Matthew 9:27-31 — Jesus Heals Two Blind Men
Matthew 9:27-31. After reviving the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, Jesus begins His walk back to Peter’s house, where the rest of the disciples were still feasting with new disciple Matthew, as well as tax collectors and people living on the fringe who had been Matthew’s friends in that life. At this point, two blind men begin following after Jesus, no doubt following the flow and movement of the crowd. As they walked along, they were crying out – krazontes – shrieking – and saying “Have mercy on us, Son of David!” This is a call back to a Messianic title for Jesus that is so important that Matthew used it as the opening line for his Gospel – Jesus, the son of David, who was, ultimately, the son of Abraham. In the most literal sense, the son of David was King Solomon.
“I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.”
2 Samuel 7:12b-13
However, in a Messianic sense, the son of David was the one who would bring about a new temple and establish His kingdom forever in the world that was coming. “Son of David” was another term for Ha-mashiach , the Christos, the one from the family line of David who would be anointed king of Israel. Maimonides, the Jewish sage of the Middle Ages, considered a belief in a coming Messianic Age as one of the most fundamental tenets of Judaism. While Judaism does not believe that Jesus was the Christ, a belief in a coming Messianic Age is deeply ingrained in the faith.
Thus, the blind men in Matthew 9 recognized Jesus as the promised king of the Jews, and they cried out for just a meager amount of the sovereign’s mercy. When Jesus reached Peter’s house, the blind men finally caught up with Him, and He reached out and healed them. At the same time, Jesus told them not to tell anyone what He had done. This seems to be a strange request, and it is repeated several times over the course of the Gospels. Make no mistake, Jesus was not trying to be cute here, and He was not engaging in reverse psychology either. Jesus knew very well that things could very quickly get out of control. In John 6:14-15, following the miracle of the loaves and fishes, a crowd decided to try to force Jesus to be king, and He had to distance Himself from that kind of mob mentality. By asking for a kind of confidentiality, Jesus was in fact asking for their cooperation. Yes, the kingdom would come, and the future would unroll as certainly as one day led to the next – but in the Master’s own good time. He didn’t receive that cooperation, though, and the men who had been blind made sure that everyone knew that the son of David had arrived.