Hosea 6:4-6 (NRSV Updated Edition)
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes away early.
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;
I have killed them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
Matthew 9:9-13 (NRSV Updated Edition)
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “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 not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
~
"Why do churches, ostensibly following a Messiah who broke bread with 'tax collectors and sinners', so often retreat into practices of exclusion and the quarantine of gated communities? Why is it so difficult to create missional churches? In seeking answers to those questions I had been thinking a great deal about Jesus's response to the Pharisees in Matthew 9. In defending his ministry of table fellowship - eating with 'tax collectors and sinners' - Jesus tells the Pharisees to go and learn what it means that God desires 'mercy, not sacrifice'.
...
"[The] antagonism between mercy and sacrifice is *psychological* in nature. Our primitive understandings of both love and purity are regulated by psychological dynamics that are often incompatible. Take, for example, a popular recommendation from my childhood years. I was often told that I should 'hate the sin, but love the sinner'. Theologically, to my young mind (and, apparently, to the adults who shared it with me), this formulation seemed clear and straightforward. However, psychologically speaking, this recommendation was extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to put into practice.
"As any self-reflective person knows, empathy and moral outrage tend to function at cross-purposes. In fact, some religious communities resist empathy, as any softness toward or solidarity with 'sinners' attenuates the moral fury the group can muster. Conversely, it is extraordinarily difficult to 'love the sinner' - to respond to people tenderly, empathically, and mercifully - when you are full of moral anger over their behaviour.
...
"These psychological dynamics help illuminate the events in Matthew 9, the tension between mercy and sacrifice. And it also explains why this tension will be a constant and consistent temptation in the life of the church. In the actions of the Pharisees we see how the experience of purity (the sacrificial impulse) had come to replace morality (the mercy impulse)...
"[Although] the experience of purity helps us understand morality, the metaphorical connection between the two is so deep that the experience of physical purity can come to replace moral action. And, given that the church is awash in purity metaphors, particularly those churches who privilege penal substitutionary thinking, there exists a constant danger that the church exchange the private *experience* of salvation, being washed in the blood of the Lamb, for passionate missional *engagement* with the world."
- Richard Beck, "Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality", pp 1-3, 46-47
~
"[I]t seems to me that the key instruction of the New Testament with relation to moral discourse, and it is a doubly sacred instruction, for it is one of the very few places where Jesus quotes the Hebrew Scriptures with absolute approval — and he quotes it twice. The key instruction for those of us who are trying to make use of the religious word in some moral sense, and there is no moral theology that is not that, is:
“But go and learn what it means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’” (Matt. 9:13; see also Matt. 12:7, both quoting Hos 6:6)
"Please notice that this is now no longer an instruction just for the Pharisees, but is, so to speak, the program-guide for whoever tries to do moral theology. Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, ... so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion. And this means that there is no access to goodness which does not pass through our own discovery of our complicity in hypocrisy, for it is only as we identify with the “righteous just” of the story that we realize how “good” their procedure was, how careful, scrupulous, law-abiding, they were, and thus, how catastrophic our goodness can be, if we don’t learn step by step how to get out of solidarity with the mechanism of the construction of the unity of the group by the exclusion of whoever is considered to be evil.
...
"[...] I’d like to underline this: what the Christian faith offers us in the moral sphere is not law, nor a way of shoring up the order or structure of the supposed goodness of this world, much less the demand that we sally forth on a crusade in favor of these things. It offers us something much more subtle. It offers us a mechanism for the subversion from within of all human goodness, including our own. This is the same thing as saying that the beginning of a Christian moral life is a stumbling into an awareness of our own complicity in hypocrisy, and a becoming aware of quite how violent that hypocrisy is.
"Starting from there we can begin to stretch out our hands to our brothers and sisters, neither more nor less hypocritical than ourselves, who are on the way to being expelled from the “synagogue” by an apparently united order, which has an excessive and militant certainty as to the evil of the other. Let us then go and learn what this means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’"
- James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment, pp. 20, 26
[Source of James Alison quote, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_5a/]
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