From the Lectionary for 14 June 2026 (Proper 6A)

Matthew 9:35-10:8 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not take a road leading to gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.”

~

"[I]n the measure that we learn unconcern about our reputation, in that measure the Father can produce in us the same love which he has for his Son, and the same love which he and his Son have for the human race. Here is where we have to make an imaginative effort, or at least I do. That love is in no way marked by any desire for vindication, for restoring besmirched reputations, for turning the tables of this world, and all that might seem to us to be just and proper, given the horror of the violence of our world. That love loves all that! It loves the persecutors, the scandalized, it loves the depressives and the traitors and the finger pointers.

"That love doesn't seek a fulminating revelation of what has really been going on as a final vengeance for all the violence, even though we may fear that it will be so. That love is utterly removed from being party to any final settling of accounts. That love, the love which was the inner dynamic of the coming of the Son to the world, of Jesus' historical living out, seeks desperately and insatiably that good and evil may participate in a wedding banquet.

"This means that it is the mind fixed on the things that are above which allows the heart to be re-formed in the image of the Father's love, forgiving the traitors, the executioners, the persecutors, the weak, those gone astray, not on account of some ethical demand, or so as to obey some commandment, but quite simply because they are loved, they are delighted in.

"When Luke has Jesus on the Cross say: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34), he was not only depicting a Jesus who was effectively revealing the mechanism of death, which includes the blindness of its participants as to what they are doing, nor was it an ethical imperative that Jesus should forgive them so that he might go to his Father ‘clean’; rather it was just that, in truth, and without any remorse or sadomasochism, Jesus loved his slayers.

"This means that when we are able to stand loose from our reputation, and because of that, from our need to insist on a day of reckoning, the eschatological imagination, the mind fixed on the things that are above, begins to give us the capacity to love human beings without any sort of discrimination, in imitation of that love, quite without rivalry, which the Father has for us. Another way of saying this is to say that there begins to be formed within us something of a shepherd's heart which is deeply moved by humans and human waywardness.

"Please notice that “heart of a shepherd” means being able to look at wolves in their sheepliness. It is not a question of us fearing that there are many people dressed as sheep who are, in fact, wolves, but, on the contrary, of being able creatively to imagine wolves as, in some, more or less well-hidden part of their lives, in fact, sheep, and to love them as such.

"Various times in the Gospel the word 'splangchnidzomai' crops up, which we usually translate as “moved with compassion.” Jesus was moved with compassion by this or that person or situation, or that the multitudes should be like sheep having no shepherd (Matt. 9:36). However the word is rather strong, and means a deep commotion of the entrails, a visceral commotion.

"This is what is so hard to imagine: as we become unhooked from our partisan loves, our searches, our clinging to reputation, with these formed in reaction to this situation or that, there begins to be formed in us that absolutely gratuitous visceral commotion, born outside all reaction, which the ancients called agape and which is nothing other than the inexplicable love which God has for us in our violence and our scandals. We begin to be able not only to know ourselves loved as human beings, but to be able to love other humans, to love the human race and condition."

- James Alison, Raising Abel, pp. 187-188

~

"The first thing we see about [Jesus] is that he's looking at them and he's gut-wrenched. He has an extraordinary sense of love for these people, he doesn't regard them as rioters or protestors or difficult people, people he needs to pacify in some way. No, he sees people who are harassed like sheep with a shepherd, and he longs for their building up and for their good.

"So his first reaction is not to send in some sort of force of order - judges, people who will sort them out, deal with their problems [...] and tell them to get on with it. No, it's very much more holistic than that. He seems to want to choose rather ordinary people to work in their midst alongside them, and his response, once he's been moved is to say, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” In other words, he's asking them to ask God for something. He wants the request to come from us. He can see what can be done, but it's not to be done from above, it's to be done by people from inside [...]

"Sending is when they become apostles, from the word 'apostela' meaning to send. He summons the twelve disciples and gives them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to cure every disease and every sickness. It's interesting his first reaction is not 'go out amongst them and sort them out, make them right, make them behave. No, it's an act of mercy, to see all the collapsed forms of in-between, what I call the in-between: the sick relationships - social, personal, inter-familiar, economic - all of the ways in which our in-betweens build us up and can imprison us. This is the world of evil spirits, of mental health problems, of profound psychic and psychosomatic sicknesses. This is people bent double, in ways that many many of us still are, and many many countries still are, by various forms of imprisonment tied into repetitive mechanisms of self-destructive behaviour. All of this is part of us not flourishing.

"Again he sends people alongside them, people with ordinary names - we think of them as very important names because they are the Apostles, but these are ordinary people, this is Pete and Jim and Andy, Tom, and eventually of course the guy who will betray him: Judas. And so we're talking about a very low-key, very gentle sending into the midst of a group of people but who didn't know where they're going... All of these kinds of things he was seeing and then pointing people to go and move into that world [...]

"[H]e is wanting to build the humanity of the people, not give them a specific religious instruction. So, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.” In other words, they are to be very very vulnerable but never transactional - there is to be no quid pro quo, no payment, because that would be just to take part in the sickness of the society.

"There's this completely gratuitous element of the sending which involves vulnerability. And if you are sent and gratuitous and vulnerable, then you run the risk of being assailed by the various demons and bad things in the society, because all that comes to someone who's weak. But if you're able to stand and speak, that's when the demons start to go away, that's when people start to be set free. If you don't play tit for tat with that then people begin to sense what humanity looks like.

"So I think that this is a wonderful wonderful gospel for us at this time, and I would ask you to pray that we be given that heart, that gut-wrenched heart which Jesus had, and that we learn how to ask the Lord to send more laborers into the harvest and that we may become those laborers ourselves."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 11 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVjyx4_oyTM)

[Source of quote from James Alison's book Raising Abel, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_6a/]

From the Lectionary for 7 June 2026 (Proper 5A)

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 (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.”

-----

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. When Jesus came to the leader's house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread through all of that district.

~

"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; pp 46-47

~

"We now come to a sign of what Jesus actually is going to show us to be the life in the Spirit. So, “As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew” - yes, the very Matthew after whom this gospel is named - “sitting at the tax booth” - and he's seated and he's at this tax table - “and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

"Now, there's an awful lot going on in just this very simple phrase. So, he saw a man called Matthew. So here is the person to whom the gospel is attributed. The name given to the person whom Mark calls Levi son of Alfos. Matthew means 'giving from God'. It's difficult to have a less tax collector-like name than giving from God, the normal role of a tax collector is to take from the people. So literally what we have here is the account of someone whose experience of following the Lord has taken him from a grasper from the people into a giver from God. And that is the whole purpose, if you like, of Matthew's gospel. The signature is being brought in. You want to know what this looks like? Here is a gospel that you should read from the perspective of a sinner, someone who was not technically impure - which is probably why Matthew doesn't have the scribes criticizing this, as we'll see in a second, but only the Pharisees - but was somebody who was very certainly somebody of moral dubiousness. [...] We are going to hear the gospel from the perspective of a sinner, someone who was brought in.

"So Jesus walking along. Remember that we're going to be walking with Jesus. And here is the great sign of how are we to read this, how are we to understand. Well, we only really understand it if we're alongside and with a sinner, if we are able to be forgiven. Someone who's in the process of being forgiven will understand the gospel. Someone who is righteous and just will not understand the gospel.

[...]

"But when Jesus heard [the Pharisees' question about eating with the tax collectors, he] said, “Well, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” In other words, what's the point of hanging out with a bunch of people who get everything right. If they're getting everything right, we'll let them get on with it. I'm hanging out with people who don't get anything right, and let's see what comes of it.

"And then he says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous, but the sinners.” And this is a beautiful quote from the prophet Hosea, and it's a signature piece in Matthew's gospel - Jesus actually quotes it twice in Matthew's gospel. And it's more important than it seems because it's not just a quote. As with all Matthew's references, you're always required to stand back and actually have a look at the text that's really being talked about to see what it really means. And one of the beautiful things about this text is if you start in Hosea 5:15, which is just before these lines, the Lord says, “I will return again to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face. In their distress, they will beg my favor.” In other words, he's making quite clear that what Hosea was promising was that the arrival of the Lord before anybody starts to repent and that it's in his presence, because he's present, that they will be able to repent.

"“Come, let us return to the Lord, for it is he who has torn and he will heal us. He has struck down and he will bind us up. After two days, he will revive us. On the third day, he will raise us up.” So these are passages which are used in Holy Week to refer to the Passion. “Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord, his appearing is as sure as the dawn. He will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.”

"And then a little critical line: “What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early.” So nothing like the dawn which is actually going to be firm and actually present. Nothing like the showers that once they rain actually wet things and make the harvest better. No, like the morning mist at noon which just goes away. It doesn't seem to do anything. “Therefore I've hewn them by the prophets. I have killed them by the words of my mouth” - spoken the words - “and my judgment goes forth as the light.” And here is his judgment, the one who has come into the midst: “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

"So Jesus is actually enacting that in their midst. And you can see that that's actually rather more shocking a thing to say than just seems from the little quote. Anyhow, [clears throat] this is the sign of what it's going to be like to walking with Jesus. It's going to be walking with Jesus accompanying Matthew, a forgiven sinner.

"The church then asks us to jump a few verses about fasting and the bridegroom, which is a pity [...] because in fact our next passage, the passage which is actually in today's gospel, is all about the bridegroom and the bride.

[...]

"So, what's going on here in terms of walking with Matthew? Well, the daughter is the daughter of Zion. Let's have a look at this wonderful passage from Isaiah 62. “For Zion's sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake, I will not rest.” So, the daughter of Zion is the woman with the flow of blood. And Jerusalem is the daughter [of] the ruler who'd come. “Until her vindication shines out like the dawn and her salvation like a burning torch. The nations shall see your vindication and all the kings your glory [...] You shall no more be termed Forsaken and your land shall no more be called desolate. You shall be called My Delight is in Her and in your land Married, for the Lord delights in you and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you. And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”

"So please notice what has happened here. We've accompanied Jesus and we've seen him fulfilling the arrival of the bridegroom and we've seen him actually fulfilling that in terms were completely comprehensible to anyone with a notion of what Isaiah had said, these would be very well known verses. A woman who would be unable to be married and was kept out because of the blood, and a young woman who was not yet able to marry - she was too young but had died on the point being - who is dead. And neither the impurity of the one nor the impurity [as dead] of the other is any obstacle to the one who is come into the midst of his people in order to marry them.

"So this is how Matthew is going to show us what the arrival of the bridegroom is like in our midst. Entirely unconcerned about sinners like himself. Entirely unconcerned about sinners like us. This is the goodness of the Lord which he wants to bring out for us."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (Proper 5 RCL)" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARUslMnk4z8)

~

"[W]hat 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 quote from James Alison's Faith Beyond Resentment, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_5a/]