Text: Matthew 9:9-13; 18-26
9 ¶ As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But 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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18 ¶ While he was saying this, a ruler came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples. 20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed from that moment. 23 When Jesus entered the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the noisy crowd, 24 he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. 25 After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. 26 News of this spread through all that region.
Theme: Jesus and Social Outcasts
Date: October 27, 2009 PM
Place: Trinity Wesleyan Church
Three Stages of Ol Suit.
Jennifer Toth has written a fine – and yet disturbing – book entitled, ‘The Mole People’.[1] She speaks, of course, not of some half-human by-product of a mad-scientist’s genetic experimentation but of the broken people, twisted by sin, disease, and addiction, who fill – by the thousands – the subway tunnels and abandoned subterranean dwellings far below the streets of New York City. They are the ultimate outcasts of our day.
Policemen fear to descend into the dark caverns they inhabit and with good reason; some of their “brothers in blue” have met an untimely death in that lawless underground frontier. Even social workers are reluctant to go down into the bowels of the earth there to search for the sick and the dying. It is said that “The Mole People” have no friends and recognize no allies. Everyone is assumed to be against them; everyone is their enemy.
They are true outcasts. Until Ms. Toth published her book (complete with pictures and other evidence) the official position of the New York police was that there are no “mole people”. Until her book, there was no program to try to reach “the mole people” and their children. Even now the outreach is severely limited and there are only two social workers assigned to work with a population estimated to be as many as 10,000 people.
You and I might hear of them and say to ourselves, “They have chosen to live the way they do and, therefore, deserve nothing in the way of help or aid.” And, with the exception of the large number of the mentally ill and the children of addicts and alcoholics, we would be right. Many are only getting what they deserve. In truth, they have chosen the life they live.
But grace is about getting the life we do not deserve. It is about God giving us another chance…after we have squandered every chance He has already given us. And Jesus is all about grace.
Do you see it in today’s text? Do you see Jesus disappointing the expectations of the religious in order to reach the outcasts of that day? By identifying with the outcast He, Himself, becomes an outcast of sorts.
Jesus loves sinners and outcasts. Truly. Deeply. Completely.
EXAMPLE ONE – Matthew, a tax-collector
Tax-collectors were hated even more in that day than in our own. There are some accounts of beggars refusing charity from those known to be tax-gatherers for the hated Roman government!
Yet, as He passes by, Jesus invites this man in a publicly hated job to come and follow Him…to be a part of His team.
Incidentally, that Tax-Collector was the very same man who is now telling us this story – St. Matthew, himself.[2]
EXAMPLE TWO – THE BANQUET OF SINNERS
Jesus broke with tradition and the religious code of the Pharisees by going to Matthew’s house for dinner. All kinds of people were there. Matthew tells us that they were all outcasts…“tax collectors and other ‘sinners’.”
Matthew also tells us that the religious folk had a royal fit when they saw Jesus (who claimed He was a teacher of the Law) eating and fellowshipping with that crowd.
But Jesus had an answer for them. He said: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (v. 12, 13)
EXAMPLE THREE – The Temple Ruler and hemorrhaging Woman
1. A man, said to be “a ruler”, (that is, he was “a ruler of the synagogue”[3] whose job it was to strictly enforce every part of the religious code), comes to Jesus with a hopeless request. His daughter has died and he knows that only Jesus can help her now. He asks whether Jesus would be willing to come to his home and give her new life? Yes. Jesus was willing.
But Jesus also had a lesson to teach this desperate Jewish ruler. (Jesus often teaches His most valuable lessons when pain or sorrow forces us to give Him our whole attention.)
Along the way to the house where the ruler’s dead daughter was lying, a woman, who had a constant hemorrhage and had been bleeding for twelve years, decided to break a very important social taboo and touch Jesus. She knew just one touch would heal her. But that same touch would also make Jesus unfit to enter the house of a temple ruler.
Now the synagogue ruler has a decision to make. He can stick with the rules of the synagogue and turn Jesus away from his house (and lose every hope for his daughter’s recovery). Or, he can choose to trust Jesus and take his place on Jesus’ side of the line the Pharisees have drawn.
Matthew makes it quite clear what the ruler chose to do. It may have cost him his job, we are not told. But whether or not he lost his job as synagogue manager one thing is certain…by the end of the visit with Jesus, he had his little girl back!
Now I need to pause here to make certain that you do not misunderstand: Jesus hates sin. You have only to look at the cross to see that. He hates sin because of what it does to people. He hates sin because of what it does to their relationships with one another and, most importantly, their relationship with God. But Jesus loves sinners. Again, you have only to look at the cross for proof of this.
I offer, (as evidence that Jesus hates sin but loves sinners), the testimony of St. Luke. In Luke’s account he describes Jesus sitting and dining with sinners and says that it was then that Jesus told the stories of the “Lost Sheep” and “The Prodigal Son”.[4] Both stories condemn sin but they also reveal God as One Who is seeking the lost.
We Are All Outcasts, Each and EVERYONE of US
When our story started out, the line between the “good” people and the “bad” was bold and clear. The “good” people were the religious folk. The “bad” people were the outcasts. But something has happened along the way, today. Did you see it?
By the end of the story, the outcasts are standing on Jesus’ side of the line…and the “good” folk of the temple are standing on the other side. By rejecting Jesus they thought they’d make Him into an outcast. But what really happened was that they had become the outcasts…outcasts from God.
Earlier in this Gospel we hear Jesus speaking to another group of people and what He has to say to them is deeply troubling. He said, (Matt. 7:21-23) “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”
Let us be careful, brothers and sisters, to be on the right side of that line lest we should be outcasts at the last.
I read this week, a bit of poetry by a fellow who is angry with the church. I think maybe he has a right to be. Here’s what he wrote:
CROSS THE STREET
He walks across
to the other side
where the sidewalk smells
where hookers stand
where junkies nod
where runaways beg
where the real world grinds
where the hearts explode
where marriages fail
where bank accounts dry up
where harsh words pierce
He is not locked up
in a seminary
in a church
on a TV set
in a separate world
He is not afraid
to touch us as we are
to pierce our darkness
to break our chains
to catch our tears
and hear our screams
He crosses the street
to where we live
He carries the weight
that drags us down
and does not run
when we rub against Him
with our pain and fear
sin and shame
death and decay
He crosses the street
He crosses the street [5]
The Gospel is Good News. And the Good News is that God is with us in Jesus Christ. God is with ‘the Mole People’, the tax-collectors, the sick, the religious person whose religion has failed; God is with the outcasts.
The question facing us is: “Who are we with?”
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Another beautiful example of Jesus choosing to side with the outcast:
[1] Toth, Jennifer –Chicago Review Press, 1993 ISBN: 1-55652-190-1, pbk ISBN: 1-55652-241-X
[2] I concur with the early “church fathers” who believed in the existence of a real Matthew and his authorship of this Gospel. One of the earliest fathers to comment on this Gospel was “Papias, bishop of Hierapolis (Phrygia) [who wrote]: ‘Matthew gathered the sayings (of Jesus) in the Hebrew tongue, and each person translated them as he was able.’” (from Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History 3.39.16) These words of Papias were written in about A.D. 120…well within one generation from the days in which the Apostles wrote and preached.
[3] See Mark 5 and Luke 8 for cross-references on this account.
[4] See Luke 14 & 15
[5] http://www.outcastpress.org/relkills/relkills.htm “Religion Kills”
