Jesus’ Identity and Man’s Response – 10/13/24

What are the most important questions in life? I’m sure that opening up that discussion this morning would lead to a healthy debate, because there are lots of important questions in life. I typed that question into AI this week, and here’s the top-ten list that I received:

Who am I?
What’s my purpose?
What makes me happy?
How should I live?
What happens after death?
What is love, and how do I cultivate it?
Here’s a deep one: What’s the nature of reality?
How can I contribute to the world?
How do I deal with suffering?
What is the meaning of life?

Now, all of those are important questions that need to be asked and explored with an open Bible in front of us at some point in our lives. But are they the most important questions? And I would say no. Can I suggest that the most important question in life is, who is Jesus? Who is he really? Our answer to that question will impact not only this life, but the next. In his book, “Who Is Jesus?” Greg Gilbert writes,

“So who is Jesus? That’s always been the question. From the moment the shepherds showed up claiming that angels had told them about his birth, to the day he astonished the disciples by calming the sea, to the moment the sun itself stopped shining on the day that he died, everyone was always left asking, ‘Who is this man?’… Like it or not, that has radical implications for your life. So I hope [to] challenge you to think hard about Jesus… and lead you to a firm answer to the question, who is Jesus? Really, it’s the most important question you’ll ever consider.”

Which brings us to a second all-important question that follows right on the heels of “Who is Jesus?” And it is this, “How do we respond to him?” I mean, if he’s just a great man, teacher, leader, philanthropist, then our options are wide open. But if he is much more than that, as Matthew and the biblical writers believed, then the question about how we respond to him becomes critical.

So for the next several weeks, we’re going to explore these two questions as we study Matthew 8-9 together. Speakers may come at it in a little bit different ways, use different words, but ultimately these two chapters seek to answer these two very important questions, “Who is Jesus,” and “How do I respond to him?” So here’s the flow of Matthew 8-9.

Matthew 8:1-17 there are three stories of miracles. And then Matthew 8:18-22, there is a call to action. And then in Matthew 8:23-9:8, we see three more stories of miracles. And then in Matthew 9:9-17, we see a second call to action. Matthew 9:18-34, three final stories of miracles in our section. And then Matthew 9:35-38, there is a third and final call to action.

So let’s jump in and let’s begin to answer these two questions from our text for this morning. Our passage is located in the first of these three sections, and we get to look at the last two stories of miracles and the first call to action. And I think it’s important to note right off the bat that Matthew is not just recording some random miracle stories about Jesus, as thrilling as they are. He’s not just telling us about some of the things that Jesus did. He is building a case. And you’ll see that throughout. He is building a case for us to discern who Jesus is. So who is Jesus? And I think the first thing that Matthew wants to see is he is the Compassionate King with all authority.

A few weeks ago, we ended our study in the Sermon on the Mount, which went from Matthew 5 to Matthew 7, and the very last part of chapter 7, we find these words:

“And when Jesus finished these things, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”

You ever feel sorry for the scribes when he writes that? I mean, it’s kind of sad. But it was not only in his teaching that Jesus possessed authority that we find. We also find it is healing. He had complete authority over physical and spiritual diseases. And we see this absolute authority over disease in a couple of ways in our text.

First of all, we see Jesus used both touch and words to heal. So in the first few verses of chapter 8, Jacob touched on this a few weeks ago, right? He touched the leper to heal him. But then we come into our text and he says words from afar to heal a centurion servant. And then he comes into Peter’s mother-in-law at Peter’s house, and he touches her to heal her. And then we see them bringing all kinds of people who were demon possessed and had other diseases, and he speaks a word over them and heals them. Jesus had complete authority to heal however he wanted to heal.

But I also want to notice the completeness of Jesus’ healing. He didn’t simply reverse the symptoms. He didn’t start them on the road to recovery. He fully healed them. I mean, they had no lingering effects. At the beginning of Matthew, as he heals this leper, he touches him, heals him, and what does he do next? He tells them to go directly to the priest for them to say that he is clean. I mean, he had no leprosy left. It wasn’t a reversal of symptoms. None. Peter’s mother-in-law went from lying in bed sick with a high fever, which would have been a life-threatening condition potentially in that day, she went straight from that to getting up and serving everybody. She got up, and she started being active. There was no recovery period needed. She was completely healed.

Later on in the book of Matthew we’ll find the story when John the Baptist was in prison about ready to die, he sent some of his disciples to ask him if he truly was the long-awaited Messiah or if they should be looking for someone else. I mean, Jesus didn’t preach a sermon about it. He didn’t say, you know, the Old Testament? He could have done that. But what did he say? What did he say to these disciples? He said this:

“Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: [here’s the evidence that I am the long awaited Messiah] the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.”

Only the Messiah-King could do that in his own power.

But let’s not miss the compassion in these stories as well. He is the Compassionate King with all authority. And what a beautiful example of this we find with the leper. Please don’t miss the drama of this story. This is a desperate moment for this leper. In desperation, the leper comes into the crowd to find Jesus. Can you imagine what that must have been like? Everybody’s bunched together, they’re listening to Jesus, and all of a sudden a leper starts coming in to the crowd. I mean, it’s a shocking decision by the leper. Everybody would have been backing away. I mean, can you see that? I mean, if they touch this leper, they are now unclean.

And there’s only one thing more shocking about the leper coming into this crowd, and that is Jesus’ decision to not back away from him in his condition. I mean, why didn’t Jesus just use words to heal him, right? We’ve already seen he can touch and heal. He can say a word and heal. If I’m Jesus in that moment, and that leper walks in to the crowd, I think I’d have been like, “Be healed,” right? I would have of said a word. But he didn’t. He went toward the leper. He touched him. Why? Because he was meeting, I think, a much deeper need than physical healing. For as long as this man had leprosy, he would have never known the loving touch of another human being. I mean, Jesus moves toward him and his compassion made him move toward one in need.

And by the way, he does the exact same thing for us in our sin. I mean, you can look at this story, and we are that leper walking into the crowd, and he is approaching us and moving toward us. No matter what it is, he does not shrink away from you. He moves toward us in compassion.

But we also see this compassion in the kinds of people he heals in these three stories at the beginning of Matthew 8. All three individuals had something in common. And it is this: they would have been considered by many in that culture to be second-hand citizens. A leper. You live outside the city. A Gentile. You have no part in all of this with us. You are an outsider. And a woman, who in that society would have been a second class citizen. I mean, how often do we see Jesus serving the marginalized? The tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Gentiles. There are no second class citizens in Christ’s kingdom. All have inestimable value. All are intricately, lovingly made in the image of God. All have worth.

But he’s not just the compassionate king with all authority in our text. Who is Jesus? He’s the Suffering Servant of Isaiah. In verse 17 of our text, Matthew goes back to the Old Testament, back to Isaiah, Isaiah 53 specifically, and says,

“This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: he took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”

Now this passage back in Isaiah 53 is well known if you’ve studied the Bible very long, and it would have been well known to the people in that day. It’s in the heart of an extended passage in which Isaiah prophesies the suffering servant, the Messiah, who would come and deliver Israel. Jesus, Matthew was saying, is that long-awaited suffering servant. He is the Messiah. In this passage, Matthew applies it a little bit differently in that he takes a look at his physical healing and he says, this is the fulfillment of that passage. But the broader way Isaiah 53, within its context, is interpreted is about the Suffering Servant taking our sin upon himself and absorbing the wrath of God upon that sin in our place. So listen in the same passage, in Isaiah chapter 53, that Matthew just quoted from.

“Surely he [Jesus] has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

And so here Matthew is telling everybody, hey, this is he who we have been waiting for. This is the One who is going to make us right with God the Father. But we find one more answer to the question “Who is Jesus” down in verse 20 of our text. He is the Son of Man from the Book of Daniel. And it’s actually Jesus self-identifying when he calls himself the Son of Man. He doesn’t simply say a son of man. He is THE Son of Man. This takes us back to Daniel 7:13-14.

“I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him [the Son of Man] was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”

So who is Jesus? In Matthew’s gospel here in our text, he is identified as the King of Kings who has been given dominion over an eternal kingdom that shall never end and will never be destroyed. So if Matthew is right about the identity of Jesus, you can see why this has huge implications for all of us.

So we come to the second question answered in our text, “What is our response?” If Jesus is indeed the Compassionate King with all authority, Suffering Servant, the Son of Man, that demands a response of some kind. And we see two specific responses here in our text. The first is faith in him. Now we see evidences of faith running throughout this text, right? We’ve already talked about the leper. That was a lot of faith to come into that crowd knowing that Jesus could heal him and obviously hoping that Jesus would heal him. We have people bringing loved ones to Jesus who are demon possessed, believing that Jesus could heal them, and other diseases.

But perhaps the most striking example of faith in our text is found in the centurion who comes to Jesus to ask him to heal his servant. And the story goes something like this. The centurion asked. Jesus responds with, “Yes, I will come to your house, and I will heal your servant.

But the centurion knew who Jesus was. He didn’t have any doubts. So the centurion says, I’m not worthy for you to come under my roof. So he suggests Jesus just say the words from afar and heal his servant. And the centurion follows that up by saying, “Listen I know what it is to have authority. I tell soldiers, and I tell slaves to do something, and they obey me immediately. And Jesus, I believe you have that same amount of authority over diseases in people’s bodies. So from afar, could you just command that disease to leave? I believe it will obey you.”

That’s just shocking. And it was shocking to Jesus. Look how Jesus responds. It says that Jesus, the God-man marveled. He was astonished. He was taken back. He had not seen faith like this in Israel. This Gentile centurion most likely did not grow up around the Scriptures and the oral teachings of Israel. He didn’t follow a rabbi, most likely. He did not worship in the temple. He probably didn’t celebrate any of the feasts, or the Passover, or the Sabbath. And he had more faith than anybody else that Jesus had seen who had all of those advantages.

People like this, Jesus says, people like this Gentile centurion, and people from all over the world that we look at as outsiders in Israel, people like that are going to come in and in the kingdom one day they will be feasting with heroes of the faith like Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac. And a lot of people who had all of the advantages would be eternally separated from that kingdom. It’s a sobering, sobering thought. Even without all the advantages, this centurion saw who Jesus was and had faith, and he acted on that faith.

But there’s a second response to Jesus that we will see more than once in Matthew 8 and 9. It is this: Follow him. If Jesus had only been a great moral teacher, then our options to how we respond to him are open. I can choose to follow or not. He’s a teacher. He’s a rabbi. If I do decide to follow him, I can decide to what extent I follow him. He can be the most important thing in my life or not. But if he’s the Compassionate King with all authority, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, the Son of Man of Daniel, the Messiah sent from the Father, then there is only one true option that we all have. And that option is presented in verse 22.

“And Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me…’”

And when you think about it, that’s the only rational response. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If Jesus is who Matthew says he is, that’s the only rational response. This is a heavy passage, what we’re coming into now. You would imagine that a rabbi who was calling people to follow him would follow that call up by listing all kinds of benefits, right? You follow me, you’ll have health, wealth, prosperity. Jesus does not always do that, and he certainly didn’t do that in our passage. I mean, this might be one of the worst marketing campaigns of all time.

We see in our passage two would-be followers of Jesus. In verses 19-20, one of the scribes comes to Jesus and promises him, I will follow you wherever you go. Jesus informs him that that may lead you to a place of such destitution that you’ll not have a place to lay your head at night. This is not a path to status, Jesus says, not a path to fortune and fame. You may be called upon to give up a lot. Following Jesus can be difficult indeed.

So Christ’s words to him were direct. The animals have homes. The Son of Man a lot of nights has nowhere to lay his head. The creatures have a place to live, but the Creator often has no such luxury. And the implication is clear. Discipleship is not a life of ease. It can be a life of difficulty. And although it is certainly a life of eternal gain, it can also be a life, at times,  of earthly loss. Following Christ in his will sometimes leads to pain because it’s so out of step with the world around us. You know what the irony of all this is? Whatever loss we endure as a follower of Christ, it is the path to flourishing in this life and the next.

But following Jesus is not only difficult at times. That was his message to the first would-be follower. It calls for urgency and devotion. In verses 21-22 we find,

“Another of the disciples said to him, ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.’”

Now, that just sounds heartless. That’s harsh. This is a hard saying. I mean, is Jesus really telling this man not to care for his father on his death bed or not to attend the funeral of his own father? I mean, what is his message here? We’ve got to wrestle with this.

I think we can rest assured that Jesus is not encouraging someone to fail to honor their parents. The Scriptures are very plain about that, right?  And Jesus himself is very plain about that in other parts of the gospels, when speaking about our responsibility to our families and especially those closest to us. And I think we’ve all seen, I know I have seen, tragic results, tragic stories of people who neglect their families because they say they’re serving the Lord. I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind here. Part of following Jesus is loving our families. In fact, following Jesus will help us be much better family members.

So we have to be careful with this passage. He’s not telling this man to ignore his elderly parents. That is the Lord’s call for many. And it’s good. It’s very good. There’s a really good chance here that the father was actually nowhere close to dying. Perhaps even had many years left. This man would start following Jesus later, right? I just have things to do. I want to get the inheritance or whatever his thought was here.  I will start following you later. There was no urgency. When other things happen, I’ll be ready to follow. As James Boyce wrote,

“The first [person in our text] was too quick to promise [I’ll go with you wherever you go] and the second was too slow to perform.”

And what we learn from these stories are some valuable lessons about following Jesus. It really is all about comparison. What are my priorities? What are the things that I value most? Where do my greatest affections lie? Am I willing to hold those things loosely to follow Jesus? The first would-be follower may be called upon. Jesus says to give up his comforts in order to follow. Would he be willing to do that? The second would-be follower may be called upon to give up his own plans and desires to follow Jesus. He may even be led and called to leave well-loved family members to do so. Would he be willing to do that?

So what is Jesus saying? I think this is what he’s saying — that our devotion to him must supersede, in comparison, our devotion to him must supersede devotion to all other things and all other people. My wife Melinda and I have been married for 30 years, and I can tell you today, I don’t want to be first in her life. I want Jesus to be first in her life. This is not an isolated teaching. It’s not the only time we find something like this in the Gospels. Jesus often speaks about what it takes to follow him, and it is hard. In other places, especially in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus very clearly says, if one is not more devoted to him than any earthly relationships, as important as those are, and even their very lives, they can’t follow Jesus. And if you’re not willing to forsake all that you have, Jesus says, you can’t follow me. You’re not able to follow me. If one does not deny themselves and take up their crosses in this life, they cannot follow Jesus.

And really, this is logical. Why? The reason is very simple. We can’t follow someone if we’re not willing to go where they went. Right? Jesus was the ultimate example of denying himself, taking up his cross, and forsaking all for the kingdom. So how can I follow him if I’m not willing to do the same? And that’s what Jesus is saying in this text and other texts. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Those are the opening words to the foreword by Bishop George Bell to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic book, “The Cost of Discipleship.” And it’s actually, that little phrase is actually a quote within the book. And here’s the context of it. Bonhoeffer writes,

“The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

And if we think about it, this is all throughout the Scriptures, right? I mean Romans 1-11 is this incredible doctrinal treatise on the glories of the gospel. And then it ends in Chapter 11 with this doxology, this praise, and then immediately into the application section of the Book of Romans. Beginning in Romans 12, he says, okay, because of all of that, present your lives as a living sacrifice. Paul says, “I die daily.”

Bonhoeffer wrote “The Cost of Discipleship” in 1937, during the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany. And I can only imagine the difficulty of attempting to follow Jesus in that culture. I mean, the moral and the societal dilemmas that would face a person living at that time in that place would be immense. And seeking to follow Jesus during those years certainly had consequences for Bonhoeffer. But he was willing to give all up in order to follow him. In “The Cost of Discipleship” Bonhoeffer writes,

“Jesus is the Christ [this is who He is, he’s the Messiah, he is], the Son of God; he is not an ethical teacher, [that’s not what he was. I mean, he taught ethical things, but that’s not who he was, primarily], but the One who brings with him the Kingdom of God. It is by his authority alone that the people can be summoned to follow him.”

Now, can I stop here and make a couple of important points as we continue to consider the words of Jesus here? These are hard sayings. First of all, we must not water down the difficult sayings of Jesus. That’s kind of the tendency we want to kind of change a little bit. I know Jesus said, you know this, but surely he meant this, to make ourselves feel a little bit better. So on the one hand, I want to make sure that we let the weight of Jesus’ words have their intended effect. I mean, these words were meant to challenge us.

But on the other hand, I also know that there are people here today who are a lot like me, who have a more tender conscience. We look at a passage like this and we compare our lives of following Jesus to it, and we’re like, I’m not even a believer. I’ve got so far to go here. And so I know there are people here just like that.

So I want to mention a couple of helpful thoughts to consider whenever we approach the hard sayings of Jesus or the hard sayings of Scripture. You go back to the Sermon on the Mount, there were things in there that you read and you’re like “ooph.” Love your enemies. Sure. Our standing with the Father is not contingent about how perfectly we follow Jesus in this life. My standing with the Father was won for me on the cross. And that never changes, right? It does not change. It’s in Jesus’ accomplishment and not my own. So that’s number one. Let’s keep that in mind.

Number two, sanctification is a life-long journey of having our affections, values, priorities and desires redeemed. We’re going to come to these crossroads in life. We’re following Jesus. We’ve got to go this way and doing what we really want. We got to go this way. And, you know, there are times where that’s going to be a real struggle for us. And when we come to those times, we look at it and we thank the Lord for revealing our heart. And we confess when we need to confess, we repent where we need to repent. And it’s just a lifelong journey of having all of our affections and values and desires redeemed. None of us are going to follow Jesus perfectly right now, most likely. If you do, please come and preach this message.

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. Maybe not like the 1st century Christians who gave up their lives for following Jesus. Maybe not like Christians all over the world today who are reduced to lives of almost unbearable poverty for following Jesus. Maybe not like the believers who find themselves standing up to inexpressible evil, like back in Nazi Germany. It might look different for all of us. But if we’re followers of Jesus, there’s going to come times when we’re called upon to sacrifice status or comfort or expectations or relationships or things or any other number of things.

In a sermon by Tim Keller entitled “Paradise in Crisis,” he shares the story of William Borden, and he says this:

“William Borden grew up in Chicago in the late nineteenth century and went off to Yale in the 1890s, I believe. Yes, he was one of those Bordens. He was extremely wealthy. The Borden’s dairy. He was one of those Bordens. He was part of that family, and he was the heir of a great wealth. When he was at Yale, he sensed God’s call to the mission field, and he decided he was going to go to North China and work amongst Mongols and Chinese people. It was very, very dangerous at the time, and when he announced to his family he was going to go into missionary work, this was appalling to everybody. A man of his stature, of his wealth, of his station in society didn’t do that. He got opposition from his family. He got opposition from his class of people. But he was absolutely resolute. When he graduated from Yale, he gave his entire inheritance, (which at that time was $1 million, which [today] would have been the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars today). He gave it away to mission agencies [other organizations]. He gave it away. Now, in relative poverty, he moved to Cairo to learn Arabic. Just out of college with his whole life ahead of him, bright … Within a few weeks, he had contracted spinal meningitis, and within a few weeks after that he was dead. Scratched on an ordinary piece of paper, which he wrote in his diary as he lay dying, found in his bedroom after he died, were these three phrases: ‘No reserve, no retreat, no regrets.’”

Now, can I admit that that’s a little hard for me to wrap my mind around? I think the part of me that places way too much importance on earthly riches is tempted to look at the life of William Borden and think, what a waste. He didn’t even get to the mission field, right? But it’s never a waste to forsake all to follow Jesus. And while what we see in this life as a reward may seem small, I promise you, I promise you that God will get it all right in the end. No follower of Jesus will ever outgive him.

2 Corinthians 4:17,

“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…”

In John 12:23-26,

“And Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. [What does that mean? He’s going to die.] Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.’”

William Borden had the same mindset of all those in Hebrews 11, The Heroes of the Faith, he had the same mindset that was recorded there of them in Hebrews 11, the writer — right in the middle of all of these stories — the writer of Hebrews says of them,

“These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this well. About seven years after he wrote “The Cost of Discipleship,” he was hanged for crimes against the Nazi empire. It’s reported that right as he was being led out to the gallows, he turned to the prisoner next to him and said, “This is the end … For me, the beginning of life.”

You know, maybe you’re here and you’re still exploring who Jesus is. Maybe you’ve been in church for a long time. Maybe you’re still not sure. Maybe this is the first time you have ever sat in a church. I want to encourage you to come back the next several weeks as we continue to explore who Jesus is.

Maybe you’re here and you fully believe what Matthew had to say about the identity of Jesus, but we find it hard. Or maybe we’re in a situation where we find it really hard to follow what we know the Lord’s will is. And whenever we come to hard, challenging sayings in the Scriptures, we should fight the urge to ignore or downplay them, right? But on the other hand, or be discouraged by them, right? We place the mirror of God’s Word in front of our eyes and pray that God does the work in our hearts that he desires to do, but always, always with the hope of the gospel before us. And a firm knowledge that the Lord delights in us, if we are his children. Amen?