The chapter
Simply Three healings, then two men who say they will follow him, then a storm on the lake and two men among the tombs on the far shore. The chapter is almost all movement.
Context After three chapters of teaching, Matthew gives three chapters of doing, and the people helped here are chosen to make a point: a leper, a Roman officer's servant, and a woman. None of the three is what his audience would have called an insider.
Verses 1-17
Simply A leper asks to be made clean and is touched. A centurion asks from a distance and says a word would be enough. Peter's mother-in-law is healed of a fever, and at evening many are brought.
Context The centurion's line about authority is the one Jesus calls faith, and he calls it greater than any he has found in Israel, about a foreign soldier. Verse 17 closes the run with Isaiah, who wrote of one who bore our sickness and carried our suffering, and Matthew applies it to a day of healings rather than to a death.
Verses 18-22
Simply A scribe promises to follow him anywhere and is told the foxes have holes and the birds have nests, but he has nowhere to lay his head. Another asks to bury his father first and is told to leave the dead to bury their own dead.
Context Both answers are harder than the requests, and Matthew records no reply from either man and no softening from Jesus. The second is among the most difficult sentences in the Gospel, since burying a father was a duty nobody disputed. The file reports it as it stands rather than explaining it away.
Verses 23-34
Simply A storm covers the boat while he sleeps. He is woken, calls them of little faith, and the wind and sea go quiet. On the far shore two men come out of the tombs, and the demons are sent into pigs.
Context Verse 28 is a good place to see how the editions differ, because they name the country three ways. SEVEN of the thirteen offered here call it the country of the Gergesenes, FOUR the Gadarenes, and TWO the Gerasenes. The two French editions part company again, the Bible Libre with the first group and Segond 1910 with the second. The chapter ends with the whole city asking him to leave, which Matthew reports without comment.