A Kingdom for Outcasts—Matthew 8:1-17

In these verses, Jesus gives Galilee another taste of heaven, cleansing a leper, healing a Roman centurion's sick servant, healing Peter's mother-in-law so thoroughly that she gets up and starts to do housework, and healing and casting out demons from a whole crowd of others.

What was the good of this taste of heaven, you might ask, if things just went back to being how they used to be? Galilee today isn't heaven on earth. All those sick people got sick again, and they are all dead. What was the point?

Well, compassion is still compassion, and healing is still healing, even when it's temporary. But Jesus' miracles have a bigger purpose than temporarily giving a few people a better life. They were meant to teach those people -- and us -- about membership in the kingdom of heaven, permanent membership in a kingdom where, in God's good timing, there one day will be no leprosy, no sickness, no demon possession, no sorrow, no pain, and, more importantly still, no sin, guilt, or death. You could say they were like a movie trailer. The trailer can be entertaining in its own right, but mainly it points to what lies ahead. Or you could say the miracles were like the blurb on the back of the book. The blurb isn't really part of the book -- it may even be on a dust jacket that gets thrown away. Yet it gives you a taste of the book itself.

So what do we learn about the kingdom of heaven from these miracles? Simply put, we learn that Jesus turns outcasts into citizens of heaven. More specifically, these miracles answer four questions: (1) Who gets into the kingdom of heaven? (2) How? (3) What For? and (4) At what cost?

Who Gets In?

The first man who comes to Jesus is a leper. Lepers were a living symbol of uncleanness. Their skin disease was a visible picture of the uncleanness of sin in all of our hearts. Jewish lepers had to live away from other people. But this leper heard that Jesus could do miracles and heal the sick, and he came to Jesus and bowed to the ground before him, but he seems a little bashful -- he didn't quite dare to ask Jesus to cleanse him. He just said, "Lord, if you will" -- if you want to -- "you can make me clean."

I love Jesus' answer: "I will; be clean." If you are wondering if you have cleaned up enough to come to Jesus, the answer is right there: you don't have to. Jesus came for the unclean, the humanly-uncleanable, the outcasts, to make them clean. Who gets into the kingdom of heaven? People who don't belong, outcasts, because Jesus makes us clean.

And then he tells the leper, "Go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them." Do you remember how, back near the start of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them?" This is what fulfillment looks like. He hasn't come to abolish the laws about leprosy -- he has come to abolish leprosy itself. And because of Jesus, the laws about leprosy will not be needed. They will become obsolete. In the New Heavens and the New Earth, there will be no more leprosy. But even here and now, outcasts who come to Jesus have the uncleanness of their hearts removed.

How Do They Get In?

But how do people get into the kingdom of heaven, exactly? That leper was a Jew, a descendant of Abraham. Is the kingdom of heaven for Jews?

Well, the Jews certainly had a privileged place, and you can see that in Jesus' ministry. Jesus came to them first. Jesus doesn't go looking for the centurion who shows up next, and says, "Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly." And I would agree with a lot of scholars who say that Jesus' next words are a question, not a statement: "Shall I come and heal him?" Are you in fact asking me to take a detour from my mission to Israel to go to your Gentile home and heal your servant?

But the centurion responds, You don't even have to do that. I know what authority is, and I believe that you really have it. If you say the word, that's enough for me.

And when Jesus hears this man's faith, he says, That is what you need. That is how you get into the kingdom of heaven. It isn't by birth, it isn't by race, by being ethnically Jewish or ethnically anything else. It's by faith. And that's why "many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." How do you get in? By faith in Jesus. "And the servant was healed at that very moment."

What For?

But what are people to do when they enter the kingdom of heaven? I think we get a simple answer to this from the next miracle, when Jesus goes to Peter's house and sees Peter's mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. He touched her, and the fever left her. And then, it says, "She rose and began to serve him." Now, this is very mundane. When it says, "She began to serve him," it is not saying that she started praying or reading her Bible or going on mission trips or anything we might think of as particularly religious. It just means that she waited on him. Maybe she set the table. Maybe she pulled a skin of wine out of the cellar or sliced some bread. But, mundane as it is, it's a picture of what we are to do as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. In big ways and small, we are to serve our Lord who healed us of our sin and brought us in.

At What Cost?

The final question the passage answers is this: At what cost do people enter the kingdom of heaven? It tells of Jesus healing many other sick people and casting them demons out of many who were oppressed by them. And it says, "This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, 'He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.'"

In other words, the arrival of Jesus doing miraculous healings is not something totally out of the blue. It was predicted by Isaiah hundreds of years earlier.

But who is this man of whom Isaiah spoke? Well, he is someone great: Isaiah says, "he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted." But Isaiah goes on: "Surely he 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."

That is the cost of outcasts entering the kingdom of heaven. That is the love of Christ for the unclean. We get in by faith, but he gets us in by sacrifice. To make us clean, he went to the cross, and died in our place, suffering for our sake the punishment that we justly deserve. With his wounds we are healed.

But that's not all. The Savior must be high and lifted up, as Isaiah said: Yes, lifted up first on the cross, but then, after his death, rewarded, as Isaiah also saw: "when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring" -- that's us -- "he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied." God kept these promises to Jesus, and rewarded him by raising him from the dead and setting him on the throne of heaven. And now he is calling, and saving, and welcoming outcasts into his kingdom. How do you get in? By faith, like the centurion. Trust in Jesus, the risen Lord, and you will become a citizen of his kingdom. What do you do when you get there? Serve him, like Peter's mother-in-law. What more will he do for you than he has already done? He will come again, and make that New Heavens and New Earth where there is no sickness or death. He won it for you at the cost of his life, and he will enjoy it with you in life everlasting.

Pastor Nate Jeffries