So we were in chapter 8, going through the book of Matthew. We’re going to start with verse 14 and probably go through 22 today, I think. It says,

When Jesus came into Peter’s home, He saw his mother-in-law lying sick in bed with a fever. He touched her hand, and the fever left her; and she got up and waited on Him. When evening came, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed; and He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were ill. This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet: “He Himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.”
Now when Jesus saw a crowd around Him, He gave orders to depart to the other side of the sea. Then a scribe came and said to Him, “Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go.” Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” Another of the disciples said to Him, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow Me, and allow the dead to bury their own dead.”

Again, we are going through Matthew’s version of events: Jesus has come down from the mountain and right away He heals a leper; then He heals a centurion’s slave. He heals Peter’s mother-in-law. He’s going to calm the sea in a few verses. He’s going to cast out a demon from a man. So, towards the end of chapter 9 there are numerous miracles that have taken place at the hand of Christ, as He is revealing: The things He spoke on the Sermon on the Mount about the kingdom of God? Now He is actualizing those. And nobody can say that He doesn’t do what He says. Remember we talked a little bit about this last week: In verse 28 it says, ‘They were amazed at His teaching; He was teaching them as one having authority.’ [paraphrase Mat. 7:28-29) Of course with the centurion, same thing; he recognized the authority of Christ. And when Jesus heard the centurion, and saw the faith that went forth from him, He regarded him with: “I have not seen such great faith with anyone in Israel.” There was a sense of: This man here, who is not even a God-fearing, Jewish person— he’s the one who has brought to us, this message. And of course faith plays into it, but the man recognized that the authority of Christ was so powerful.

What we’re going to do today, in talking about these two different events is actually to reverse them, because I want to finish today with Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law, and the various other things that come after that.

So, starting with verse 18, it says, “…Jesus saw a crowd around Him, He gave orders to depart to the other side of the sea. Then a scribe came and said to Him, “Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go.” Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

And before we actually get into this… I think it was an awaking, maybe, at Thursday night Bible study: We read into texts (I do, I know) things that aren’t necessarily important at the moment. Not that they are not part of what the text says, but they are not things that need to be spoken of at the time. I think about Christ, and the words of Christ; (if you have a red-letter Bible, you see His words) it should excite us and maybe even slow us down a little bit, to recognize that Jesus is not speaking willy-nilly about things. He’s not flippant about things. With everyone who approaches Him, He speaks to their heart.

We read the story of Nicodemus today in Sunday school; Jesus spoke to Nicodemus’ heart. He spoke a truth that was universal, but the truth was spoken to where Nicodemus was at personally. And that is why, when Nicodemus asks Him something, Jesus goes on to what appears to be another subject right away. Nicodemus says, ‘How is this true,’ and Jesus says something that seems to be completely outside of that, because He was addressing the heart issue of Nicodemus. And in the Scriptures, when we find Christ talking to people, that is what is going on. He’s not forming law, or relating to us the way that we are all supposed to live, but He’s saying to us, ‘This was this man’s issue.’ And because it’s in the Scripture, it means this is what a lot of people’s issues are.

So this first man who came up was a scribe—and by the way, to be a scribe was to be part of the Pharisees; so he would have been one of the people who were enemies of Christ. And yet, for some reason, He had heard Christ; been drawn to Him. He was one of those people, maybe, that recognized an authority in Christ that he didn’t catch in the Pharisees. He was drawn to Christ and he responded to the Gospel, in a sense. He is not called a disciple; he is called a scribe; so, not to say that he is a true believer, but he definitely is somebody who is intrigued. But really he comes with an idealistic idea about what it is to follow a Messiah; or in this case, a Rabbi. As a scribe, he would have been following Rabbis through his whole life; and now here’s another Rabbi. And this Rabbi is actually doing miraculous things. Somehow, this scribe has noticed, and so he thinks, ‘This is going to be such a great thing for me to follow this Rabbi.’ His idealism of what, in this case, Christianity is going to be (and this would be the point that the Lord would want us to get) is not always the same as what is actualized. We can have an idealistic view of how things are supposed to be, but in actuality it’s not the same. It is not the same. And Jesus is making that clear to him when He says, “The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus is not saying He didn’t get to sleep in homes, because He did. He isn’t saying that, as a follower, ‘you’re never going to get any sleep or you’re going to be sleeping outside all the time,’ or anything like that. He’s simply letting the man know: ‘What you want to do, in following me, is going to require things of you that possibly you’re not willing to give up.’ Again, speaking to the heart of the man; and speaking to ours in that sense. Letting us know that this walk we call the Christian walk, should require from us, many times, things we don’t really want to let loose of; whatever they may be. Regarding the scribe, somebody put it this way: The scribe was thinking of the soldier who was marching in a parade. And Jesus was talking about that same soldier; who was actually watching death; the soldier who is going through exhausting marches through marsh and terrible places, and people around him are being killed on a regular basis. He’s talking about the actual thing that a soldier does, not the pretty thing we see. All soldiers could say of a military parade, ‘Yeah, that’s really cool to see that.’ But that’s not what this is about. Christ is just addressing that to him and saying, ‘Hey, listen. I know that you have an idealistic view of what it means to call me teacher and to follow me wherever.’ And that’s a bold statement: “Teacher, I’ll follow you wherever you go.” Christ does not shake His head at him or say, ‘You have no clue.’ He just responds and say, ‘Man, by the grace of God I would pray that would be true, but in actuality I want to share with you that this is not a life for everyone.’

And I think we lose sight of that sometimes. I think as saints we miss just what it is to be a follower of Jesus Christ, in the truest sense of the word. Because we typically live our lives fairly selfishly. I mean, most of us do pretty much what we want to do. We go where we want to go, we spend the money we want to spend, we read what we want to read, we watch what we want to watch. And Jesus is saying, ‘If we’re honest with what it means to be a saint, it means things are going to be required of you. Things that will cost you. Things that will cause you to have to re-form habits and re-think the very way you live your life.’ And when we first come to Christ there is that experience of knowing Jesus Christ; and we oftentimes easily give up a few things, but then as Christ shows us more and more of who we are, we do start to hang on to things. And then what happens is one of two things: we either make a conscious choice to live in reality, or we choose to have an idealistic version of what Christianity is. One that the world sees as neat and tidy but in actuality, inside of us, it is all messed up.

And then another man—and this man is called a disciple—says, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, ‘Follow Me, and allow the dead to bury their own dead.’” In our culture that would be a horrible thing to say to somebody. With the sensibilities of mankind, and our nature, we would be appalled. If we had, for instance, made a decision as a church to go evangelize, say, in another town a few hours away; and then somebody came up to me and said, “Oh, I can’t go today because I have to bury my dad today; we’re having a funeral.” If I said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead. You come with me. We’re going to go evangelize.” I mean every single pastor, preacher, minister of the Gospel in the United States would be considered to be a tyrant, an evil human being, to even think like that. But that is what Jesus said to this man! Some people try to say that, in the Jewish culture, the comment about “let me first bury my father” means that the man wanted to follow Jesus but is saying, “My dad hasn’t died yet – it might be a year or two; can it wait that long?” But with the way the text is written, that is not what it’s probably saying. It’s simply saying that the man says, ‘I want to bury my father,’ and Jesus says, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ This is an incredible statement about how much, again, is required of us, as saints of the Living God; how much we have to give up, how much we have to lay down. And how much our time and attention should be for the Kingdom of God.

By the way, when Jesus makes the statement “allow the dead to bury the dead,” He is saying to the man, ‘your father, being a Jewish man, is not a believer. He died and he’s not a believer, so let your family who are also dead (but you’re not!) go and bury him. That’s their job. Let the dead bury the dead. But we are not going to do that. We are going to go evangelize and when we bury somebody, we’re going to bury the living, not the dead.’

In one of the commentaries I read, a Lutheran pastor named Lensky says that while this is not a rule or law, we should be aware that there are many deaths of which we are not supposed to be a part. Our job is to advance the Kingdom of God, and when we spent an inordinate amount of time simply comforting people over both an eternal and damned death, what good is that to anybody? And some people would balk at that, of course, and say, “Well, we’re going to get up and share the gospel at the funerals,” which we do, but Jesus is saying something that is extremely difficult for our civil minds to grasp. And the point is, again: Our business is to be about God’s business. And if that business is done by going to the funeral of an unsaved person, then we should do it. But if that is not our business, then we have no obligations for that. We have more important things to do. And again, you guys, I’m telling you, this is an incredible statement to make. By the way, while in our culture we find this appalling; in Jesus’ culture it was more appalling, if we could imagine that. Their religious structure was such that the act of a man neglecting to attend his father’s funeral was considered worse than having leprosy. It was a horrible, horrible thing to do. So, when Jesus said that, it was an affront to all the things and all the people around Him as they stood there and said, ‘This can’t be true, what he’s telling us.’ And yet, Jesus, in His statement is telling this man, ‘No. Let that go. You follow me. We have work to do, brother.’

The next verse says, “When he got into the boat, his disciples followed him.” I wonder if that man followed him. It says “his disciples,” so maybe that man, being a disciple, did say, ‘Okay, I’m going to do what Jesus said.’ And again, I don’t think we comprehend to the full force of what it means to actually be saints of the Living God. And I also don’t think we comprehend the full force of what it means to be realists and not idealists.

While we were worshiping today, I was thinking back to when I was an idealistic believer, early on. I understood the part about following Jesus, the mysterious and the mystical and those things (although there was a part of that which wasn’t as profound as what I thought it might be). And I remember this event when Cherri and I went away for a night. It was the first time that we went anywhere overnight together since we had started having kids. Sara was seven at that time, so that means that Cherri and I had never left our kids alone for more than a couple hours in the first seven years of Sara’s life. Hannah was the last one at that time; she would have been one. So we went away for a night. Somebody I listened to recently had been preaching a message in which he had talked about this book called “Night” by Elie Wiesel, which is about the Holocaust. And he read some things out of it, which I won’t talk about today, but nonetheless; we walk into the motel room and laying on the floor of the room is that book. Like a jolt I thought, ‘Oh my gosh.’ Like, it’s just laying there, right by the bed, “… how could the housecleaner miss this?” And the Lord had just set it there. So I picked up the book, and then we turned on the TV. At that time, being the idealistic person that I was, living in McCook, Nebraska—everything was gone from my life except for Cherri, kids, church, and work. I mean, I didn’t do anything fun; my life was very good, by the way, it’s just—I was there. And everything revolved around what happened at the church, and we didn’t have a TV, and I didn’t pay attention to news. I only read Christian news, and things like that; so my life was very secluded. And I remember we turned on the TV and they were running a news story; video footage in Northern Ireland, where these two English informants had gone down a wrong road and run into a Northern Ireland parade. And so they have this video of this car trying to get out, and people are chasing them. (This was back when news wasn’t left and right; it was actually news.) But these people are chasing them and you see this car shooting down the street and pretty soon it’s surrounded. And then I watched a guy with a hammer reach in; he just swung the hammer into the car. They cut the video; and the next thing I see are guys laying on the ground. They’re dead. And I was like, “My gosh! There’s sin in the world like this!” I was shocked. Like, you know it, but you don’t know it. It was like a revelation: “There are people that are this evil! People so caught in their own things that they would literally kill others for the sake of their belief system – their nationality.” And I think the vision of it was what caught my attention. I think it was probably something from the Lord too, because I could feel the fear of the guys in that car as they desperately trying to get out. And I could think about those guys realizing, ‘We are in deep trouble.’ It jolted me. Those two events jolted me. And I don’t think I’ve ever been the same since, by the way. When Jesus rebukes the guy about his idealism, it was like, ‘I get what that is. I get it; that we can get in our head a way that something is supposed to be; and then life happens. All of a sudden it’s not neat and tidy as I want it to be.’ When Christ calls us, He actually does call us to something great. He calls us to be part of the Kingdom of God. He calls us to be people who work to advance this Kingdom; this message of this crucified Christ to the world. And your life may seem really good at many times, but you will go through incredibly difficult things if you live, actually, in that message. Because everywhere around you is grief and pain. Everywhere around you is grief and pain. It shows up in all kinds of forms.

Now, back to the beginning of today.

This was another of those moments— I’ve been having a few lately, which is kind of fun for me. And I say fun, not in the way that some people think of fun, because I’m feeling very convicted.
But it says, “When Jesus came into Peter’s home and saw his mother-in-law lying sick in bed with a fever, he touched her hand and the fever left her and she got up and waited on him.” Cherri and I talked yesterday about women in ministry; the “yeas and nays” of that, and we have a little bit different take on it, Cherri and I do. And we talked today in Sunday school about faith and factuality and I would love to say that my version of this whole thing is factual, but the reality is that there’s probably some nuances there that I need to correct. But nonetheless, Edersheim says, about this story: “It was the first Diaconate of woman in the church—might we almost say, in the world?—” A Diaconate is a deaconess; a way to serve; the noun of that. But he says, “—a Diaconate to Christ and to those that were His; the Diaconate of one healed by Christ; a Diaconate immediately following healing. The first, this, of a long course of woman’s Diaconate to Christ, in which, for the first time, woman attained her true position.”

And I realized, this is such a great statement. We can argue whether this was the first time that a woman was put in this position, but that’s part of our problem; we start to discuss things outside of the text and pretty soon we’re lost in everything else. But Edersheim, in essence, is saying that in her service to Christ (he healed her, she immediately got up and began to serve) she found her true self. This is who she was! This was what God made women for: To serve Christ. And of course, in the room we may be saying, ‘Yeah. He made men to do that too.’ True! Agreed. Agreed. But this is about this woman who got up and immediately began to do what she knew she was supposed to do, which was to take care of Christ and the people that He was with. And the healing it talks about—I think it might be in one of the other gospels, but the word fever means “high fever” so some people think it’s malaria or what have you, but whatever the disease was that had her, the potential for death was there.

My kids used to come to me, and say, “I think I have a fever.” I shouldn’t throw Benjamin under the bus, but I’m going to. This came from his mom, but Benjamin would take his temperature, when he got sick, over and over and over again. “It says 99.6º. It’s 100.2º.” He’d come to me and say, “Dad, I’ve got a fever.” I’d say, “That’s not a fever, dude. That’s not a fever. Once you get up around 102º then we can talk about it. But that’s not a fever.” And so it was this running thing and I would always think, ‘Man, put that thing away; you don’t need to know what your temperature is every few minutes!’

But this fever was a real fever, is my point. One of those fevers that devastates your life. That puts you down. And not only did Christ take the fever away, but one of the great things about the miracle was the woman was immediately well. And most of you know, after the fever comes that draining feeling where its like, “I don’t have a fever anymore, but I’m not going to do anything for a day or two.” But this woman immediately gets up and begins to minister to Him. And whether she became fully strong right away or whether she said, “My fever is gone, my job is to serve the Lord Jesus Christ,” we don’t know. But either way, Christ did an incredible miracle on this woman and I love that thought of: He healed her to serve. So many of us think the healings of God are for the purpose of us thinking that God is good, which is true; but in Christ there is always more to it than that. He healed her to serve. When she started to serve, did Jesus say to her, ‘No, you better rest a little while. Why don’t you sit down and take it easy. You just got over a fever. I know I just healed you but…’ Absolutely not! She was going to do what she did and Jesus was like, ‘There she goes!’ That was her job at that moment in time. A Diaconate. She was going to serve Jesus Christ to the very best of her ability, in the home of Peter.

And then it says, “When evening came, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed; and He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were ill. This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet: “He Himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.’”

I have read this text every year, sometimes twice a year, for the last 30 or 37 years. And I’ve read it numerous times apart from that. And I was so convicted last night. Again in the book of Edersheim (and I’m going to read a portion of this story in a minute) he said something to the affect of: A mechanical, external and unspiritual view of this prophecy— (the one that says “he himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases”) —will crush the spirit by the letter. [paraphrase] And I felt such a weight at that moment in time; reading that. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh; how often do I do that? How often do I allow the letter to crush the spirit of an event?’ I was just casting it off as, ‘Oh, there’s another prophecy Jesus fulfilled. That is so cool!’ and not catching the full force of what’s being said. Maybe I feel convicted too, because numerous times in my life people have brought up, for instance, healing; that God wants healing for everybody, all the time, and no questions and all those things. And I question that, partially because I never see that and partially because I don’t even see it in the Scripture. But also I take people to Peter oftentimes (1 Peter 2:24) when they bring things up like that. (By the way, this is one of those texts that is a main one in that world of health and wealth.) And it says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross. so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, for by his wounds you were healed.” That text, obviously, is talking about salvation, for sure. It’s not talking about physical healing. It’s talking about being saved. It’s talking about His righteousness and the cross and our ability to come to Him and all those things that make us whole, outside of our physical nature. And so, when I think about Isaiah 53:4, where this reference in Matthew is from, oftentimes my mind goes there, but this time I was struck because Matthew doesn’t go there at all. I’m reading into the text, things that aren’t there. Matthew says ‘this is the fulfillment of that prophecy.’ He healed people. He cast out demons. He took their infirmities and carried away their diseases. Matthew says, ‘This IS what this is.’ This IS what this is. He took their infirmities. He carried away their diseases. And something else has been going through my mind now for a month or so: This concept of faith. And I realize sometimes, how faithless I must be in this arena. And how we, every once in a while, can have an emotional, experiential touch with faith; just like how I picked up that book “Night” or I saw that news story and it rocked me. And I can see that and think, ‘Oh my gosh, my view of faith is so shallow. There’s so much more to it.’ And then it flits away because I choose to go to something else, maybe. It could be any number of things. Maybe it’s just because of the timing of the thing. And I don’t really get to grasp the full force of what it means to actually have faith in Jesus Christ. And I, for sure, in a case like this, don’t get to grasp the full force of what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ. Not that I haven’t seen miracles and not that I haven’t run into people who are demon-possessed, or at least demonized, and things like that. But I haven’t been able to see the full force of it.

And Matthew plainly says, ‘This is what Jesus does.’ This is what he does. We have, by the way, entire denominations that have chosen to disregard the healings of Christ as anything but for the first generation of Christians. Incredibly sad.

I walked out of here last night, just before 8:00. I listen to the Catholic radio station, and there’s a show on every night between 7 or 7:30 and it runs until 8:00. And just by their voices you can tell they are young men, probably early 20’s. And on this show, they’re talking about all the things that are happening miraculously around the world in the Catholic church, and last night they were talking about this guy going around Romania and healing people who had cancer. Some Catholic missionary. All these things are happening around the world, and in the U.S., of course, we’re so reasonable and rational that we don’t even know we’re reasonable and rational. We have reasoned our own reason out. And instead, what Christ wants is people to simply believe and want to experience all that He has.

And so this is what Edersheim says about this story; getting into the part not about Peter’s mother-in-law, but about the evening that took place.

He says:

“There must have been many homes of sorrow, care, and sickness there, and in the populous neighbourhood around. To them, to all, had the door of hope now been opened. Truly, a new Sun had risen on them, with healing in His wings. No disease too desperate, when even the demons owned the authority of His mere rebuke. From all parts they bring them: mothers, widows, wives, fathers, children, husbands—their loved ones, the treasures they had almost lost: and the whole city throngs—a hushed, solemnised, overawed multitude—expectant, waiting at the door of Simon’s dwelling. There they laid them, along the street up to the market-place, on their beds; or brought them, with beseeching look and word. What a symbol of this world’s misery, need, and hope; what a symbol, also, of what the Christ really is as the Consoler of the world’s manifold woe! Never, surely, was He more truly the Christ; nor is He in symbol more truly such to us and to all time, than when, in the stillness of that evening, under the starlit sky, He went through that suffering throng, laying His hands in the blessing of healing on every one of them, and casting out many devils. No picture of the Christ more dear to us, than this of the unlimited healing of whatever disease of body or soul. In its blessed indefiniteness it conveys the infinite potentiality of relief, whatever misery have fallen on us, or whatever care or sorrow oppress us. He must be blind, indeed, who sees not in this Physician the Divine Healer; in this Christ the Light of the World; the Restoror of what sin had blighted; the Joy in our world’s deep sorrow. Never was prophecy more truly fulfilled then, on that evening, this of Isaiah: ‘Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses’ (Isa. 53). By His Incarnation and Coming, by His taking our infirmities, and bearing our sicknesses—for this in the truest and widest sense is the meaning of the Incarnation of the Christ—did He become the Healer, the Consoler of humanity, its Saviour in all ills of time, and from all ills of eternity. The most real fulfillment this, that can be conceived, of Isaiah’s rapt vision of Who and what the Messiah was to be, and to do; not, indeed, what is sometimes called fulfillment, or expected as such, in a literal and verbal correspondence with the prediction. An utterly mechanical, external, and unspiritual view this of prophecy, in which, in quite Jewish literalism, the spirit is crushed by the letter. But, viewed in its real bearing on mankind with its wants, Christ, on that evening, was the real, though as yet only initial, fulfillment of the world’s great hope, to which, centuries before, the God-directed hand of the prophet had pointed.” (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah pp.336-337)

And you think about people in our lives that are crushed or hurt or not living their best; sick, their lives are a mess. And think about them coming to Christ at that moment, like he mentioned, where people came and stood at the door and let Jesus touch them. Let Jesus cast demons out. Let Jesus heal kids, fathers, mothers, children, in every form and shape. He’s just ministering to them one at a time; blessing them with health. And I get it, we don’t know what happened after that. But does it really matter? Because at that moment in time, as Edersheim said, we get to see Him as He truly is. He is one who comes to bring to us a life that is full; that is rich; that is vibrant. One that is beyond what we can ask or think or see, the Bible tells us.

And yet, that life is costly. Because there’s an expectation of you from Jesus that you will yield to Him and live His life to the world. It’s not that He comes and heals and says, ‘I’m going to heal you IF you do this.’ because that’s not what took place here. But He comes and heals and with that healing comes, with Christ, an expectation. And with all of us who came to know Jesus and were born again at one time in our life, that call came with an expectation of Christ’s goodness; an expectation of Christ’s holiness, and an expectation of us being all that we can be for Jesus Christ. There is no other.