So, since you're here and all, I assume you hang out on the internet a little bit, and you hang out on the internet a little bit. It means you've interacted with other humans there, and some of that has probably been wonderful. Mostly, my interactions with humans on the internet have been great, fulfilling, enjoyable. We stretch each other, good things come of it. But you know how some people aren't great? And you go and you have an interaction with them, and it doesn't matter what you say or do. They're mad and they're difficult and they're dug in, and maybe it's because of how you look or what you represent, but there's nothing you can do because if your idea or version of who you are gets any traction, they feel like their idea or their version of who they are doesn't get traction. I don't think usually stuff is so binary. I think usually it's possible for things to just get better for everybody and for lots of things to work together. That's what I was taught in school. But the internet right now, good heavens, we get after each other in some weird ways, and that can be really disappointing and at times seemingly irrational. You peel back enough layers though, and you can figure out why people get combative and weird. Likewise, in the first century AD, at times, there's just combative weird stuff that doesn't make a ton of sense. And you look at it at first glance, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa! Why are we mad? Why are we yelling about things? This is just bizarre. Somebody's trying to do something nice, bro. Don't get all weird about it and complain and make negative comments and downvote what the actual problem is. But then you look a little bit closer and you get to know the context, and you're like, oh, okay, you're from this group, you're doing this thing, you feel this threat, insecurity kicks in, and now we're being jerks to each other. All right, I get it, I get it, I get it. And that is what we encounter in Matthew chapter nine as Jesus comes back from across the lake, where we get the situation that happened at the end of chapter eight with the two guys by the tombs who are crazy and demon-possessed and going berserk, and Jesus sends the demons into some pigs, and the pigs go into the drink, and then everybody's like, leave, we don't like the people who run off our pigs while trying to help out our demon-possessed people that guard the tombs and make our lives miserable. It's a very confusing situation. You can go back and listen to the content on that if you haven't heard it already. So if Matthew is giving us a chronological telling of events, and that means they got back in the boat right after that, it was a very short trip and they just came home. Okay, well, I guess let's go back to Capernaum, then maybe things have calmed down a little bit with the miracle frenzy. It is also possible that what we're looking at here is one of those places where Matthew does a little bit of chronological rearranging to illustrate his theological points. Now, you might be saying, well, that's screwed up. That seems like the Bible is lying and not accurate, and this is why I don't like the thing, because it doesn't tell the truth in the way I expect the truth to be told. That is a valid pushback. If it is important to you that a first century document communicate history and details in the same way that a 21st century document would do it, and that a first century document would anticipate how we do things now, then yeah, that's a pretty big hang up. But if you look at contemporary content, you find that writings about content like this, where theology and history overlap, it was a commonly accepted practice to lump these anecdotes together to walk us through a thematic purpose. And that isn't even something we entirely don't do today. That's something everybody's gonna have to wrestle with on their own. My thinking would be that that is something Matthew is doing here, that it wasn't a quick trip across the drink and that Jesus did not immediately turn around and come home. If we wanted to take more time on it, we could go over to Mark and to Luke and compare notes and see exactly what happened in what order and try to reconstruct it. And there are really smart people who do that, and they're better at it than me. So whether this is exactly chronological or not, what is definitely happening is that Matthew is walking us through a series of themes. Miracles happen, people react. That's chapter eight. Now we're into chapter nine, and what we're gonna find here is that miracles happen and then people react. What we're gonna see in both of those parallel chapters is that the miracles that happen demonstrate a profound authority over things that seem unbreakable. And that's what you and I have been talking about the last couple of days with this whole time travel token thing and the idea of going back and unmaking guilt, in a sense, eliminating our need for forgiveness and resolving the things that eat at us over time. So I think Matthew is making a theological point by arranging his anecdotes in a certain order, but whatever the case, we know that just geographically we're no longer in Gentile territory on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. We are back in Jesus' hometown, and that's how the passage starts. Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over, and came to his own town. We're going to see that language used to again refer to Capernaum. This is the place where Peter was probably from locally, and where Jesus hung out with him. It was the base of most of his years of ministry and doing things in public. So in verse 2, it says, Some men brought to him a paralytic lying on a mat. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven. Now the second part there is obviously the grand payoff to this passage, but real quick, if you've been through the Bible or you remember your flannelgrams from Sunday school, you remember that this is the story where Jesus comes back across the water and there's still a ton of hubbub. Everybody's all excited and energized up the same way they were after Jesus in chapter 8 healed Peter's mother-in-law, and then everybody came and they bring in their demon-possessed and they're sick, and Jesus is fixing everything, and then he has to step back from the crowd for a little while, and that's why he goes across the lake and then comes back, and he comes back and things are still hopping, real spicy. Everybody's fired up about this. And so the place is totally packed, again, with disciples, people who like what Jesus is into, with crowds, people trying to figure out whether this is legit or not, and with enemies, people who are increasingly getting openly hostile toward Jesus. More on that in just a minute. And if you recall, there's one amazing signature narrative detail to this story that Matthew, for some reason, chooses to leave out. And that is that it's so crowded with people who are interested in Jesus that this guy who actually needs Jesus beyond just an intellectual debate level can't get in. And so his friends go up on the roof. It would have been a flat roof, like an open skylight kind of thing, and they lower him down right through the roof and drop him like right down in front of Jesus, like me flinging out an irresistible nymph on the end of my fly line in front of a brook trout facing upstream. Like, aha, look what we just dangled in front of you, Jesus. We know you can't help but heal things when you see it. Take the bait, take the bait. And maybe they weren't trying to manipulate Jesus, but I mean, what a bold gesture these people made, according to the accounts in Mark and Luke, to be like, this is gonna be socially weird, but we are dropping this dude right in the middle, and the dude is like, drop me in there, do it. I think we can get this right, but he has to see me, and the only way he's gonna see me is if we do this weird handicapped man on the end of a line fishing thing. And so they drop him down in there, and it has the desired effect. Jesus' big teaching and dramatic thing that's going on gets interrupted. Again, all of those details are omitted by Matthew because he's not trying to make a point about this guy's great faith. He's not trying to make a point here about right posture before the king. He does that elsewhere. What he's trying to do here is illustrate a point about the authority of Jesus to forgive. Again, you want those additional details? Go check out Mark and Luke. But with that more robust collection of details, it's even more obvious why Jesus would see this and be like, well, that's a gesture of faith. Like the same way the leper who ran up to Jesus as he's coming off the Sermon on the Mount, and I made the connection between that and this, even when we covered that at the beginning of Matthew chapter 8. The same way that guy is violating social convention and doing something really socially awkward to get in front of Jesus because he believes Jesus can fix it, that's a gesture of faith. So this is a gesture of faith. And Jesus responds to that gesture of faith not by saying what you'd figure, you're healed, get up, go get them, tiger, show them what you can do, and then everybody's gonna be really impressed with what I've accomplished. He doesn't do that. He starts with something that matters much more for all of history than maybe one guy possibly getting healed if we believed the story. So instead of speaking to the obvious thing that would have been a nice gesture and a cool story, he instead speaks to the thing that would cause everybody who ever reads it and who has ever wanted to use a time travel token to fix stuff they screwed up to perk up and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, I that's cool. My legs are gonna fail me eventually, one way or another. But what's this whole thing about fixing the stuff that's wrong with me? Fixing the things that I got wrong that I can't scrape off of me, that I go around out damned spot outing like Lady Macbeth trying to scrape away the guilt? What is this thing about forgiveness? Like, he didn't wrong Jesus, and Jesus is claiming that he has got forgiveness to dish out here. How does that work? And before we can even get into letting that sink in, that maybe we don't need the time travel tokens. Maybe the stuff that is broken about us that we regret and that we resent and that we can't fix actually could be addressed by the entity who set all of existence into motion and who is authoritative because he controls all of existence and controls all of truth and reality and guilt and forgiveness. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, before we can even let that sink in, people are already griping. People already got fingers of the keys ready to type their grouchy, well, actually, passive-aggressive tweets, calling out Jesus and pushing back on this most beautiful and profound thing. Apparently they've never done anything wrong. Verse 3. At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, This fellow is blasphemy. What? Why wouldn't you want this to be true? And maybe some of them did, maybe some of them didn't. Matthew is giving us a truncated version of events. Maybe there's a way I could construct a case for these guys weren't being as awful as you think they were, but Jesus, as we're gonna see tomorrow, uh, he reads it exactly the way it is. And since he's the one who is in charge of justice and forgiveness and judgment and knows exactly how things are, he's probably reading them right. And he's gonna push back. And also, if I don't hit pause here and pick this up tomorrow, then some of you are gonna push back. So you're gonna be like, what? Is it 10 minutes or is it an hour? So we are gonna further break down the first century equivalent of grouchy tweets opposing Jesus doing redemptive good things, what's going on in the brains of the people who do that? What further are the implications of Jesus saying that he can just forgive sins like this? And how do we know that he's actually qualified to do it? What happens next? In the meantime, it has been a forever since I've taken a minute to say thank you to everybody who supports the program at patreon.com slash the tmbh podcast. If there's anything that you enjoy about this podcast and having it be part of the rhythm of your day, I cannot stress to you enough how much our gratitude should be directed at the people who make this thing go by supporting the program. They buy my time and they make it so that I can do this and put honest thought into it and share it with you. So thank you, thank you, thank you to the people who do that. And to those of you who don't support the program, you do support the program by being here and by hanging out. It's an encouragement just to have you here. Don't ever feel like there's an expectation that you have to go and kick in everything. You absolutely don't. At the same time, I'm enormously grateful for those who do. I think that makes sense, right? I appreciate you all so much. More on this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do it again soon.