“Go and learn what this means, ’I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Jesus, quoting the prophet Hosea, in today’s Gospel Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.
“What would you stop to bless and caress/ if you believed that blessing could address/ our painful illusions of brokenness?” Bernadette Millers, poet.
In the Gospel today, Jesus calls a tax collector to follow him – and what if he had not? For that man, loathed as he was for working for the occupying power to implement taxation and doubtless creaming off some of the profits for himself, went on to become the saint whose Gospel bears his name, dying for the faith he proclaimed as one of the Apostles. Jesus must have seen something in Matthew that he didn’t yet discern in himself and when he calls him, it’s an imperative Jesus to uses: an order. Matthew had a choice, however, to follow him or to remain with his money and his familiar way of life, but it seems that he got up and left all this. Matthew didn’t choose Jesus – Jesus chose him. And so, in the ordinariness of working life, as for Peter and Andrew whilst casting nets at sea, or James and John whilst repairing their nets with their father, a new way of life and faith intervenes so unexpectedly.
It’s the same for the other tax collectors and those ‘sinners’ who meet with Jesus as he eats at Matthew’s house where many shunned by the law gathered with him. The Pharisees see this and complain about it but Jesus tells them that it is the sick who need a doctor and gives them another imperative: “Go and learn…” Yet it is a leader of the synagogue, one abiding by the religious laws of the day, who allows his need of healing for his daughter to overcome all this as he asked for Jesus’ help. At this, now it’s Jesus who gets up and follows him just as a woman with gynaecological problems also comes to Jesus wanting to touch his cloak. Under the rules of the time, Jesus would be expected to avoid both a woman and the bleeding from which she had been suffering for twelve years but he responds immediately to her and tells her that her faith has made her well. The faith of the synagogue leader also makes his daughter well, although the professional mourners at her house laugh when Jesus says she is not dead. As with Matthew, there is no questioning or checking from Jesus about their status – both find healing because of their faith in him. It is the religious people of the day who doubt him.
What Jesus does reminds his followers that faith is not found in the regulations and rules drawn up by religious people but in the need, dirt and mess of human beings encountering Jesus’ healing and ministry as lives are changed and hope is answered. Just as he told the Pharisees to learn to show mercy rather than sacrifice, so the same is true today. Jesus isn’t saying that ritual and worship don’t matter but that love and mercy are more important as he reaches across boundaries and conditional treatment that isolates those in most need. In responding to the included and excluded alike, the outsider and those within, Jesus mixes up the traditional thinking of his day as the distressed and suffering people around him find a welcome and response that the synagogue – and some churches today? – would have withheld due to them being thought to be unclean. The leader and the woman are both unnamed – but they find the healing they seek through God’s love and care for all humanity, not just a religious few.
It’s clear from much happening nationally as well as internationally today that the rules and traditions of our time are being reinterpreted in ways that often bring isolation or sacrifice rather than healing and mercy. Who are those who have been merciful to us and are there perhaps ongoing situations in our own lives, families and communities where, like the Pharisees challenged by Jesus, we also need to go and learn the greater importance of showing mercy to others rather than sacrifice?
With my prayers; pob bendith,