Preaching Paths 11 June 2023

Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary

Mt 9:9-13, 18-26 presents in four interlocked scenes the shocking, boundary-crossing nature of Jesus’ interpretation of the reign of God.

Scene I: Rabbis like Jesus would choose disciples to learn their teachings and emulate their way of life, but none would choose a tax collector! Tax collectors made their living by aiding and abetting the Roman occupier. They were banned from Temple worship.  Yet , Jesus stops at Levi’s tax booth: “Follow me.” Levi abandons his tax station and follows.

Scene II: Consequently, tax collectors and “sinners” (a mixed collection of the ritually unclean) flock to the house where Jesus sits at table. The Pharisees, ever alert for law-breaking activity, come to interrogate Jesus’ disciples about their master’s choice to eat with sinners. Jesus confronts his accusers directly: “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” He refers his critics to scripture: “Learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (see Hosea 6:6)—an interpretive key for this text as a whole.

Scene III, Part 1: The meal is interrupted by a distraught father, a leader of the synagogue no less, whose daughter has just died. He believes Jesus can yet intervene. He would know full well that for Jesus to touch a dead body would render him “unclean” (see Lev 21:1-4), but implores him anyway in desperation. Jesus gets up and goes with him.

Scene IV: On the way through the town, Jesus’ garment is touched by a woman with a ceaseless hemorrhage. Contact, intentional or unintentional, with a bleeding woman rendered one unclean. Yet—far from trying to hide this contaminating contact—Jesus turns deliberately to engage the woman. (Note: social norms prohibited addressing any woman except one’s wife in public.) “Take heart, woman,” says Jesus. “Your faith has made you well.” In Mt’s version of this story, it is this exchange that precipitates her healing.

Scene III, Part 2: At the synagogue leader’s home, Jesus dismisses the wailing mourners, insisting the young girl is not dead, but sleeping.  The crowd laughs; how absurd! Once they’ve dispersed, Jesus takes the child by the hand. She awakes as from sleep and gets up. Little wonder that “news of this spread throughout that region” (v.26) !

Jesus demonstrates again and again the shocking, boundary-crossing mercy characteristic of the reign of God: calling a man of despised occupation, engaging a chronically ill woman, rescuing a child written off as beyond help.  (Who and where are such among us today?) Jesus doesn’t withdraw fastidiously into a “clean” zone that excludes and discards some as unworthy. He deliberately engages human brokenness.

Preachers must avoid an anti-Semitic slant: Matthew’s community saw Jesus as a reformer within Judaism, a “new” Moses interpreting Jewish law through the lens of Infinite Mercy.