3rd Sunday after Pentecost.
June 5, 2005
Matthew 9:9-13.

^9:9As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. ¹⁰And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. ¹¹When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹² But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (NRS).

3rd Sunday after Pentecost

  Suppose that Jesus were visibly present here on earth going about his ministry like he did at the time of Matthew. Where would he go and with whom would he spend his time? I think he might go to a place like San Francisco and spend time with homosexual atheists in a gay bar. Or he might go to Vancouver and spend time with prostitutes like those who apparently wound up dead on Pickton’s pig farm. Would that bother you? Would you feel that it wasn’t really right for Jesus to spend most of his time with people like that rather than in churches with people like us?

  I have to admit that this thought is a bit disturbing. Some of those people seem like victims: a young girl who gets hooked on heroin and then has to sell her body to pay for the drugs she now cannot live without. I can have great sympathy for someone like that. But I am hard pressed to feel sympathy for a man who has rejected Christ, the Church and the Word of God and decides to “take a walk on the wild side.” If he were to get Aids I would probably feel that he was getting his just reward. The fact that he was perishing, both physically and spiritually, would not be that important.

  Like the Pharisees, we need to grapple with Jesus’ words, Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. In other words, in Jesus’ world, mercy takes precedence over religious duty and sinners take precedence over the righteous. This is what we must go and learn!

  In our reading, we meet three types of people. First, there are the tax-collectors and other sinners. Perhaps the best way to describe these people is that they were converts from Judaism to paganism. They were Jews who knew the commandments of God. They were surrounded by God fearing people who always observed the Sabbath. They were surrounded by synagogues where Moses and the Prophets were read and studied. Those in Jerusalem could see the magnificent temple of Herod the Great. No one taught them in public school to be atheists or idolaters. No one taught them that it was good to collect taxes for the pagan Romans or to be a prostitute or a thief and just give up trying to keep the commandments. No they seemed to choose that life for themselves. Maybe they regretted the outcome, but with a few exceptions, they followed their own desires for riches or whatever. Everyone knew that they were damned—including themselves—so it was best to just avoid them because you didn’t want to end up one of them.

  Then there are the Pharisees. They are the religious elite, the truly pious who go to extreme lengths to keep the commandments and, of course, be seen doing so. They despised the tax-collectors and other sinners not only because these sinners were morally weak and ignorant of God’s law, but also because contact with them defiled you. Their sin would contaminate you and make you less acceptable to God. They would tarnish the shine on your halo.

  But before we start thinking that they must have been terribly arrogant snobs, put yourself in their situation. They didn’t know how to change sinners. The Pharisee could really only tell a sinner how badly he would suffer at the judgment and encourage him to repent and keep the commandments. They didn’t have a message of forgiveness and mercy and a new beginning. Just shape or ship out.

  That is the way good Jews thought. So they expected Jesus—the third person in this account—to do the same. But Jesus didn’t do the same! After his “Sermon on the Mount,” a sample of Jesus’ words, Matthew reports a series of Jesus’ deeds, mostly miracles. He heals a leper, a pagan Roman’s servant, Peter’s mother-in-law, two demon possessed men, a paralysed man, two blind men and a dumb man. He also raises a little girl from the dead. In the middle of all this, Jesus calls Matthew the tax-collector to follow him and eats with Matthew and other sinners! What we see is Jesus healing and ministering to people who are on the fringes of Jewish society, the disenfranchised, people without public status and power.

  The Pharisees could not do those miracles. But that was not the problem. The problem was that the Pharisees tried to keep Jesus from doing all this. He could touch lepers or the dead and not be contaminated. He could cast our demons and not be harmed. And he could eat with sinners without being led into sin. In fact, when Jesus ate with sinners, spent quality time with them, they came to repentance! But the Pharisees didn’t think it right for him to eat with Matthew and his kind. They had so forgotten that God is interested in saving people not condemning them, that when Jesus did that, it went right over their heads. So Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea to them, Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’

  The sin of the Pharisees—one into which we easily fall—is that they imagined that God valued performance of religious duty more than mercy, that God valued good church-going people more than sinners. But they were wrong. That’s why Jesus said to them another time, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! (Matthew 23:23-24).

  Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. That is what Jesus is all about! And so that is what you and I are to be all about. Like Jesus—as his body—we are to value mercy over religious duty and sinners over the righteous. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. (Matthew 18:12-13).

  It’s easy to lose that focus. We are in the process of making a church building for ourselves. We will be occupied with that task for the next couple months at least. That can easily become our focus rather than sinners who need yet to know the mercy of God. If that church building is to serve in God’s kingdom, it must serve to call sinners to the mercy of God in Jesus Christ.

  At some point in the past, you, or your parents or grandparents encountered the mercy of God. You learned that Jesus came to take away the sin of the world, rather than to cram the world’s sin down its throat and roast it in hell. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17). God’s purpose is to save, to save every filthy, lazy, vile, unworthy one of us. We can’t loose sight of that fact. We can’t think that God has shifted his focus mainly to our religious duty.

  Now let’s not take the illogical step that our religious duty is unimportant. Willful sin will kill you! As we read last week, Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. (Matthew 7:21). But we saw that it is imperative that we do what Jesus says so that we will not be deceived and loose faith, or rather today I should say, lest we loose mercy. For we are dependent on mercy, on Jesus’ death in our place. And he died for all, whether that be the addict street walkers and the gay atheists or you and me. God wants to save them. He wants them too to know mercy so that they can be changed. We must never change God’s purpose to one that seeks to exclude people from the kingdom. The purpose must always be to heal sinners. Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.

  Two possible errors confront us. One is that we open the door to sinners and their sin. We cannot accept sin because Jesus does not accept sin. We cannot accept one who continues to be a fornicator, an idolater, an adulterer, a male prostitute, a sodomite, a thief, the greedy, drunkards, revilers and robbers, to quote Paul (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). We accept people who have repented of those things, been baptized and justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The door is open to sinners. We beckon them to come in. But their sin stays at the door!

  The other error is to become like the Pharisees and close the door. An American pastor noted that the conservative churches of today—and we are one of them—are in greater danger than ever of falling into the idolatry of Pharisaism. He says that we are investing too much of our time in passing legislation designed to make our country more moral and not enough time practicing mercy. He challenges us to find one word from the mouth of Jesus or his Apostles that tell us to go and make laws to make America or any other country more moral. Rather, Jesus said “Go make disciples by baptizing and teaching.”

  Like Jesus we are to go to the lost. We are to go to the woman who had an abortion and say, “Let me tell you about the mercy of Christ.” We are to go to the homosexual and say, “Let me tell you about the mercy of Christ.” We are to go to the prostitute and say, “Let me tell you about the mercy of Christ.”

  Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. To learn that is to receive the gift of life! To learn that is to hear Jesus’ word and do it, to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Shortly we will learn it again as we receive Jesus’ body and blood and ourselves receive his undeserved mercy. And having learned that Jesus values mercy over religious duty and sinners over the righteous, let us go and do the same.