June 5, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Hosea 6:3-6 + Romans 4:18-25 + Matthew 9:9-13
Through the month of June, Matthew’s Gospel will have Jesus assembling and instructing his apostolic church. This week and next we get the Matthew version of his selection process, and then we finish the month with some initial instructions so that we do not get it wrong about what we are called to do and to become as members of the apostolic church.
The Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel invites us into his home. It is a wonderful tiny detail that makes a great difference. Luke has Matthew or “Levi”, as he calls him throw a dinner to which Jesus is invited, but the Jesus of Mark and Matthew’s Gospel is the divine host who invites the sinner into his home. This revelation of divine hospitality, of God as gracious host who invites and includes everyone is the cause for our joy this day as we sit and wonder at this wonderful turn of events. How unlike us is this great God who has no list of those included and those excluded! How wonderful it is to think that for once in our lives, we need not wonder nor worry about whether or not we are wanted or included, for deep inside us all is that lurking doubt that we will not be chosen, invited, or wanted. All that is wiped away by this Jesus who more than once in Matthew’s Gospel invites the unexpected into his home.
It prefigures the church, this assembly where only one thing is asked of us, mercy. That’s all he asks: “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.”
Sacrifice is a complex term in religious vocabulary. Authentic sacrifice reflects what is best about humanity, and the paradigm of Christian love is Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. It is crucial though, to discern between a sacrifice freely made out of authentic love which is an act of mercy, and a sacrifice made out of fear or some twisted belief that we have to pay back God for what we’ve been given or make up for our sins. The truth is, nothing can make up for our sins; and if we have to pay back God for what we have been given, then it would never have been a gift.
That kind of sacrifice threatens to make us hard resentful and self-righteous rather than trusting more deeply in the goodness of God as the source of our well-being and salvation. It can also make us very hard on those we love. It is this kind of sacrifice that Jesus would have none of.
It is mercy he desires, and the lived experience of mercy is the generous and loving gift of one’s whole self out of love for another. That is true sacrifice as we see it expressed in the love of Jesus for his Father, and the love of the Father in the sending of his only son to share the totality of the human experience, even helpless, violent death.
The trouble with the Pharisees was that their scrupulous concern to live exactly by the law drew distinctions between people, like the righteous and the sinners. Paul comes along and insists that Abraham was righteous because of his faith in God’s promise rather than by following a Law that had not been give yet. If Abraham could be righteous before there was a law, then the law is not the “be all and end all” of what makes someone righteous.
The graciousness of Jesus is our comfort, our joy, and our challenge today. His call for mercy, his inclusive behavior, and his invitation extended to us is what we celebrate around this altar. Your graciousness to each other, your welcome, your openness, your patience, and the hospitality of this parish is our living of this gospel. The Jesus who looked for people to invite and include lives now in us, and we are unworthy of his presence if we fail to live with that same spirit.
What must make us similar to Jesus is not that we attract people like ourselves, but that we reach across barriers to do so. Jesus reached out to Matthew a tax collector, then to a woman who was bleeding, then to a girl thought to be dead, and all of them bring their friends to meet the one who reached out to them. Out of this process rooted in the ministry of Jesus and practiced in the mission of the church, a new humanity is emerging, and the Lord’s table will be finally filled, for many will come from east and west and north and south to eat at the feast of salvation.