Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
For I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.
Although by biblical standards it is an exceptionally brief story and it is snuck into the middle of a lot of action, we have just heard the call story of Matthew. A tax collector, someone distrusted at best, reviled at worst by his community for choosing to work directly for the oppressive Roman regime, is sitting at his controversial job. The tax booth where he sits is a dreaded site for the occupied peoples. It is there they must give up their hard earned wages, the fruits of their labor and the sweat of their brow, to fund their own oppression. In many cases, the tax rate was arbitrary, rising unpredictably to meet the appetites of a growing Empire. What’s more, the tax collector was in a position of power, protected by the Imperial authorities, and some of them chose to use that power for their own financial gain. We know that Zacchaeus, whom Jesus called down from a tree, was one such tax collector, because in his moment of conversion he swore to pay back fourfold every person he had cheated. This admission of guilt did not stop Jesus from dining with him, and it does not stop him from calling Matthew to follow him.
Just as with Zacchaeus, the onlookers take issue with Jesus’s choice of tablemates. The Pharisees ask the disciples why their teacher is breaking the rules, but Jesus answers them instead. He doesn’t deny that Matthew and the others at the table are sinners, as the Pharisees have labeled them. He doesn’t insist that if they only knew them better, they would understand why he was spending time with them. Instead, he tells them that it is the sick who need healing, not the well and able. It is the sinsick soul that needs a balm, not the righteous one. Rather than sacrifice the tax collectors and sinners on the altar of purity and piety, Jesus has enough mercy to sit down at their table and break their bread.
Jesus does not claim that Matthew, or any of his followers for that matter, are perfect sinless paragons. He does not require of them a confession and 50 Hail Marys before they can join him on his way. No more does he test their righteousness before accepting them than he interrogates the man whose daughter has died or the woman with the hemorrhage before he heals them. Those who are well have no need of a physician; and that’s fine, because Jesus has come for the ones who need him. For the lost sheep, the prodigal son, and the tax collector.
The Pharisees were not wrong to ask the question. Asking questions of the Divine is never wrong. Sometimes, maybe always, we ask the wrong questions, but the true answer comes anyway. The Pharisees asked why the teacher, with whom they shared an ethnicity and a religion and a history and a worldview, would do something so entirely outside of their carefully constructed system. This system, although perhaps it can seem rigid and unfeeling to us after centuries of self-righteous interpretation from those who had left it behind, was meant to be protective. The purity laws were meant to protect a culture, a way of life threatened again and again by oppressive regimes and violence and the passage of time. They were, and still are for many Jewish people, a way of remembering who they are, who their ancestors were, what they have endured and what God has done for them. So when they see Jesus doing something that they interpret as a divergence, it stings. It is confusing. It feels dangerous. How will these people ever leave behind their sinful ways if people like Jesus don’t shun them? How will they ever choose to come back to the fold if they are not shamed for wandering astray?
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
Or, as Hosea is translated by the NRSV, I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice.
The Lord said to Hosea that the people of God loved with the same permanence of a whisp of cloud or the dew that dries with the morning sun. They are fickle, and inconstant, and they believe God’s favor can be bought. But God desires steadfast love, not sacrifice. Relationship, not burnt offerings. To the people most concerned with the sacrificial system of the Temple and the purity required to participate, Jesus quotes this passage and tells them to go study up. Not to reject their religion or shame their practices, but to point them back to the heart of the matter. The righteous already know God and embody steadfast love and mercy. The rest of us have work to do.
The people around the table with Jesus on this particular occasion were not the poor, or the disabled, or the downtrodden. They were not who we like to picture as Jesus’s friends, hardworking people of humble means, the deserving poor, people of deep faith leading uncomplicated lives. They were the relatively powerful in their society. The table was filled with food and drink paid for with ill-gotten wealth at the expense of others. The tax collectors may have been rejected by some of their community, but they kept their own company and enjoyed proximity to power and the elites in their society. They were the privileged, with no reason for that to change.
Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
It is a sickness, sin. It infects our systems, our relationships, our communities. It harms all of us, even those who seem to benefit from its rotten fruits. Jesus understands this. This is why his acceptance of hospitality from the tax collectors is not a betrayal of the people who were harmed by them, although they would have every right to interpret it as such. Jesus understands that the healing of a tax collector leads to the healing of an entire community, just as the healing of a child leads to the healing of an entire family. For every sinsick soul that walks with Jesus into freedom, we all become a little more free. Free from oppression, free from judgment, free from isolation. The returning of one lost sheep makes the entire flock more whole, more safe. The conversion of the powerful leads to the emancipation of the oppressed, and the freedom of the poor takes nothing away from the wholeness of the wealthy who has given everything away for their sake.
What Jesus is doing is not “love the sinner, hate the sin” in the way we often hear it at this time of year. It is not identifying an oppressed group and adding to their oppression in the guise of religious conviction and care. It is not diagnosing which are the sick people by how different they seem from us and acting as our own divine physician. God desires mercy, steadfast love, not sacrifice and slaughter. What Jesus does is call. He calls Matthew out of his tax booth, and through their relationship gives him good enough reason not to go back into it. He calls the synagogue leader’s daughter out of death into life, taking her by the hand so that she is not alone on the journey through. He calls the healed woman daughter, and affirms her transformational faith. He calls Paul, who is engaged in violence and persecution, and sends him to a believer who helps him see. He has called kings and queens, emperors and chiefs, presidents and archbishops, Pharisees and tax collectors, and you and me. Not because we are sinless, but because the table is big enough, the path wide enough, the life abundant enough for all of us.
Mother A Writes 