this first half of “Book III” into twelve sub-sections, and have taken the first four of them in one go. You might suppose that I would plan to do the next four next week, and then the four after that; however, I think these actually fall into a 4-3-5 pattern: subsections i-iv together, then subsections v-vii, then subsections viii-xii. This is based partly on what seems to me to be the strongly coherent theming of Matt. 8:23-9:8—we’ll get to that—but also on the analysis of patterns in the Tanakh from my series a year ago, “Are Our Bibles in the Wrong Order?” (Its salient installment for patterns involving these three numbers is Part II; if you want the background to that, it’s in Part I, and it continues into Part III and Part IV.)
2This was true not only in Jewish society—the go-to example of hubris that appears in the Talmud is that of King Uzziah in II Chronicles 26, where he tries to usurp the role of the priests by offering incense in the Holy Place—but in the pagan world as well. For example: in Æschylus’ play Agamemnon, the titular king returns home to Mycenæ from sacking Troy. His queen, Clytæmnestra, has spent the last ten years plotting revenge on him; long story. On his arrival, she proposes that, in triumph, he audaciously walk into his palace on an insanely costly bolt of fabric that has been dyed with Tyrian purple (that is, on a red carpet). Because of the expense of even a small amount of this dye, the only proper use of a bolt like this would have been to dedicate it to a god; walking on it is an act so ostentatious and wasteful, its arrogance reaches the pitch of sacrilege, and Agamemnon refuses to do it … at first. Bit by bit, his wife wears him down, till finally he dismounts from his chariot and commits this sin of hubris. It is this which forfeits the divine protection which would otherwise attend him as a king, and empowers Clytæmnestra’s design to succeed.
3This may strike the modern reader as a rather intrusive approach to morality, but this forgets what the Torah professed to be. First, this was the Law of God, God who reads human hearts; “intrusive” doesn’t begin to cover his knowledge, while on the other hand, if tzaraath really was imposed by him then it would only ever be imposed justly. And second, it was a Law that called the Hebrew people to be specially devoted to mutual decency and mercy, especially to the poor. Certain forms of generosity were positively required under the Law (cf. Leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22, Deuteronomy 24:19-22—note that the Deuteronomic text in particular bundles the law about gleaning together not only with other mitzvot about justice and mercy, but with a reminder to abide by the rules laid down concerning tzaraath).
4The names Esau (עֵשָׂו [ɜêšåw]) and Jacob (יַעֲקֹב [Yaɜàqov]) respectively mean “rough, hairy” and “one who follows at the heels, tracker, ‘tail’.”
5J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring) II.2, “The Council of Elrond,” pp. 283-284 of the 1994 Houghton Mifflin Collector’s Edition.

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