Jesus’s Authority
Jesus's Authority
Image by Good News Productions Int. from Free Bible Images, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Cleansing the Unclean
A man with a severe skin disease approached Jesus and bowed before him. “Lord, if you’re willing, you can make me clean.”
Jesus reached out and touched him. “I’m willing. Be clean!” Immediately, the man was cleansed from the skin disease.
Then Jesus told him, “Make sure you don’t tell anyone. Instead, go show yourself to the priest. Offer the gift Moses commanded as a witness to them.”
Image by Good News Productions Int. from Free Bible Images, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus amazed the crowd by speaking with authority about the coming kingdom. In the next section of his gospel, Matthew continued to show Jesus’s authority over the kingdom, this time by describing a number of his miracles. The stories in this section are arranged thematically, not chronologically, into three sets of three, with the sets separated by two sections focused on discipleship.
The first set shows Jesus as the Son of humanity, who came to save the entire human race, including those the Jewish elite looked down on.1 First among these societal outcasts, a man with a contagious skin disease came to Jesus and bowed before him.2 In order to prevent the spread of his disease, the law required him to live outside the city and declare himself unclean whenever anyone approached.3 Anything he touched also became unclean, and his mere presence produced fear in others. So he asked not just to be healed but to be made clean. If Jesus was willing.
Jesus assured the man of his willingness. Society had rejected him, but Jesus would not. In fact, Jesus did something his culture considered shocking. He walked up to the man and touched him. How long had it been since the man felt the touch of another person? But instead of making Jesus unclean, their contact cleansed the man by healing his skin disease.
To make his cleansing official so he could reenter society, the man had to travel to Jerusalem, present himself to a priest, and undergo an elaborate ceremony that included offering three lambs, or a lamb and two pigeons if he was poor.4 Jesus commanded the man not to tell anyone about his cleansing until the priest had certified it. That certification would serve as a witness. Along with the man’s own testimony, it would fulfill the law’s requirement for two witnesses to confirm a claim.5 Without this legal requirement, Jesus likely faced accusations of being unclean himself.6
The Unworthy Centurion
After Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion approached and begged him, “Lord, my servant lies paralyzed at home in terrible pain.”
“Should I come heal him?” Jesus asked.
“Lord, I’m not worthy to have you come under my roof,” the centurion answered. “But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. I’m also someone under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell one to go, and he goes, another to come, and he comes, and my slave to do, and he does.”
Hearing this, Jesus was astonished and told those who followed him, “I tell you for certain that I haven’t found anyone in Israel with faith like this! I tell you many will come from the east and west and feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom will be thrown into the darkness outside, where people will weep and gnash their teeth.”
Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go. As you believed, let it be done for you.” The servant was healed that very moment.
While the man with a skin disease was a social outcast, at least he was Jewish. But when Jesus returned to Capernaum, an official in the Roman army asked him to heal his paralyzed servant.7 The servant must not have been Jewish either, since the centurion would have mentioned this important detail. The centurion represented not just the nations in general but Israel’s most hated enemy. Most Israelites believed the Messiah would come to save them from Rome. In fact, he came to save the Romans too.
Jesus responded to the centurion by asking, somewhat incredulously, whether he should come heal the servant. Pious Jews believed entering the homes of non-Jews made them unclean. Though Jesus wouldn’t have followed this tradition, he used it to test the centurion. His response reflected such a humble faith that it left even Jesus astonished. Jewish tradition aside, the centurion knew he wasn’t worthy of hosting Jesus under his roof, and he refused to use his earthly authority because he recognized Jesus as greater than himself. This distinguished him from the Jews, who weren’t worthy either. But they didn’t realize it.
The centurion’s faith stemmed from his recognition of the source of Jesus’s authority—God himself. That’s precisely the test the Jewish leadership later failed.8 The centurion knew the soldiers under him would obey his orders because he was under authority. The soldiers didn’t fear him personally. They feared Rome and knew Rome would back him up as long as he acted on the emperor’s behalf. Likewise, the centurion believed Jesus acted on God’s behalf, so God would back him up. All Jesus had to do was give the command.
- Matthew 8:20. In the traditional title Son of Man, man means “mankind, humanity,” not “adult male.”
- Though usually mistranslated as “leprosy,” the Hebrew and Greek words for this malady referred to a variety of skin diseases, not all of which were incurable. See Leviticus 13.
- Leviticus 13:45–46.
- Leviticus 14:1–32.
- Deuteronomy 19:15.
- Mark 1:45.
- Luke 7:3–5 make it clear the centurion didn’t speak to Jesus himself. He sent a delegation to speak on his behalf. Matthew omits this detail as irrelevant to his point.
- Matthew 12:24–32, 21:23–27.