Biblion Bible Commentary
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He Took Our Infirmities
Matthew 8:14-17
14 When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever. · WEB
A fever, an evening of healings, and a quotation from Isaiah that tells the reader what all of it costs.
When Jesus came into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever Matthew 8:14.
The healing and the evening that follows are told more briefly here than in the earlier account Mark 1:29–34, which supplies the detail that the whole town gathered at the door. Matthew compresses it to two verses and spends the third on something the other does not have.
The passing note that Peter had a mother-in-law is worth registering — the apostle whose successors were later required to be celibate was married, and Paul mentions his wife traveling with him 1 Corinthians 9:5.
He touched her hand, and the fever left her. So she got up and served him Matthew 8:15.
The recovery is immediate and complete, and the response is domestic. She gets up and does what she would have been doing — which the Gospel records without comment as the natural shape of gratitude.
He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick Matthew 8:16.
The summary is brief and the word all carries it. This is the block's function in the chapter: authority exercised at scale, on everyone brought, in an evening.
That it might be fulfilled which was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying, "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases" Matthew 8:17.
And here is Matthew's own contribution, which changes the register of the whole sequence. The quotation is from the fourth servant song Isaiah 53:4 — the passage about the one wounded for transgressions — and it is applied to an evening of healings rather than to the cross.
That is a striking placement and it should be read carefully. The verb is took and bore, not merely removed. Matthew is not saying that healing was the whole of what the servant carried; he is saying that this evening's work belongs to the same undertaking. The one who lifts sickness off people is doing, at Capernaum, the early work of what he will finish by carrying something heavier — and the Gospel puts the servant song here so that the healings are read as costly rather than casual.
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