Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebibelproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

Alright, well in this episode we're going to continue exploring the Gospel according to Matthew.

We are considering today a story from Matthew chapter 9.

As with all these stories, Matthew isn't just collecting together interesting things that

Jesus said or did on any given day.

Each story is making a unique claim about Jesus' identity, about his character.

Or in this case the story we're looking at in this episode, it's making a claim about

the kind of communities that Jesus came to create in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus, we're going to see, brought together an extremely diverse and complicated group

of people around his Kingdom of God announcement.

And this is a story where Jesus is actually being labeled by outsiders as a rebel, as

somebody who's undermining the stability of Jewish society because he's gathering together,

...