My name is Matt Whitman. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And when I was playing guns with my friends in fourth grade, some girls from the neighborhood came over and were like, we want to play guns too. And we were like, that is not how things work. We do not associate with girls. You're gonna have to go somewhere else. And then one of them was like, I totally can play guns. And she reached and tried to take a gun out of my hand. It wasn't an actual gun. We didn't use actual guns that shoot real bullets. They were fake guns, just to clarify that, so people didn't think that I used actual guns with real bullets, and that a girl, unsafely and without trigger discipline, tried to grab it out of my hand. It was a fake gun. But she did that, and then we touched hands, and I'll tell you how that made me feel inside emotionally. Dude, dead. It made me feel horrible because I got touched by a girl, and now I knew I was gonna get made fun of by all my friends, and that's exactly what happened. Because you don't want to be touched by a girl when you're in fourth grade. But fast forward to eighth grade, when that girl came over and saw me sitting alone at the eighth grade roller skating party at Warnoco West in Greeley, Colorado, and she was like, hey, we should roller skate together. And I was like, okay. And then we went out there and she's like, You're supposed to hold hands when you roller skate. And I was like, uh, okay. And that did make me feel things. That was really electric, and to this day I continue to really like it when I hold hands with my now wife, who was not the eighth grade girl, and she came along later. But the point is, if you rewind back to the kid version of me, there was something that was like socially costly about hanging around with girls, let alone making physical contact with a girl. Likewise, in Jesus' time, there was not like a social religious uncleanness that went along with contact with a rando woman, but there was social consequence to it. An ick factor. Uh that's just not done factor. And unfortunately, culturally at the time of Jesus, there was a pretty low view of women. Now there were exceptions to this. There are exceptions that we see to this uh just a little bit north of Jerusalem. Uh there's a coastal city that we're gonna visit later if we ever get around to the book of Acts, where we meet a woman who owns a business and is held in high esteem. We're gonna meet some other ladies who are held in high esteem as we work our way through Matthew. But for the most part, there's a pretty strong pecking order in this part of the world. Now Jesus is the exception. Part of the reason Jesus takes heat is because he's a little friendly with the ladies, but not in the creepy way. He just includes them in stuff. And he's nice to them and cares about them, and he doesn't just keep all of the religious important talk and action to the gentleman folk. He extends that to the ladies, and he even had ladies who uh participated in his traveling party of disciples to some extent, and there's even an indication that there was a woman, maybe more than one woman, who helped to bankroll what Jesus was doing, because it's expensive to go around and feed twelve dudes and whoever else is tagging along as well. So Jesus was unbelievably progressive on the whole question of women standing in society for those times. But at the same time, what you gotta understand when you read through the New Testament is that our uh modern feminism and even more recently the postmodern feminist movements are not at all what Jesus had in view when he was here. I suppose he could have made it his mission to come and correct all of the social ills of the first century Eastern Mediterranean world as perceived through the lenses of 21st century people like us so that we would approve of him and not cancel him. But that wasn't his agenda. If he'd done that, he wouldn't have been able to achieve a bigger task, which is redeem everybody, oppressed and otherwise, and fix much larger problems than even the ugly social ills that have plagued humanity throughout the years and in various cultures. So if you go and you look at Jesus, and what you're hoping that he will do is provide all the ammunition necessary for whatever very worthy cause you might be interested in, you'll usually be disappointed because he came to seek and save the lost. And he said so. He didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. He repeatedly spelled out what he was about. And especially if you're talking about very recent modern feminism, you'll be very disappointed in Jesus because he just doesn't use any of that woke language, he just isn't playing ball with that kind of mentality. Again, making no judgment as to the validity or not validity of that. But what I am saying is, if you consider Jesus in his moment, he's like pretty much nobody else. Unbelievably receptive and sympathetic to the plight of people on the fringes of society, and more than willing to blow through social barriers. This is where we get into a little bit of a reset here. So you recall where we're at. Jesus does his big Sermon on the Mount. The values of the Sermon on the Mount are weird and different than anything about the rest of the world, religiously, secularly, otherwise. People are thinking this kingdom thing that you described sounds wonderful. I would love to sign up, I would love to be a part, but uh, I mean it is my soul. So maybe I'm just gonna wait around a little while and see if he actually has the authority or credibility to back up such bold claims. Jesus walks off the hill where the Sermon on the Mount happened, a leper comes up to him, the leper's like, hey, I know that if you wanted to, you could heal me and make me well, and Jesus is like, yeah, I'm willing. And he reaches out and he dodges the leper, and immediately it says the guy's healed. Now you and I are gonna look at that and be like, whoa, the birth laws of time and space, immediate healing, like a physical transformation before people's eyes. That's the kind of thing that I want to see in order to have faith. Like, that's that's just amazing on so many levels. The original audience is gonna be like, yeah, okay, miracle, cool, whatever, great. But let's go back to the part where you touched him. You can't do that. Like you just you just can't do that. It's not done. It's like staring at a home run in the batter's box for 10 seconds after you hit one in the major leagues. Like, you're gonna get beaned the next pitch. It makes you baseball unclean, and even though it's not a written rule, everybody just knew it. You don't touch those people. So Jesus comes off this mountain where he says he's got a set of values that are totally different, and he blows past one of the biggest social norms, social preclusions of his day. Then, you'll recall, he walks toward the city of Capernaum, the closest town, and he runs into a Gentile or a Gentile's emissary. It's not quite clear in the text. And as he's talking with this centurion, this occupying Roman leader, who theoretically should be the enemy of everything Jesus is about, he finds out that the centurion guy has uh a sick servant who he really cares about. And then the centurion guy gives this great speech about authority, and it's kind of like lobbying a softball to Jesus, who's actually kind of on an authority tour right now. And he's like, dang! He didn't say dang, I don't know if Jesus says dang. He's like, but dang, this guy nailed it. And that is exactly how faith is supposed to look. This guy understands it. People in Israel don't get it like this yet, and your servant is healed, and in that instant, the centurion servant gets healed. So now we've blown through two gigantic social conventions in two straight anecdotes. And to the attentive reader, what we see here is that Jesus is breaking the laws of time and space without even lifting a finger. But in the process of doing that, he's also burning down social and religious conventions, which would be sending a message, a signal, a dog whistle to everybody that is loud and clear that says, This thing is for everybody. The kingdom does not see rank. Everybody is invited to this thing. The values really are upside down. So then he's in Capernaum now, and that's now we're finally getting to the Bible. Verse 14 of Matthew chapter 8, it says, When Jesus came into Peter's house, he saw Peter's mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him. Okay, it's two sentences, right? There shouldn't be that much here, but wrong! There's a lot here. Okay, so first of all, we get a little clue about what Jesus is doing work-wise, and that is he is basing his ministry out of Capernaum. If you go to that town today, you can go to an Orthodox church that is built over the ruins of what they believe to be Peter's house. Is it is it not? I I don't know. I don't have a clear enough sense on that one to even give you a likelihood. So I'm gonna call it a coin flip. I I can't say for sure, but the tradition is unbroken and incredibly strong that Peter lived right around there somewhere, and also the tradition is very strong in the Bible and outside the Bible that Peter was indeed married. Now you might be thinking to yourself, but wasn't Peter the first Pope? And aren't popes supposed to be not married? Well, theoretically, yes, that is the way it works now, but in fairness to the Catholic point of view on this, I don't feel like we Protestants can be like, there, mic drop, take that, Catholics. Peter was married. I mean, I mean, for me, I think that's at least compelling, and I think it means that maybe clerical marriage makes some sense, but for the Catholics, they would say, look, the this was not instituted yet. Catholics do not in any way pretend that the fallout ban on clerical marriage happened from the beginning of the church. That was something that happened closer to the turn of the first millennium to the second millennium, and they're not shy at all about admitting that the whole clerical marriage thing was a result of clerical abuses in local communities where you could just hand down titles to your oldest son if you were the local priest, and as a result, the teaching got pretty watered down, the skill set got pretty watered down, and it was becoming a bit of a farce. So eliminating clerical marriage also eliminated this problem of the clerical primogeniture that was going on there. So, setting aside the historical debates about whether or not people who do professional church ministry should be married or not, and acknowledging that I'm very, very, very in favor of clerical marriage, the bigger question here for the original audience would not be that. It wouldn't even have crossed their mind, they wouldn't have cared about any of that business. Instead, what they would have cared about is the fact that Jesus is going around touching people again. People you're not supposed to touch, just like fourth grade meat. You don't want to make physical contact with a girl? That hurts your rep. Well, likewise, it doesn't just say that Jesus healed this lady, it says that he touched her hand and the fever left her. Now, why would Matthew even bother to give us that detail? I mean, why couldn't it just be like Jesus walked in and she was sick and he was like, I got this one? And he was like, Be well, woman, and then she was well. I mean, maybe he said stuff like that. But the means of deliverance of this miracle that Jesus picked was physical contact. Why? Well, come on, you see the pattern now too, right? We as a modern audience are gonna get hung up on the physics side of this, and we should, it's very interesting. Like, dang, how does that happen? That proves a lot to me. But as real as the physical boundaries and parameters of the natural world feel to you and me, that is exactly how real the parameters and boundaries of the social and religious and ceremonially clean and unclean world felt to the original audience here. I'm not sure which would have blown their minds more. In three straight anecdotes, Matthew demonstrates Jesus' authority over the physical world and also his authority over social conventions involving unhealthy people, Gentiles, and women. And in just three quick stories, all of the boundaries that existed socially that held society together and made people feel good about the pecking order are wrecked. Oh, and also, his really good buddy Peter, who probably loved his mom a whole lot, got his mom back. And that's pretty cool, isn't it? Like, whatever you're into, or whatever angle you come from with a story like this, that's just redemptive and beautiful. And the final thing we note here is that what does she do when she gets up? Ah, here's this theme again. She assumes a right posture before the king. Now, again, if we read this through the lenses of modern feminism, it might not sound as sweet and as beautiful. What? Why is she getting in the kitchen and working? But if we take this in the original context, uh it's beautiful. She experiences the grace and the power and the social rule breaking and the values of the kingdom of Jesus, and she gets up and the first thing she wants to do is assume a right posture before the king and serve him. I think it's a beautiful passage on a billion different levels, and I think at a time when we still have not managed to properly sort out what we do with the differences between us in society. Here is a simple, lovely example of a thing that transcends all of that division and all of that stuff that we heard over, and that is simply the grace of Jesus and the values of the kingdom acted out. Tomorrow we're gonna find a way to make the next two sentences take at least as much time as it took for us to process these two sentences. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.