Sunday’s Readings: 2nd Sunday after Trinity

Proper 6: Exodus 19.2-8a; Psalm 100; Romans 5.1-8; Matthew 9.35–10.8 (9-23)

MATTHEW 9.35 has “a pleasant rhythm”, my commentary says, highlighting three activities of Jesus: “teaching”, “proclaiming”, and “healing”. That is Jesus’s ministry in a nutshell. Other elements of his being are revealed by other ways. The Passion, for instance, reveals his identity as Saviour. The incarnation reveals him because the Word.

In this summary of Jesus’s ministry, the Evangelist adds some information. “Teaching” refers to communications of truth in groups gathered together to study God (the word “synagogue” means a coming together of individuals). “Preaching” moves out from faith communities, showing Jesus energetic in the broader world, spreading the excellent news to outsiders. “Healing” brings in a 3rd aspect of ministry: not telling people about God, but showing people about God. For this, the NRSV refers to people’s “disease and sickness”. Other modern translations take an identical path. But the second word used (malakia in Greek) means first “softness”, then “weakness”, fairly than “sickness”.

Only Matthew attaches this noun to Jesus’s healing ministry. It occurs thrice (4.23, 9.35, 10.1), at all times after the word for diseases (nosoi). But it isn’t mere verbal variation. “Weakness”, in any case, isn’t the identical thing as disease. Two possibilities suggest themselves. One is that Matthew is pondering of other ways of needing healing: one for diseases (infections, viruses, cancers), the opposite for debilities resembling paralysis, blindness, deafness, mutism. The other possibility is non-physical: outside the New Testament, this noun for “weakness” is used, in some non-Christian texts, to mean moral weakness, starting from cowardice to “effeminacy” — a word hardly current, for good reasons, in modern moral discourse (the adjective, malakos, is present in Matthew 11.8, Luke 7.25, and 1 Corinthians 6.9).

I feel it unlikely that Matthew is attempting to represent Jesus as being on an ethical crusade against — one other dated term — “unmanliness”. Rather, he’s ensuring that his audience understands the entire range of physical needs over which Jesus has healing power and authority.

Moving on to 10.1-2 brings a momentous shift. But, since it happens without introduction first or explanation afterwards, there may be an actual risk that we’ll miss it altogether. Between these two verses, the “disciples” turn into “apostles”. Putting this in less churchy terms, we’d say that Jesus’s “pupils” turn out to be his “messengers”. That change of terminology may indicate that Matthew the Evangelist has switched from one source to a different. Or perhaps he had his list of the apostles at hand, and thought that here was a great place to insert it. This is the primary time in his Gospel (and so the primary example within the New Testament) that the word “apostle” has been used. Yet Matthew doesn’t explain its meaning, or say why he has introduced it here. Perhaps he expects his audience will know already.

Matthew’s picture of Jesus’s ministry in 9.35 recurs in those instructions to the Twelve, when he gives them authority and sends them out. They aren’t instructed to “teach” within the synagogues, but the opposite two elements of Jesus’s ministry from 9.35 are mentioned. When they’re told to proclaim the excellent news (10.7), it is sweet news not only of “the dominion” but of the “kingdom of heaven”. When they’re sent to heal the sick, that is now itemised: it’s to encompass raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and casting out demons.

Perhaps this last type of healing — exorcism — is meant to fulfill the needs that Matthew has in mind when he speaks of “weakness”. It seems consistent with the Gospel as a complete that the Lord’s response to humankind, after which that of the Twelve, is to offer strength for human vulnerability (one other possible term for expressing that “weakness”).

One small point that I find touching in its humanity comes at 10.3. Almost from the start of Christianity, Matthew the Evangelist and Matthew the tax collector have been identified as the identical person. That continues to be the likeliest explanation of why this Gospel, uniquely, tells of a tax collector called Matthew (9.9, 10.3). The other three Evangelists either don’t associate the disciple Matthew with being a tax collector (Mark, Luke), or don’t mention him in any respect (John). Perhaps the Evangelist adds “the tax collector”, like a medieval craftsman signing his work on a roof beam out of sight — a quiet mark of non-public pride on the part that he has played in Jesus’s ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing.