Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
I Am Willing; Be Made Clean
Matthew 8:1-4
1 When he came down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. · WEB
Told as the earlier account tells it; what Matthew supplies is the position — the first man healed after the sermon is the one man nobody could touch.
"Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean." Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him Matthew 8:2–3.
The cleansing runs as it does in the earlier telling Mark 1:40–45, down to the instruction to say nothing and to show himself to the priest with the offering Moses commanded Leviticus 14:2–32. What Matthew contributes is placement.
This is the first thing that happens after the sermon ends, and the man is a leper — excluded from the town, required to call out his own uncleanness Leviticus 13:45–46, untouchable by anyone who wished to stay clean. A discourse that has just insisted not one stroke of the law would fall is followed immediately by a hand laid on the one person the law kept at a distance.
The touch is the detail to hold. Under the law, contact with a leper transferred uncleanness to the toucher; here the traffic runs the other way, and the man is left clean rather than the toucher unclean. That is what this Gospel is going to keep demonstrating about how the law is fulfilled rather than broken — and the instruction to complete the priestly certification shows the point is not that the regulation is discarded.
"See that you tell nobody" Matthew 8:4.
The silence command is the earlier account's and it is kept here without the note that the man broadcast it anyway. Matthew's interest is in what the healing establishes rather than in how the news traveled, and the block of ten miracles that begins here is arranged to make one claim: the authority the crowds heard in the sermon Matthew 7:29 is the authority now shown over disease, weather, demons and death.
settled What this mark means