Matthew 4:23–25

Matthew 4:23 — The Threefold Ministry

Matthew's summary statement is carefully constructed around three Greek participles: didaskōn (teaching), kēryssōn (proclaiming/preaching), and therapeuōn (healing). This triad is not accidental; Matthew will repeat it almost verbatim in 9:35, forming a deliberate literary bracket — an inclusio — around the central section of chapters 5–9, which contains the Sermon on the Mount (teaching) and a cycle of ten miracles (healing). The reader is meant to understand that what follows is the content of what 4:23 describes in miniature.

The phrase "their synagogues" is notable. The possessive pronoun subtly marks a distance between Jesus and the Jewish establishment that will grow throughout Matthew's Gospel, but here in Galilee — "Galilee of the Gentiles" (4:15) — Jesus is still operating within the structures of Jewish communal life, teaching with authority from within. Synagogues were centers of Torah instruction; Jesus entering them to teach the "Good News of the Kingdom" (euangelion tēs basileias) signals that He is not abolishing the Law but fulfilling and transcending it (cf. 5:17). This is the same Kingdom John the Baptist announced (3:2) and that Jesus Himself proclaimed at 4:17; now that proclamation is accompanied by evidence — healing — that the Kingdom has genuinely arrived.

"Every disease and every sickness" (pasan noson kai pasan malakian) uses a double universal to stress the comprehensiveness of Jesus's healing power. Matthew employs malakian — literally "weakness" or "softness" — alongside nosos ("disease") to encompass both acute illness and chronic debility. Nothing in the human condition of bodily suffering lies beyond His reach. This is not merely therapeutic; it is eschatological. The prophets associated the age of restoration with healing (Isaiah 35:5–6; 61:1), and Matthew is explicitly presenting Jesus as the one in whom those promises are fulfilled.

Matthew 4:24 — The Geography of Mercy

Syria, the region immediately north and northeast of Galilee, was predominantly Gentile. That "the report went out into all Syria" and that Syrians brought their sick to Jesus is a striking geographical detail Matthew could have omitted. He includes it deliberately. Jesus has not yet commissioned any mission to the Gentiles (that comes in 28:19), yet the Gentiles are already coming to Him. This anticipates the faith of the Canaanite woman (15:22–28) and the Roman centurion (8:5–13) and, ultimately, the Great Commission. The Kingdom draws the nations to itself before it is formally sent to them.

The catalog of afflictions — "various diseases and torments, possessed with demons, epileptics (selēniazomenous, literally 'moon-struck'), and paralytics" — is comprehensive in a culturally specific way. Matthew distinguishes between natural illness and demonic possession, a distinction sometimes flattened by modern readers but maintained with care in the Gospel tradition. The inclusion of demoniacs signals that Jesus's healing is not merely physical restoration but cosmic: He is binding "the strong man" (12:29), invading and dismantling Satan's domain. That He heals all of them — without exception, without failure — is Matthew's testimony to His divine sovereignty.

Matthew 4:25 — The Gathering of the Nations

The list of regions — Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, beyond the Jordan — traces a rough circle around the land of Israel, with Decapolis being the Greek-speaking region of ten cities east of the Jordan, again including Gentile territory. The "great multitudes" (ochloi polloi) are the crowds who will recur throughout Matthew as a theologically complex group: they follow, they marvel, they are "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (9:36), but they do not yet fully commit. They are the mission field of the Church, neither insiders nor rejected opponents.

Typologically, these gathered multitudes recall the assembly of Israel around Moses at Sinai, an association Matthew reinforces by immediately positioning the Sermon on the Mount — delivered from a mountain, to the disciples, with crowds at the base — as a new Sinai event. Jesus is the new Moses, but greater: Moses mediated the Law; Jesus speaks it from His own authority ("But I say to you…").

Catholic tradition reads Jesus's threefold activity — teaching, preaching, and healing — as the foundation of the Church's own threefold mission, which the Second Vatican Council articulated as the munus triplex: the prophetic, priestly, and kingly offices of Christ in which all the baptized share (Lumen Gentium 10–13). The Church does not merely remember this healing ministry as a past historical event; she continues it. As the Catechism teaches, "Christ's compassion toward the sick and his many healings of every kind of infirmity are a resplendent sign that 'God has visited his people' and that the Kingdom of God is close at hand" (CCC 1503).

The Church Fathers saw deep significance in the universality of the healing. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Matthew, Homily 14) marvels that Jesus healed not selectively but completely — "he left none uncured" — and reads this as proof of His divinity: no merely human physician can heal every disease. For Chrysostom, the gathering of Syrians, Galileans, and peoples from beyond the Jordan already prefigures the one catholic (universal) Church gathered from all nations.

St. Thomas Aquinas (Catena Aurea on Matthew) draws on patristic sources to note that the threefold ministry — teaching doctrine, proclaiming the Kingdom's nearness, healing bodies — corresponds to the healing of the whole person: mind, will, and body. This integrative vision of salvation as encompassing the entire human person, not merely the soul, is deeply characteristic of Catholic anthropology. The Incarnation redeems the body, not just the spirit; the healing miracles are therefore not incidental but intrinsic to the Gospel.

Pope Benedict XVI (Jesus of Nazareth, Part One) emphasized that "the Kingdom of God" is not merely a social program or political reality but is inseparable from the Person of Jesus Himself — He is the Kingdom (autobasileia, in Origen's term). To encounter Jesus teaching and healing is to encounter the Kingdom arriving.

Matthew 4:23–25 challenges contemporary Catholics on two concrete fronts. First, the integration of word and deed: Jesus does not merely preach the Kingdom abstractly, nor does He merely heal without proclamation. For Catholics today — especially those involved in parish ministry, hospital chaplaincy, Catholic social services, or medical professions — this passage refuses any split between evangelization and works of mercy. The Church's healing ministry (the Anointing of the Sick, hospital apostolates, Catholic healthcare) is not a social add-on to the "real" Gospel; it is constitutive of it.

Second, the geography of Matthew 4:24–25 should unsettle comfortable parochialism. The sick came from Syria — foreign, Gentile, outside the covenant — and Jesus healed them without hesitation. For Catholics living in polarized societies tempted to draw tight boundaries around who deserves mercy, this passage is a quiet rebuke. The crowds that gather around Jesus do not have their papers in order. They are "harassed and helpless." The question these verses pose is not "who qualifies for the Kingdom?" but "who is suffering and can be brought to Christ?" Every parish, every Catholic family, every individual disciple is implicitly commissioned by this text to widen the circle.