I was a camp counselor for a really long time, and then eventually a camp director straightened my shirt. That's kind of a big deal. And one of the things that I got to do when I graduated to camp director was get the big 6D cell mag light out that was way overkill and patrol the outside of things so that the youngsters wouldn't get into any kind of little hanky panky hijinks, troublemaking kind of nonsense. And so I would just uh hang out in the woods and camp late at night and watch what the kids were doing. And every now and then, sure enough, here come some kids creeping along in the dark to somebody else's cabin and blam-mo! I'd hit them with that light, and they'd all look guilty and scared, and then they'd all switch from guilty and scared to like what? We were just doing a thing that we needed to do. And those were always the best excuses ever. And uh it's real easy. It's like if you're out at night and you're sneaking around like little turds, it's because you're definitely doing something wrong. There's no reason for you to be sneaking. Whatever your plan was there is probably real stupid, and it would have been better to have been done during the light, and then I send it back to their cabin. But weirdly, on the sneaking front, I've got this friend, and he's a great friend, and I really like his style, but he also sneaks a little bit. But the weird thing is that he sneaks in such a way that it's only to the benefit of other people. It's a very unusual personality trait. This is a very generous, very cool friend, and I've come to really admire the clever working behind the scenes for the benefit of others in ways that they might not even notice and that he will surely never get credit for. The point is, or might I say, likewise, sneaking in the biblical narratives that we see can have a lot of different connotations. Right off the bat, it looks like sneaky equals bad, but at times we see the sneak being weaponized for some kind of good motives. And I think that is what we are seeing in Matthew chapter 9 as we get to this third clump of demonstrations of miraculous authority from Jesus coming off of the Sermon on the Mount. We're in the middle of the third clump and we're in the one about the two blind guys who are like, What? Jesus is walking by? Jesus, hey, Jesus! Well, specifically they say, Hey, son of David, have mercy on us, which is code for heal our blindness, because we think you can do that. And Jesus just cruises right by, and we don't really get a sense right at that moment in the text as to why he just cruised right by. You know what? I have a Bible here. As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, Have mercy on us, son of David. And when he had gone indoors, the blind men came into him and they asked them, Do you believe that I'm able to do this? Yes, Lord, they replied. Then he touched their eyes and said, According to your faith, will it be done to you? And their sight was restored. And then Jesus sternly warned them, see that no one knows about this. But they went out and spread the news about him all over that region, and I'll add the word, anyways. Okay, so at first it looked like Jesus just blew them off or maybe missed the cues, but now we see he had a plan all along. He wanted this miracle to unfold in secret, in the dark, which is kind of ironic because the whole miracle is about illuminating that which was dark. So we're gonna have to break down why that might have been or what the deal was there in just a minute. So, once again, backtracking just for a second to where we were yesterday, the greeting that these guys throw out is have mercy on us, son of David. And that's kind of a loaded term, but at the most basic level, it means that they were suspecting that Jesus was the Messiah, descended from David, obviously, not like literally and immediately. There are some generations in there and whatnot. But this is the guy who is the little shoot that's coming out of the burned-out stump of the line of Jesse. Jesse was David's dad. And that prophecy, everybody in the original audience knew it, is from Isaiah. And famously, it's this glimmer of hope that's being held out after all of the ugly events of the Old Testament and the failure of the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom. And it looks like God's chosen people are just belly up and nothing is ever gonna work out, and all the beautiful promises of God could never come true, the promises that he made to David to establish his beautiful, unending kingdom with his eternal king and everything being worked out and straightened out, and it's all gonna come through these people and through the line of David, and now, but now there's no kingdom, there's no throne. How can this possibly work out? Well, that's why that passage in Isaiah was so clung to, so valued, and that's why people were looking forward to the Son of David. But Son of David at this point meant a lot of different things. It didn't just mean Jesus or Messiah, as maybe Christians think about that, or Jesus or Messiah in kind of the socially encouraging, equitable sense that maybe somebody who respects Jesus but wouldn't say they're a theist. Somebody from that camp might attribute that version of Messiah to him. No, this conjured for a lot of people a very different version of that: a military leader who would come and undo the damage done by Rome, restore things to the glory that King David experienced with all of his wealth and his son Solomon's wealth and their political dominance and hobnobbing with fancy people like the Queen of Sheba and whoever else wanted to come out and check out their awesome stuff that they had built. And as you know, as a sophisticated person living in the 21st century, stuff means stuff. Everything means something at the most basic level. Not all the fingers means the same thing. One finger means you're number one, another finger right next door to that one means something much meaner. Everything means something. Words are loaded, words are politically loaded, and phrases that you could have uttered 15 years ago that would have been utterly innocuous and meaningless now really mean something and are gonna set off a fire in people's brain this way or that way. And honestly, again, making no statement whatsoever about anything here. How about the phrase black lives matter or all lives matter? Things that would not have set off a firestorm very recently, now all of a sudden, that's very loaded. If you understand that, then you can understand what exactly is going on here. Son of David sounds really harmless to you and me, but it wasn't. It meant something. And if that phrase and that nickname catches on too early on in the game here, that's kind of a dog whistle to bring in the conspiracy revolutionary types. It's also a good way to bring to the attention of the Roman authorities that something is cooking over here. And it would seem that Jesus didn't want that attention on him. How am I arriving at this conclusion? Well, it's very simple, actually. What we have is something of a literary parallelism in the editing style of Matthew here. So, in this third chunk of miracles that we're seeing coming off the Sermon on the Mount, it opens with outcasts in society boldly approaching Jesus in a way that would be pretty weird and saying, in so many words, I know you can heal me. And then Jesus looking back and being like, Yeah, I can, and that's good faith, and let's do this thing. In the story about the leper, it's okay. When he came down from the mountainside, this is uh 8-1, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. See, and it matches. Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. Okay, that's also how he healed the blind guys. I am willing, he said. Jesus obviously intoned the same thing in the miracle with the blind guys, and then he says, Be clean, and immediately he was cured of his leprosy. But 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. And you can go back and listen to the whole episode that we did on that particular topic, where we took a little more time to break down why he might have said that. Obviously, that miracle looks like it happened in front of people, so some people caught on to what was going on. But it seems like the idea here is don't tell anybody, go and do all of the ritual cleansing thing, because it's gonna really cause it to dawn on people, like, no, this guy's like legitimately religiously clean, not just healed, like everything's right, this is amazing. And then eventually it'll come back around to Jesus that, oh, he can declare things clean, something that we saw him just do with the woman who had the bleeding here just a minute ago. But the one thing that is different between these two parallel miraculous accounts is the way it starts. The blind man doesn't address Jesus as the son of David. He just says Lord, which sounds pretty fancy because of the way we think about the word now, but really that was just a basic, honorific title for any normal person of any kind of authority. Think Mr. or master. Lord didn't necessarily mean I think you're God, or the ways that we would think of it now. So we've gone from a pretty skeptical greeting of Jesus when all of these authority stories start after the Sermon on the Mount to Son of David. So what changed over that span of time? That one person is like, I guess Lord? And other people are like, whoa, son of David, we see you for who you are, even though we can't see anything at all. Well, that's really interesting. What changed, I think, is that exactly at the midpoint between those two stories, just even in terms of pretty much word count, you get the story of Jesus going out and calming that storm on the Sea of Galilee. And what did the disciples say after that happens? They say, What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him. And then the very next thing, which also represents the middle point of the top of the narrative structural mountain between the two miracles we're looking at here, and the demons are like, Whoa, we know who you are. What do you want with us, son of God? So what has happened is there's a question that is flirted with coming off of the mountain. He teaches with all this authority, it's different than other people. And we'll call him Lord for now. Let's see what happens. And then all of these demonstrations of authority occur. And then if the question wasn't obvious enough already, the disciples are credited with asking it, who is this guy? The demons start to hint at it, and he's like, No, no, we're not doing that right now. And then finally, apparently, it's just become so evident that even a blind guy can see it. See what I did there? Or rather, I should say, see what Matthew did there? And they're like, we can't see a dang thing, but we know you're the Messiah. You're the son of David. So then, in light of that, and in light of the connotations that go with it, picture Jesus' response. He's like, Yeah, and we're just gonna be cool and roll by that for now. Hey, have you ever had your kid or a friend who maybe just isn't getting what's going on socially in the moment come up and just blurt something out about how the things are that's totally not discreet? And you're like, dude, you are killing me right now. You can't play it off. You can't make it go away. All you can do is just maybe ignore it until they force you to acknowledge it. Jesus was not gonna get forced to acknowledge that title. Is it the right title? Yeah. But is that title crazy loaded? Yeah, it's crazy loaded. And we can't just go around barking this out at this point in the game yet. It strategically is not Jesus' game plan. And we know that Jesus is really into the strategy thing because he's gonna say as much in chapter 10. And we'll get over there in a little bit. So he slow rolls by them, and then like a primitive 8-bit video role play game, he's not surprised at all when they just walk right into his house and start pressing the A button and having dialogue with him. And in fact, he initiates it. He's like, Okay, we're in here now, guys. Yeah, all right, I knew you were coming. Okay, so do you believe I'm able to do this? And the question doesn't seem that weird to them. They know what the whole social exchange is about here, and apparently they fully anticipated that he would engage them when they got in the house. And they're like, Yeah, yes, Lord. And so they believe that. And he touched their eyes and then he says, according to your faith, it will be done to you. Again, this doesn't look like it's a neat, tidy quid quo pro. I always struggle with that phrase, but rather it's in keeping with your faith. Here is a measure of fixing and redeeming and healing that looks a lot like that. Again, I don't think there's a magic formula here where if you say the right phrase to Jesus, you get him over a barrel and he has to do your miracle thing no matter what it might be. But this does illustrate a point. Even the blind guys could see this is the son of David, but Jesus is still in a place where we're not gonna go around and just trumpet that at this point yet. Now, there are other places beyond the parallel miracle back there in chapter eight with the leper that we just looked at, where he does the same thing, most notably in chapter 12 and chapter 17. Oh, verse nine, yeah, that's right, because this is coming off of the transfiguration. And Jesus is like, Yeah, let's not tell anybody about this until you see that the Son of Man has returned from the dead. So it's like Jesus is pacing this thing out a little bit. He doesn't want it to come to a head yet. There are buttons that he wants to push, but he wants to be the button pusher. There are times when he's gonna fiercely push back on the religious leadership, the people who seem to be against the kingdom or just missing it, the people who seem to be blind, and we're gonna break that down more tomorrow. And there are other times where he's cool with letting other people and seemingly random circumstances move the thing forward. Now, if you're sitting here processing this with me, whether you are a person of devoted faith, trying to figure this thing out, not sure what to make of it, and maybe rebuilding adult faith for yourself for the first time, or not faith at all, it's still pretty easy for all of us to be in the same boat in high five and be like, ah, that's pretty cool. I see what the guy's doing there. Good strategy is good strategy. He's playing this thing very smart. We all know what it looks like on social media when somebody explodes through the wall like the Kool-Aid man is like, hey, here's all my opinions about everything. I'm totally right about all this stuff. Agree or we're enemies. Like it's just dumb. That's not a way to set yourself up for a long-term presence in that space. You're picking a fight right off the bat. People are going to jump to conclusions without hearing you out. This is not a good strategy. We also know what it looks like when somebody is smart, when they're so invested in the thing that they're doing that they take the time to think strategically about it to see the good ends that they're trying to bring about accomplished. And I think that's something that all of us can agree is a pretty impressive strategic mindset on the part of Jesus. That is him knowing his audience and understanding the moment in history in which he is operating better than anybody else in the game. 4D chess, to borrow an expression from a friend. Tomorrow we've got to talk about the blind thing and what the blind thing means and where it fits into all of this. And I think that'll be a really fun conversation that'll have us back in the old testament a little bit as well. All right, I've had fun processing sneaky Jesus maneuvering with you today. We'll go and look at the whole concept of blindness and where that fits in with the Old Testament. And it's pretty interesting stuff that we're gonna get into tomorrow. In the meantime, my name's Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. I really like you. Let's do this again soon.