The crowds on the mountain
Sight given by Jesus. Sight restored. Matthew 15:29-31.
What led up to it
Jesus has returned from the region of Tyre and Sidon to the Sea of Galilee. He goes up a mountain and sits down. The feeding of the four thousand follows.
What happens
Large crowds bring the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others and lay them at His feet. He heals them, and the crowd glorifies the God of Israel.
In their shoes
No one here has a name. What the text does show is how they arrived: brought by others, up a mountain, and laid at His feet. Behind each of them is someone who decided to make that climb with them.
The place and the time
What the old books and the archaeologists can add. Each paragraph names its source.
Edersheim places this scene, and the feeding of the four thousand that follows it, on the eastern side of the lake in the Decapolis, among people who were not strictly Jewish. Matthew says only that Jesus came to the Sea of Galilee and went up a mountain, and other commentators put it on the western shore.
Source: Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), Book III, chapter XXXVI.
Matthew Henry noticed that the people "brought their sick relations and friends along with them, and cast them down at Jesus' feet," and that "we read not of any thing they said to him": their condition spoke for them. Every blind person on that mountainside had been carried or led up it by someone.
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Matthew 15.
The passage
Matthew 15:29-31
29 Moving on from there, Jesus went along the Sea of Galilee. Then He went up on a mountain and sat down.
30 Large crowds came to Him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and laid them at His feet, and He healed them.
31 The crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled restored, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel.