Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And we've been looking at Matthew chapter 9 for the last, I don't know, a couple of weeks, whatever here. And one of the things that we've noticed together is that Matthew seems to have lumped three incidents together that tell a story or that all hit on one theme, and that is the opposition to Jesus. They're mad about him forgiving people, they're mad about him hanging out with the repugnant cultural other. And then, well, John's disciples, a little friendly fire, come along, and they're a little bit troubled about Jesus' religious ritualistic practices. And then we see Jesus respond to all of that. Well, I suspect that Matthew is doing all of that on purpose. And so yesterday we started a conversation about how Matthew handles the chronology, how sometimes he's a little bit chronologically loose with his document to make a point and tell the story better. And how at other times he seems to be pretty dialed into then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. So we're going to break that down more today, picking it right up where we left off. And the next verse we're going to look at is while he was saying this, a ruler came and knelt before him and said, My daughter has just died. Bah ba. Can Jesus deal with the death thing? That's the logical question. So why is that there? Why didn't Matthew put the death thing at the beginning if chronologically that's more where it happened? Well, because it doesn't illustrate his point as well. And there's no thing at the beginning of Matthew where he comes out and he's like, Hey, so here's all the things that happened exactly in order. He's not betraying our trust. He's telling a story, he's organizing in a way that would make sense, and it does make sense. But one of the hints as to when we are out of chronological order or when we are in chronological order has to do with the beginning phrase that Matthew tags onto each of those anecdotes. Now, here's the thing: if you're reading a song of ice and fire or The Lord of the Rings and you're bouncing around between different groups of characters and different point of view characters, you're going to recognize really quickly, because you are an interpretive expert, that while this particular chapter might be out of sequence from the last three chapters you read, still everything in that chapter is happening in order. And then that guy said, then they walked over there, and then that lady said, and then they had a sword fight over here, and then this thing happened, and now the chapter is over. But the chapter was in sequence. Likewise, even though Matthew at times does seem to jump, or Luke seems to jump, and sometimes it's hard to tell which one is making jumps and which one isn't, there are often clues in both of those particular gospels as to when we are right in sequence. So for example, coming off the Sermon on the Mount, when we get done, Jesus taught his authority, the teaches of the law, and then it says, when he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him. Ah, so that is exactly next. And then we go from there, when Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him asking for help. That's not quite as specific. Maybe it's chronological, maybe it's not. When Jesus came into Peter's house, okay, well, that who knows when that happened. When Jesus saw the crowd around him, well, okay, it looks like these details maybe hang together chronologically. Verse 23, then he got into a boat and his disciples follow him. Okay, that sounds chronological. When he arrived on the other side of the region, okay, that sounds chronological. Then he gets done getting kicked out of the region of the Gatarenes, beginning of chapter 9. Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over, and came to his own town. Okay, that sounds fairly chronological. Then he heals the guy, the Pharisees are mad. Verse 9 of chapter 9, as Jesus went on from there. Okay, that's definitely chronological. He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Okay, and then they have that party. Verse 14, the passage we've been looking at this week, says, then John's disciples came and asked him, okay, so that gives the impression that we're still maybe around this party. You see what I'm saying? Eight and nine look like most of this stuff chronologically is bouncing from one to the other. But there are a few that include just enough vagary to allow for the possibility that Matthew is saying, yeah, in this general time, this happened. But when we bounce over to Luke, we get some really overt clues about whether we're talking about immediate language or something that's going on longer. Luke chapter six, I'm literally just randomly doing this. Oh no, Luke 5. One day as he was teaching the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, okay, so that's random. Luke chapter six. One Sabbath, Jesus was going through the grain fields. Okay, so there's nothing necessarily chronological here. On another Sabbath, he went into the synagogue. Nothing necessarily chronological. One of those days, Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray. Again, nothing necessarily chronological. But then we get to chapter 7. It says, when Jesus had finished saying all this in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. Okay, that's more definitively chronological. Chapter 8, after this, Jesus traveled about from one town to another. That's loosely chronological. Then I flip over here to chapter 12, and I get, meanwhile, when a crowd of many thousands had gathered, okay, so there we get like a legit verbal acknowledgement that we're jumping around in time a little bit. I bounce over here as we're getting toward Jerusalem in Luke chapter 18. As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind man, and so then we finish up the Jericho thing, and then we get into 19.1. Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. That's necessarily chronological. So Luke gives us a different set of verbal cues as to when we're right in chronological order or when this basically happened one of these days. It doesn't matter whether this is in order or not. Whereas Matthew is a little bit more difficult to pick apart. What it looks like is that Matthew has organized this thing around five big speeches: the Sermon on the Mount, which we already did, the missional discourse, which we're getting to in chapter 10, the Kingdom Life Discourse in Chapter 18, and the Olivet Discourse, which is crazy and difficult, and we're not going to be there for a very long time. And then you have a clump of action that is the filler material between these big speeches that demonstrates Jesus' authority, the situations he was in, what Jesus is like, whatever it might be. We'll figure that out as we go along. So all this to say that the storytelling that you and I enjoy and consume every single day is using the same techniques that we see Matthew using here. They are good storytelling techniques. What we are getting from Matthew is not a literal end-to-end, boring, dry, sterile, freshman year history textbook. What we're getting is a document that is making an argument. And the argument is Jesus is king. He's the real deal. Now, whether you'll be convinced by that argument or not, well, I don't know. Some people have been, some people haven't been through the years. But I do think that in the same way it would be very unfair to go to the Lord of the Rings trilogy or a song of ice and fire or Disney's Mulan or anything and be like, wait a minute, that didn't happen in order. This is a fraud. It would also be very unfair here. If we get to a place where we say, I don't believe this and I want to reject it, we can just reject it on the merits of the claims and say we don't think it's true. But I don't think it is rejectable or dismissible on the merits of using chronology as a literary tool to accomplish the unapologetic persuasive ends that Matthew is clearly going after. And last thing here, what I wanted to accomplish with this conversation was not like a vigorous defense of Matthew, like, hey, back off of Matthew, leave Matthew alone. I'm none of you criticizing Matthew. And even if you were, you're allowed to criticize Matthew. That's fine. I'm not trying to just make this case so that the bad people who don't think all the things that I think can get their comeuppance because, aha, look at this. You like books, see, you can't get after Matthew. No. The larger point is proactive. You and I, whether we ultimately believe in Jesus and the contents of this book or not, are going to understand the book better if we see what he's doing and why he's doing it. So as we were talking about yesterday, those three anecdotes that we just looked at in Matthew chapter 9, Pharisees getting grouchy about forgiveness, Pharisees getting grouchy about the repugnant cultural other, John's disciples getting grouchy about fasting, those are arranged, and that's meant to be a cue to you and I interpretely to track with what Jesus is going for and with what Matthew is going for. Simply put, if we want to understand the document at the deepest, most complete possible levels, we have to notice the techniques that the author is using and try to get inside the author's head a little bit. Again, we may land in different places as to what it means or what we do with it, but to read it well, that's something we got to do. And that really was the point of this exercise. All right. I think it's important from time to time for us to step back, look at the big picture, the structural things that we wouldn't find when we zoom in closely, so that we can understand those things that we zoom in closely on better, and so that we can eventually get to a place where we come away from this thing and be like, all right, I think I see what the point of Matthew is. And also the more we understand that big picture, which I think is more clear, the easier it is to go into the difficult parts of this document. And be like, all right, that's a little bit less clear, but in light of what we clearly can see that Matthew is going for big picture-wise, we have now more tools to make sense of the trickier parts as we come to those in future passages. You guys are awesome. Thanks for being up for doing weird episodes like this. Next time we're moving on to the thing that I just teased about death. That's kind of the big one. If you can beat everything else, but not death, I'm not really interested in your religion. If you can beat everything else and it hints at you being able to beat death, and then you do beat death, well, that would get my attention. So we'll look at that next. I know I say this all the time, but thanks to everybody who supports the program at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. I get to do this because you chose to do that. I absolutely love you for it. Thank you so, so much for doing that. Looking forward to hanging out more next week. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.