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Matthew 9 9-17 The Physician, the Table, and the New Wine

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The previous scene ends with a paralyzed man rising at Christ’s command and the crowd glorifying God for the authority to forgive sins. Then Jesus speaks another command: “Follow Me.” Matthew rises too. The authority that releases a man from sin now reaches a man seated inside a compromised livelihood and creates a disciple. From the tax office, the passage moves to a crowded table; from the table, to the Physician; from the Physician, to the Bridegroom; and from the Bridegroom, to new wine. These are not separate lessons. They reveal how Christ saves. His mercy comes near without calling sickness health. His presence gives joy, His Passion gives fasting its true sorrow and longing, and His grace renews the person who receives it.

Matthew rises at Christ’s call (Matthew 9:9)

9 As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he arose and followed Him.

Matthew’s call belongs to the Capernaum setting of the surrounding narrative, although the verse does not name the city or identify the precise site. The “tax office” was a place of toll or customs collection, the kind of station where duties could be charged on goods in transit. Such collectors were widely disliked because their work served systems of rule and offered opportunities for self-enrichment, though the evidence does not justify declaring every collector personally corrupt.1 Matthew gives none of that background in his own defense. He tells us where he was sitting and who called him.

Jesus sees Matthew at the tax office. The verb matters because the Gospel has just shown religious critics looking at Christ and finding grounds for accusation. Christ looks at a compromised man and sees someone He will call. This gaze is mercy, but the mercy takes the form of a command. “Follow Me” does not bless the seat that holds Matthew. It summons him away from an old allegiance and into the road of the Son of Man.

The answer is immediate: “he arose and followed Him.” Matthew offers no speech, promise, or defense. The authority of Christ’s word is answered by a body getting up. Repentance appears here as a transfer of allegiance made visible. Matthew leaves the place that had defined his income, reputation, and loyalties because the Lord who calls him has become more decisive than all three. Grace reaches him where he is; discipleship requires him to rise.

Language insight

The sequence in Greek is as spare as the English: Akolouthei moi, “Follow Me,” followed by anastas ēkolouthēsen autō, “having risen, he followed Him.” The force lies in the sequence rather than in a hidden meaning assigned to one tense: command, rising, following. In the next verse, the verbs describe Jesus and the guests reclining together. The call does not end in private admiration. It leads into a shared life in which Christ’s presence becomes visible to Matthew’s former social world.2

Gems from the Fathers 💎

Saint John Chrysostom sees the call of Matthew as a further revelation of the authority just displayed in the healing of the paralytic. If Christ has authority to undo sins, Chrysostom asks, why should anyone be astonished that He can make this man an apostle?3 The old occupation is neither hidden nor allowed to dictate Matthew’s future. Christ’s power is shown not only by forgiving a guilty man, but by forming him into a witness.

The pattern of rising continues beyond this passage. Matthew 9:18 begins, “While He spoke these things”; when a ruler pleads for his dead daughter, “Jesus arose and followed him” (Matthew 9:19). The paralytic rises at Christ’s command, Matthew rises to follow Christ, and Christ rises to follow a grieving father. This is narrative-theological continuity, not proof of a particular redactional intention: the authority that summons obedience is itself mercy moving toward need.

Bernardo Strozzi, Calling of St Matthew Bernardo Strozzi, The Calling of Saint Matthew, circa 1620, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This Western Baroque painting is a teaching image, not an Orthodox icon.

The painting can help a group attend to the decision in the verse: Matthew is seated amid the signs of his old work while Christ’s call demands a new direction. The image should serve the text rather than supply motives or details the Gospel does not give.

The Physician at the table of mercy (Matthew 9:10-13)

10 Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples. 11 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 When Jesus heard that, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

The man who rose is followed by many who recline. Matthew calls the location simply “the house.” Mark and Luke identify the house in the parallel account with Levi, whom Christian tradition identifies with Matthew, but Matthew’s own wording is less specific.4 What Matthew emphasizes is the company: many tax collectors and sinners sit with Jesus and His disciples. The Lord’s call has opened into public fellowship.

The Pharisees direct their question to the disciples: “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Table fellowship communicates welcome and nearness, so the question carries real moral concern. Yet it assumes that the decisive influence at the table must be the sinners’ impurity. Jesus answers by reversing the direction. The sick do not make the physician sick merely by coming near; the physician comes near so the sick may be healed. Holiness is present at the table as healing power.

That medical image gives Christ’s mercy both tenderness and moral seriousness. Sin is no harmless difference of lifestyle. It damages desire, judgment, love, and freedom. It requires a Physician. At the same time, the analogy gives no warrant for treating physical or mental illness as evidence of personal guilt. Jesus uses sickness here to reveal what sin does and what His saving presence accomplishes. The first patient each hearer should recognize is not the person across the table, but the self that still needs Christ’s medicine.

“Go and learn” is a severe word addressed to people who already know Scripture. Jesus cites Hosea 6:6: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” In Hosea, religious observance had been severed from faithful love. Christ does not abolish sacrifice, worship, fasting, or obedience. He restores their truth by revealing the God to whom they are offered. Worship becomes false when it allows a person to approach the altar while refusing compassion to the wounded. Mercy is not a softer alternative to holiness. It is the life of the Holy One reaching the sinner so that repentance and communion become possible.

The last phrase guards the table from sentimentality: “sinners, to repentance.” The approved NKJV includes these words. Several critical-text editions end the verse after “sinners,” while Byzantine, Greek Orthodox, and Textus Receptus forms include “to repentance”; the current evidence supports stating that edition-level difference, not making claims about particular manuscripts or their dates.5 Either way, the scene itself is medicinal and vocational. Matthew leaves the tax office. Christ receives sinners in order to heal and call them, not to preserve the sickness that binds them.

Language insight

Jesus contrasts those who are strong or healthy, hoi ischyontes, with those “who are sick,” literally those in a bad condition, hoi kakōs echontes. The words refuse two distortions at once. A sick person truly needs healing, and a physician draws near precisely because healing is possible. The word eleos, mercy, then interprets the prophetic demand. Mercy is not indulgence. It is God’s active compassion toward the needy, embodied here in Christ’s presence at the table.2

Chrysostom on the Physician

Chrysostom says that Christ came “not to cure bodies only, but to heal likewise the wickedness of the soul.” He compares the Lord’s presence among sinners to the work of a physician: “unless he endure the corruption of the sick, he frees them not from their infirmity.”6 The contact is purposeful. Christ does not become like the sickness He touches; His incorruptible mercy begins the cure.

This reading also turns the Pharisees’ question toward the Church. A parish can defend correct teaching and still make a wounded person feel that Christ’s table is guarded by contempt. It can also speak of welcome while becoming afraid to name repentance. The Physician permits neither error. His truth diagnoses because His mercy intends to heal.

Matthew gives this mercy another visible form in 9:36, when Jesus sees the multitudes “weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd,” and is moved with compassion. The Physician’s mercy becomes the Shepherd’s truthful sight and active care: He sees the wound, names it without contempt, teaches and heals, commands prayer, and prepares servants to enter the need (Matthew 9:35-10:1). Mercy is more than a kindly feeling. In Christ, it sees clearly and goes to work.

The Bridegroom, fasting, and vessels made new (Matthew 9:14-17)

14 Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?” 15 And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast. 16 No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. 17 Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

The question about fasting grows naturally from the meal, but its wording reveals comparison: “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?” Fasting has become a measure by which one group evaluates another. Jesus does not answer first with a rule. He reveals who stands among them. The meaning of fasting depends on the Bridegroom.

The NKJV’s “friends of the bridegroom” renders an idiom that literally speaks of the sons of the bridal chamber, those who share the wedding joy. Jesus asks whether they can “mourn” while the Bridegroom is with them. Matthew’s verb is stronger than a neutral reference to skipping food. It joins fasting to grief and longing. The disciples’ present joy is therefore not carelessness, and their future fasting will not be spiritual display. Both receive their meaning from Christ.

Then the joy darkens: “the bridegroom will be taken away from them.” Chrysostom reads this as Christ laying the first foundation for teaching His disciples about the Passion.7 The Cross will give their fasting its sorrow, but the Resurrection keeps that sorrow from despair. The Church fasts in communion with the crucified and risen Bridegroom: repenting of the desires that divide the heart, longing for fuller communion with Him, and preparing to receive His gifts with hunger. His words do not imply that He has simply abandoned His Church. The Bridegroom is sacramentally present, and His people still await the unveiled wedding feast.

The cloth and wineskins continue the answer. An unshrunk patch pulls against an old garment and enlarges the tear. New wine breaks skins unable to bear it. Christ’s life cannot be reduced to one more practice attached to a heart that refuses mercy and repentance. Yet the images are also pastoral. They explain why Jesus does not impose every ascetical burden on His disciples at once. Grace calls for real renewal, and wise formation helps a person grow strong enough to bear what is given.

The final words identify the Lord’s purpose: “both are preserved.” Newness is ordered toward salvation, not destruction. The text therefore gives no license to despise the Old Testament, caricature Jewish people as worn-out vessels, or baptize every novelty as “new wine.” Matthew’s Gospel has already declared that Christ fulfills the Law and the Prophets. The issue is the living capacity to receive the life He gives. In a thematic comment on Luke’s parallel, Saint Cyril of Alexandria connects the new garment and wineskins with hearts renewed by the Holy Spirit.8 The Spirit does not make us fashionable. He makes us capable of communion.

Chrysostom on strength, timing, and preservation

Chrysostom reads the images with pastoral gentleness: “The disciples have not yet become strong.”9 A teacher who gives a burden without attending to the person’s present capacity can turn medicine into injury. Christ’s gentleness is not permission to remain immature. He is already preparing the disciples for the day when they will fast. His patience has a direction: strength, obedience, and preservation.

This is especially important in family and parish life. Zeal may demand from a beginner the rule of someone formed over decades, or may use a correct standard to secure the teacher’s importance. Christ teaches another way. Tell the truth, keep the goal clear, and form the person with patience so that the wine is not spilled and the vessel is not ruined.

The Church hears the Physician and Bridegroom

On Baba 12, a modern CopticChurch.net lectionary page places Matthew 9:9-13 at Vespers. The same page gives Mark 2:13-17 at Matins and Luke 5:27-32 at the Liturgy, while its Synaxarium includes the martyrdom of Saint Matthew. Across the day, the Church hears the three Synoptic forms of the call, the table, and the Physician’s saying. Matthew’s conversion is proclaimed as apostolic vocation: the sinner whom Christ calls and heals becomes a witness to His mercy. This exact range is directly verified in a modern parish-maintained digital witness; no printed Katamaros has been cross-checked, and the historical rationale for the placement has not been established.10

The same modern digital witness places Matthew 9:10-15 at Matins on Tuesday of the first week of Great Lent. Near the beginning of the fast, the Church hears the Physician at the table, mercy interpreting sacrifice, and the Bridegroom promising that His disciples will fast. Lent is thereby guarded from comparison: fasting belongs to healing, repentance, and love for Christ.

It also places Matthew 9:15-17 at Vespers on Wednesday of the first week of the Holy Fifty Days. In Paschal time, the Church hears of the Bridegroom, new wine, and renewed vessels. Resurrection life is more than a patch over old habits. The risen Christ gives a life that the Holy Spirit forms us to bear. The cited pages verify these modern digital placements; confirmation from a printed Katamaros would be needed for a stronger claim about formal universal authority.10

Spiritual Fruit 🍇

  1. Rise from the seat that keeps negotiating with Christ. Matthew’s body answers the command before his reputation can be repaired. A “tax office” may be a profitable compromise, a secret habit, a resentment that feels justified, or a need for control that has become part of your identity. Name the seat honestly in prayer and confession, then take one concrete step that makes rising real: end the dishonest arrangement, remove access to the hidden habit, return what is owed, or ask forgiveness without defending yourself.

  2. Come to the Physician as the sick person, not as His assistant diagnosing everyone else. Religious knowledge can make the Pharisees’ question sound reasonable while hiding the heart’s own need. Before speaking about another person’s sin, ask Christ to reveal the pride, fear, appetite, or hardness that still needs His cure in you. Receiving mercy this way makes compassion truthful: you can draw near to the wounded without calling evil good because you know the Physician is healing you too.

  3. Let worship teach your hands mercy. Hosea’s words expose prayer, fasting, and service that coexist with contempt. If you are keeping a rule while refusing reconciliation, humiliating someone weaker, or ignoring a need within reach, do not abandon worship. Let worship become honest. Seek forgiveness, perform a hidden act of mercy, and return to prayer asking for the heart of the One to whom the offering is made.

  4. Fast toward the Bridegroom, not against another disciple. Comparative asceticism asks, “Why do we fast while they do not?” Christ turns attention from ranking people to loving Him. Keep the fast given by the Church with humility; join restraint in food to repentance, prayer, almsgiving, and preparation for communion. When you fail, repent without theater. The point is a heart made hungry for Christ, not an identity built from stricter performance.

  5. Practice patient formation without lowering Christ’s call. The new wine is precious, the vessel matters, and the Lord wants both preserved. In parenting, mentoring, or parish service, resist the urge to prove seriousness by loading every burden at once. Give the next faithful practice, explain its purpose, and help the person grow strong enough for more. Apply the same patience to your own weakness while refusing to rename delay as peace. Christ’s gentleness trains; it does not abandon.

Footnotes

  1. Gilberto Ruiz, “Taxes in First-Century Palestine,” Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/taxes-in-first-century-palestine/; Greg Carey, “Tax Collectors,” Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/tax-collectors/. ↩

  2. MorphGNT/SBLGNT, Matthew 9:9-17, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/morphgnt/sblgnt/master/61-Mt-morphgnt.txt. ↩ ↩2

  3. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily XXX on Matthew 9:9, NPNF1 10, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110.iii.XXX.html#iii.XXX-p12. ↩

  4. John Van Maaren and Katelyn Schnoor, “The Apostle Matthew,” Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/the-apostle-matthew/; compare Mark 2:14-15 and Luke 5:27-29. ↩

  5. MorphGNT/SBLGNT, Matthew 9:13, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/morphgnt/sblgnt/master/61-Mt-morphgnt.txt; parallel Greek editions, https://biblehub.com/text/matthew/9-13.htm; NET/NKJV comparison, https://classic.net.bible.org/verse.php?book=Mat&chapter=9&verse=13. ↩

  6. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily XXX on Matthew 9:10-13, NPNF1 10, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110.iii.XXX.html#iii.XXX-p21. ↩

  7. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily XXX on Matthew 9:15, NPNF1 10, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110.iii.XXX.html#iii.XXX-p70. ↩

  8. St Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke 5:27-39, thematic Synoptic parallel, 1859 English translation, https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cyril_on_luke_02_sermons_12_25.htm. ↩

  9. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily XXX on Matthew 9:16-17, NPNF1 10, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110.iii.XXX.html. ↩

  10. CopticChurch.net, Baba 12 readings, https://www.copticchurch.net/readings?g_year=2025&g_month=10&g_day=22; Tuesday of the first week of Great Lent, https://www.copticchurch.net/readings?g_year=2026&g_month=02&g_day=17; Wednesday of the first week of the Holy Fifty Days, https://www.copticchurch.net/readings?g_year=2026&g_month=04&g_day=15. ↩ ↩2

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