I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Having celebrated the past two Sundays the principal feasts of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, we now enter fully into the long Season after Pentecost that stretches until the end of November. This extended time does not present us with many major feasts but rather invites us into the rhythm of the weekly celebration of Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the original feast of the Christian Year that was celebrated long before Easter or Christmas or Pentecost were instituted and whose observance remains a distinctive marker of what it means to be a Christian. Our weekly observance of the Lord’s Day in the weeks and months ahead will be marked by a near continuous reading of the Gospel of Matthew, beginning with today’s passage from the ninth chapter. This text presents us with four scenes: the calling of Matthew, a dinner Jesus shares with tax collectors and sinners, the healing of a hemorrhaging woman, and the raising of the daughter of a synagogue leader. Though a seemingly disparate collection of events, they all point to the transformative power of God’s mercy that is the heart of Jesus’s ministry, freely given to all. Let us consider these narratives in turn.

It is perhaps fitting that our long journey through Matthew’s gospel begins with the scene in which Jesus calls the one to whom this gospel is traditionally attributed. The calling of Matthew unfolds in just one short verse, but there is much in the background that is unmentioned yet essential for our understanding. To fully appreciate the significance of the scene, we must first consider the nature of Matthew’s profession, that of a tax collector. Now it seems undeniable that across various cultures, across diverse time periods, the one who comes to collect taxes is not a popular figure. The dynamics in Jesus’s day created even greater cause for their scorn. Most of Jesus’s ministry recorded in the Gospels unfolded in Judea, a province of the massive Roman Empire that stretched across the Mediterranean world. This complex and immense empire could not possibly manage all bureaucratic affairs from the capital at Rome but rather depended on regional or local forms of administration for a wide variety of necessary functions, including the collection of taxes. In the Judea of Jesus’s day, members of the local population were enlisted to assist in the collection of taxes. As agents of the often hated and distant imperial authority, tax collectors were seen as collaborators and even betrayers of their own people. Furthermore, these tax collectors worked within a system that allowed and even encouraged them to extract more than was owed from the people so that they could personally profit at the expense of others. It is no surprise, then, that tax collectors were viewed so contemptuously.

Walking along one day, Jesus sees one such tax collector at work and responds not with disdain but with an invitation. He sees Matthew not as others do, but as he truly is: a man in need of mercy. The call was simple: “Follow me.” Matthew’s response was similarly straightforward. He got up and followed Jesus, and his life was never the same again. The example of Matthew shows us that God can change the hearts of the most unlikely people, the most notorious of sinners, those who have so often chosen the wrong paths and followed selfish ways, reminding us that no one is beyond the possibility of conversion of life.

The call of Matthew is all the more remarkable if we consider some of the other disciples among whom this tax collector would now be numbered. Earlier in the gospel narrative, Jesus had called the humble fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John with the similar summons of “follow me” (Matthew 4:18-22). Now Matthew joined with these fishermen, the sort of people we might imagine he extracted money from in order to live his own comfortable life. Potentially even more astounding is the fact that listed among the twelve is one “Simon, who was called the Zealot” (Luke 6:15), who seems to have belonged to the revolutionary group of the Zealots that advocated for war against the Roman Empire in order to free the Jewish people from foreign domination. A man zealous to throw off what he believed was the tyranny of empire joins with the tax collector who collaborates with that very same empire. These are the companions Jesus called to be with him, a testament to the power of God to bind together diverse peoples who had been transformed by an encounter with the living God.

Now Jesus’ welcome of tax collectors is not isolated to the person of Matthew, as the verse that immediately follows his call indicates. Invited to dinner at an unidentified home, Jesus is a guest in the company of many other tax collectors and sinners, those whom most others would consider disreputable and best avoided. The Pharisees expressed their disapproval of Jesus’s actions by asking his disciples why he would eat and share a company with such people. While there is certainly an element of moral disapproval of their lifestyle on the part of the Pharisees, there is likely as well an understandable and from their perspective, legitimate concern about ritual purity, a fact that is at first implicit but clearly present throughout the remainder of the passage. Because of their interactions with Gentiles and their dissolute living, tax collectors and sinners would have been regarded as ritually unclean and their ability to offer sacrificial worship in accordance with Jewish law compromised. In sharing this meal with them, Jesus’ was also potentially at risk.

Overhearing the complaint of the Pharisees, Jesus responds with a vivid, indeed remarkable description of his mission, likening himself to a physician who comes to heal and care for the sick. He plainly states that he has come to call sinners, not the righteous. Jesus is the Good Physician who comes to heal those who need it most: the sick, the lost, the wayward. That Jesus shared the company of those who were otherwise seen as scandalous or disgraceful is not an indication that he was edgy for the sake of it but rather that his ministry was all about offering mercy to those who rarely received it from others, granting them the possibility of a changed life. A physician’s job is, after all, not to tell someone it’s just fine to remain mired in their sickness but rather to help them heal.

Jesus continues by invoking the words of the prophet Hosea, found in the first reading appointed for this day, telling the Pharisees to go and learn what it means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Jesus reminds these religious leaders that an outward observance of ritual offered by one whose heart is far from God lacks what is most essential. Overscrupulous observation of ritual regulations will serve no good if in the process our heart is far from God and we miss or ignore the need of a neighbor immediately in front of us. Mercy must be the priority.

In the two scenes that immediately follow, Jesus lives out what he has just proclaimed. First, the leader of the synagogue comes and kneels before Jesus, begging him to show mercy. “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” The man’s request immediately raises the question of ritual impurity as touching a corpse made one ritually unclean according to the Jewish law. Yet, in keeping with the prophetic words of Hosea that he had just proclaimed, Jesus shows no hesitation in responding to the request and gets up immediately to follow the man.

But before this incident can reach its conclusion, another figure enters the scene: a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. Her condition rendered her perpetually ritually unclean according to Jewish law, along with anyone and anything that she touched. The isolation to which her condition relegated her must surely have contributed enormously to the suffering she experienced those many years. A condition she could not control and from which she desperately sought healing confined her to the periphery of religious and social life. We have no idea how she knew about Jesus. We only know that she believed in his power to free her from her long suffering. And so she came up behind him and touched the fringe, the very edge, of his garment. That touch rendered Jesus ritually unclean, but when he turned and looked at her that was not his concern but rather love and compassion for this woman. He saw her suffering, her desperation, her need for healing. He did not rebuke her but rather showed mercy. “Take heart daughter. Your faith has made you well.” And immediately she was freed from her suffering. Her life completely changed.

Only after the healing of the hemorrhaging woman does the narrative continue with the account of the young girl who had died. Jesus and his disciples come to the home and find a commotion, with the flute players that traditionally accompany the occasion of a death and many who were filled with grief and distress by such a young life cut short. Remarkably, Jesus tells them to depart, for the girl is not dead but only sleeping. He enters the house and does exactly as the father had asked. He takes the little girl by the hand and raises her to new life. A touch that rendered him ritually unclean becomes a miraculous moment of mercy for the young girl and for all those who loved her. Life is brought from death, mourning turn to joy—all flowing from the undeserved yet freely given mercy of God.

The various scenes that comprise this gospel passage unite in their testimony to the transformative power of God’s mercy. In calling Matthew and dining with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus shows those whom others considered irredeemably lost that it was possible for their lives to be changed, that they were more than the worst things they had done in their lives. He calls into his fellowship those of all backgrounds— sinners, the righteous, everyone in between, offering the simple yet life changing summons, “Follow me.” With the touch of his garment, the hemorrhaging woman is healed and her life changed. Grabbing the hand of the young woman, Jesus raises her from death to new life. In all cases, for Jesus, mercy is the priority above all else in his mission of seeking out sinners, the sick, the lost, the forgotten, the unloved. As the late Pope Francis so strikingly put it, “The name of God is mercy.”

The same gift is freely offered to us as well. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done or what you’ve failed to do, you are never beyond the all-embracing love and mercy of God. Jesus offers you the possibility of a changed life lived in his presence, saying, simply, “Follow me.” As we freely receive this gift of mercy, so too are we to freely offer it to others. We can start best in the reality of our daily life— by extending mercy to a colleague who so frustrates and bothers us, to the driver who cuts us off on our daily commute, to those with whom we vehemently disagree and find it nearly impossible to understand, to our families and friends whom we love dearly but who can also hurt and disappoint us. These are just small ways we can begin to imagine a world in which mercy prevails, a world in which we truly live as Jesus taught us, “Be merciful as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). To be disciples of Jesus is to pattern our lives on his, to follow in his ways, and to go and learn what he teaches, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” To him with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be honor, glory, worship, and praise, now and forevermore. Amen.