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.”
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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.
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"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."
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"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
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"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)
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"[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/]