As we delve deeper into Jesus’ ministry, we get a perfect glimpse of what it looked like to be with him in Matthew 9, which contains multiple instances of Jesus bringing healing to people, interspersed with a couple of teaching moments.
One of the important ideas for us to remember in reading through the healing miracles of Jesus is that in the first century (and even into points of the late Renaissance), there was a common understanding that disease was often an outward sign of sin. For someone to be paralyzed, blind, or deaf, especially from birth, was seen as God’s punishment on the sins of the parents, while infertility in a woman was often considered to be evidence that the woman had committed a sin that had not been confessed and pardoned through ritual sacrifice at the temple. In all of these cases, the people who were suffering were seen as being unclean, a rather all-encompassing category of people within the law of the Old Testament; one of the primary duties of the devout to separate themselves from the unclean.
When we look at Jesus’ ministry as a whole (and this chapter specifically) through the lens of his interaction (and healing) of those who were unclean, we see Jesus in a whole new light. He offered forgiveness to the unclean; he called the unclean to be his disciples; he understood that even those who claimed to be righteous were themselves unclean in heart even if they did not exhibit “uncleanness” in their outward behavior. We can apply this understanding to our own lives through the words of Augustine: “The church is not a museum for saints, it is a hospital for sinners.”