Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. I know you have a gazillion things you could be doing with your time. You're busy, you have things that you need to accomplish, and yet here we are hanging out. That is not lost on me. Thank you for making the time to do this together every weekday as we work through the book of Matthew. And one of the things that can happen as we do this every single weekday, as we get through nine chapters of the book of Matthew, is that we can get to these rapid-fire anecdotes like we've had in Matthew 8 and Matthew 9 since we got done with the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7 through 5. And each anecdote demands, you know, some cultural background and history and interpretation. And there's usually some red letters in there from Jesus. And it's like, oh, what does that mean? What do we do with that? And cross-referencing to the Old Testament. There's just a lot of, I think, very enjoyable busyness that goes into digging into each of these stories. But then what can happen is I think we can lose the pattern a little bit. And there can also be questions that don't present themselves in one little anecdote or passage, but only become evident when you look at several of them at once that we can miss. And I don't want to miss those. So this is one of those episodes where we're going to step back and look at the big picture a little bit for the sake of understanding the little picture more specifically. So here's the deal. Matthew does some goofy chronological stuff in his book. I'm not troubled by it. Some people are. They look at it and they're like, wow, what the heck? That looks different than what Luke does or Mark does or John does. And that is fuel for what some people call the synoptic problem. I guess synoptic problem is an okay term. I really don't feel like there is a significant problem between these documents. And part of the reason that I feel that is because I consume stories, like you, all the time. You read books and watch movies and you watch Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu at night. We live in a generation of storytelling narrative experts. And you really are an expert. You are very, very sophisticated and good at receiving and understanding narrative. And part of the reason I can tell that you are is because of what keeps getting made. It's sophisticated and hard. It doesn't mean it's necessarily always good, but the stories that we're getting now would be very confusing to the people who were alive when the first movies were coming out. First movies come out, you have one camera pointed at one scene, and it's really more like a stage production. And this happens here, and it's all very chronological and neat and tidy, because we weren't trained or conditioned for how to communicate little nuances and subtle details in those early days of visual storytelling. Whereas now, my goodness, you can pick up on every little hint and every little detail. You know when a character's about to go sideways, you can sense foreshadowing, you can pick up on themes, and further, you can easily sort out what looks like a little bit of chronological jumpery. So one of the issues with good storytelling is you usually have more than one character, right? And when you have more than one character, they're doing different things in different places. And even the most basic of stories is gonna have a good guy and a bad guy, a protagonist and an antagonist somewhere, and they're usually not hanging out in the same room. So you got to jump over to see what the one is doing and what the other is doing, and that means that chronologically, some stuff is gonna overlap or maybe even jump back a bit in time when you bounce between those different point of view characters. This is not troubling for you. You have no issue sorting that out or figuring out what's going on. You can look for the clues, kind of like we did in the last season of the Clone Wars, to figure out, like, oh, this is happening right up against the events depicted in Star Wars Episode 3. Don't worry about it if you didn't track with that example because you don't watch those programs. The point being this: when we get to Matthew or Luke and we see a little bit of bouncing around, like with the political timeline or with Herod, and we jump away from Jesus and John the Baptist, and we go talk about Herod and John being in prison, and then we bounce back a little bit later on to where we were originally in the timeline, you're good with that. You know how to do it. It's very, very intuitive for you at this point in history. Some people might look at that and be like, oh, there's an error in the Bible, but come on, nobody would ever do that with any other document or movie. You can tell what the author is going for. But where I think storytelling and the gospels as well gets a little bit trickier, and maybe you could argue a bit more subjective, is when the author voluntarily bounces around chronologically for organizational purposes, for mnemonic purposes, helping the audience members to track with and remember the structure of the book, or for simply thematic purposes to lump together anecdotes that all communicate one thing before we move on to the naturally successive idea that would come out of that one thing, which would happen next. And I think Matthew does a ton of that. And I think he does it on purpose, and I think he kind of had to do it as the guy who followed Jesus around, taking notes and being like, I'm gonna write all this stuff down someday. Luke didn't do that. He got his data secondhand. Mark didn't do that, he got his data secondhand, maybe from Peter, but that's still secondhand. John did this, but John has a very different perspective in terms of what he's doing and trying to accomplish. So Matthew hangs out with Jesus for a little while. He's like, all right, I've got a few things that happened before I got on the scene here, but most of this I'm just watching unfold. And as we travel around from place to place, I'm hearing a lot of the same sermons. I'm hearing a lot of the same themes developed. And Jesus is walking each group of these people from point A to point Z. So Matthew has been from A to Z with Jesus five dozen times by the time they get to Jerusalem and Jesus gets crucified. So how is Matthew supposed to organize that? Get a hundred scrolls and make a 10-zillion-page tome that covers the same things that Jesus said again and again, the equivalent of Jesus going around and doing like campaign speeches? I mean, they talk about the same stuff. No. Instead, what Matthew does is he opts to go out of time occasionally to organize his document in such a way that these themes are going to be obvious A to Z only one time for the audience that's going to pick up this book and read it, whether it's in the first century AD or you and me talking about it right now. This thing would be a weird mess if he gave us everything and every speech A to Z, A to Z, A to Z, A to Z. So it would seem that what Matthew and the other gospel writers discovered is that the miracles and the teachings and the works of Jesus all serve to demonstrate something in that A to Z progression of the teachings of the kingdom, the the stuff that Jesus was trying to communicate to people over and over again. And so what it looks like Matthew has done is that he has stayed in a relatively chronological pattern, but he's made the editorial choice to lump together clumps of anecdotes that illustrate one point out of the I mean, we're pretending it's 26 on the A to Z that Jesus is trying to develop. So as we were talking about yesterday in Matthew chapter 9, we get three points of resistance in the last three passages we looked at. The Pharisees get mad that Jesus heals the paralytic in the first anecdote in chapter 9, and Jesus pushes back on their anti-forgiveness stance. Then the Pharisees get mad that Jesus called Matthew and hangs out with repugnant cultural others, and Jesus pushes back on that. Then John's disciples, friendly fire, get a little bit testy and questiony over why Jesus doesn't act more like the Pharisees in his fasting habits, and Jesus pushes back on that, if a bit more gently. What Matthew has done is lumped these three ideas together to make a point on the way from A to Z about the story of Jesus and what Jesus is trying to point out. We're going to see clumping like this all over the place. Here's another one we just looked at. Matthew chapters 5 through 7. It's a Sermon on the Mount. Big bold claims. How can anybody claim all this stuff? That's incredible. Your kingdom sounds awesome, but come on, lots of people say crazy stuff like, I wish we all had unicorns that pooped chocolate bars and that could make soda come out of water fountains so that everybody could have butterfingers and soda all the time. But it doesn't mean that you can do it. Jesus has to demonstrate some authority to back up the air of authority that he communicated in Matthew 5 through 7, which was impressive, but not enough to change the world. And so then Matthew goes and lumps a handful of anecdotes in chapter 8, and I believe on into chapter 9 as well, to demonstrate that Jesus does have authority, that he has authority over social constraints, like the guy with leprosy, that he has authority over sickness, again, like the guy with leprosy and Simon's mom, Peter's mom, and also that he has authority over distance in the encounter with the centurion. Yeah, like I can make your servant healed from here, no problem. That he has authority over the weather, that he has authority over spiritual things, that he has authority over a broken body and the laws of physics, and again with Matthew in chapter 9, that he has authority over all of the social rules and everything else, and even that he has authority over the religious rites and rituals in the passage that we've looked at the last few days, with John's disciples pushing back on him about fasting. And just as a little preview of where we're headed next, the big one is still looming out there that he would have to have authority over in order for all the stuff he said in the Sermon on the Mount to be true. And the next verse we're going to look at when we get to this tomorrow is while he was saying this, a ruler came and knelt before him and said, My daughter has just died. And on the way out the door, I just got to say thank you for being the kind of conversation partners that you are. I know it's kind of a weird structure for a conversation, but you know what I mean. Because I feel like I have permission to step back from the narrow focus on the immediate text in front of us to look at this big picture stuff from time to time. Because you keep giving me the distinct impression, both in data and in written words, that you are up for that. And that along with me, you want to understand this thing better in the grandest sense of it. And to do that, we gotta step back from the text and look at the big picture from time to time. Thanks for being up for that. More on this tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Five All Hour Podcast. Catch you soon.