Centering our love on the unloved
Proper 5A | Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
We have arrived once again to Ordinary Time. We’ve been in Lent and Easter for weeks and weeks, but now we’re here in the seasonless season counted in weeks after Pentecost. Ordinary Time. The regular kind.
One of the joys of Ordinary Time is that we get to go through the gospel story in relative order, and so today we pick up the narrative thread toward the beginning. Now, where we were way back in February was in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), where Jesus casts a vision of the Kin-dom that is eminently challenging to those in power. It is a passionate, captivating, and beautiful vision.
Our gospel then jumps into the middle of chapter nine, so we miss quite a lot of story. And a lot of stuff we already know. But there’s something to seeing these pieces rub against each other that connects it and makes it all come alive. Like, I could easily sum up chapter eight by saying that there’s a bunch of healings. But that would mean skipping over the healing of a gentile, which expands the conversation beyond the Hebrew people, and the stilling of the storm, which is a shocking display of raw power. Jesus pushes the boundaries and challenges expectations.
Power Over Creation!?
The stilling of the storm is a story I take particular note of each time. Coming so soon after Jesus expands the mission to the world, he also expands the power of the Messiah to all of creation. The script the people who encounter Jesus have is that of a healer and teacher. That someone might come along who can make sickness go away or show the right way to live. Jesus was also hinting at his being the Messiah and divinely-driven king. And that script has power and glory attached to it.
But here, Jesus kicks down the barriers and reveals a scope that goes well beyond their imagination. He reveals frightening power over the elements, over life and death, that they can’t comprehend. Power that people just don’t have. This stuff: healers don’t do that. Messiahs don’t do that. Only gods do that.
Then they go to the other side in a boat like it’s no big deal. And over there, people start bringing their sick loved ones to Jesus. And somebody brings a man to Jesus who is paralyzed and Jesus says that his sins are forgiven. Some people hear this and are like, that’s a God thing, not a man thing; that’s blasphemy. And the text says that Jesus reads their hearts. And he finds evil there. So he asks why they rather think evil than invite good. He says “For which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?” Then, of course, he heals the man who walks away. Healed and forgiven.
This moment informs what comes next: Jesus chilling with so-called sinners.
So-Called Sinner
I’m saying that they are so-called because the word sinner has totally lost the plot. And I think it had in Jesus’s day, too.
Sin is not a personal failing or an isolated event. Sin is always about relationship. It is, in this way, like love, like the Trinity, like creation itself: always in relationship with everything else. When we speak of sin, we are speaking to violations and abuse and moments of disruption which rend and tear at the relational fabric of families and communities. This isn’t about a problem one person has, as if they are always alone.
This is why families and friends stage interventions for those suffering with alcoholism. Because it isn’t merely an individual failure, but a collective pain born by the family, friends, and wider community.
And yet, what happened in the first century is so much like 21st century fundamentalism that ostracizes and blames the already separated. The evil Jesus diagnosed in the hearts of the skeptics involved their vision of seeing the suffering of paralyzed persons as the result of sin. This is the same thing they are thinking as Jesus is sitting with a bunch of the wrong sort of people. People the faithful would confidently declare with gleeful pride are rightfully suffering in their sin. Happily convinced that these people are getting what they deserve.
Jesus sitting with them, then, is a violation. It is like being a class traitor. Like he is supposed to join them at the country club, not slum it with the people who deserve their poverty.
“You’re Fine!”
Friends, know that this isn’t how sin works. And it reflects the very reversal that Jesus is offering here. He compares himself to a doctor who is treating the sick, not the healthy. An idea that obliterates the very concept of their rejection, revealing its ridiculous logic and evil desire.
As we ourselves think through this, we should take note of Jesus’s own conviction, here, which is two-fold. He says
“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
This isn’t intended to be a simple “call-out” of the evil hearts of the righteous insiders for the benefit of the public. We’ll see that at the Temple. This is about mercy. Mercy for the people who need it.
And here, I think, Jesus invites us into the most challenging part of it all. To recognize, not just that these poor so-called sinners need mercy. And not just that the pious oppressors do, too. But the mercy these people right here need, right now, is greater than of the people who are already pretty right with God. It is a lot like the parable of the lost sheep: the shepherd leaves the 99 to fend for themselves to search after the one because the one has nobody and the 99 have each other. The pious have each other. Mercy for them is like Rub some dirt on it. You’re fine.
This is one of the things protestants and catholics have all struggled with for very different reasons. But most often because they both will make it about individual sin and restoration, that all of us are sinful and need to be restored, rather than engage with Jesus’s vision of mercy as we see it here: love these people in their need.
More Than Healing
The gospel then jumps over a question about fasting, specifically why Jesus doesn’t make his disciples do it, which we could spend another ten minutes on, but let us just add to the tension of sin and mercy and being with the people who need it and that Jesus doubles down on his conviction here: that the pious are fine. The faithful are going to fast eventually. That day is coming. We need to be able to contend with what God is doing with freshness and mercy. That’s Mary choosing the better part. To be with people in their moment.
All of this informs that big moment when Jesus is being pulled in two directions, by people in need. One to raise his daughter from the dead and the other a woman suffering for over a decade. And we might easily classify them as healings, like in chapter eight so we can move on. But for Jesus, it is neither humdrum miracle work nor proof of any divine greatness, but the fulfillment of God’s grace and the restoration of the people who need it most.
Our passage ends with a development that should be as shocking to the disciples as the stilling of the storm. Because now Jesus is breaking another law that governs the universe. And yet he dismisses the people’s insistence that she was, in fact, dead. “Go away,” he says, “for the girl is not dead but sleeping.”
The text says they laughed at him. Because they knew. And we know. But Jesus is claiming something else. Not to gaslight us and convince us, but to reorient our attention. In a sense, he’s saying I’m not that special! Because the point isn’t Jesus or the miracle. It’s the grace itself.
Centering Mercy
It’s probably not the wisest thing for a priest to say that Christians are a little too Christocentric—Jesus-centered. It’s kind of our deal. And there are important reasons why it is important for us to focus on Jesus and not just draw all of our attention to the Unity, to use a Trinity Sunday word. So I don’t want to tell us to focus less on Jesus.
It’s more like our obsession with Jesus is a bit divinity groupie. Like, we’re following him around like we’re Dead Heads and he’s Jerry Garcia. Meanwhile, Jesus is drawing our attention to the relationship. He’s drawing us to our relationship to him, to God and the Holy Spirit, to each other, to our neighbors and our enemies, to strangers and immigrants, to the poor and the hungry, to prisoners and the infirmed, to people who have everything and to the people most in need. He keeps telling us to love them. And not just love them, but serve them. And feed them. House them and welcome them and comfort them and all the many things.
And then, when we get to the end of the line, the last teaching Jesus will offer them before setting out for the Garden of Gethsemane is to meet the needs of the people around them. The people most in need. And they’ll find, as we will find, in the end, that it was Jesus we served, helped, healed, and fed. He tells them that the best way to love him is to love people who need love.
This is the part of it we know is true and still struggle to deal with. Because we want to be saved too. We want this thing to include us. And Jesus has already assured us that we’re good. We’re in. This is about loving those who aren’t.
It’s about mercy. And making it the center of our attention.