Pastor Sandy Selby
Second Sunday after Pentecost - Year A
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Last Sunday at the 9:00 service, Pastor Jean invited forward five recent high school graduates from our congregation to receive scarves made by our Prayer Shawl Team, each in that person’s favorite color, or the color of the college they will be attending this fall. As they go forward in this next chapter of their lives, Pastor Jean reminded them of something they have heard her say many times here at Faith Lutheran Church. “There is nothing you can do to make God love you any more, or any less.” It’s a message that is at the heart of the gospel.
Today we begin the long, nearly six-month season of the Sundays after Pentecost that will take us to Advent. In the gospel lessons from Matthew, we’ll be walking with Jesus and his disciples through Galilee and Judea. In the Sermon on the Mount that we heard from Matthew’s gospel several months ago during the season of Epiphany, Jesus told us how we are to live. From here on out until the end of November, Jesus is going to show us how we are to live!
But first, let’s talk about context! As is true of all four gospels, Matthew’s was written within a particular context. The truth of the matter is we don’t know exactly where and when this gospel was written, or who actually wrote it, but it was probably written in the late first century in Antioch of Syria, which had a large Jewish population. It was written within the context of a lot of conflict—conflict between the early Christians and the Pharisees, their major opponents in the Jewish community, and conflict within the early Christian community, itself. So, much of the language in Matthew reflects that conflict, with very strong statements against the Pharisees, in particular, and at times against the Jewish people, in general.
I say this because as we hear, over the next many weeks, at times strident, seemingly anti-Jewish sentiment in Matthew’s gospel, we need to understand that it was written two thousand years ago, in a particular context, for a particular reason that was important to its author. Understanding the context in which Matthew was written is especially important because certain passages from Matthew, and from other gospels, were influential in the rise of antisemitism many centuries ago, and continue to fuel it today. When certain passages from Scripture are taken out of context and used as weapons, as they have been used against Jewish people for centuries, and against the LGBTQ community by some people today, the consequences can be devastating and, at times, deadly.
A story in this month’s issue of The Christian Century describes how many mainline congregations are wrestling with how to treat Scripture passages that can be interpreted as anti-Jewish, at times altering problematic language when reading the gospel stories during worship, at other times, removing it altogether. I’ll give you an example that happened right here, at Faith Lutheran Church, two months ago.
On Good Friday, our worship service was structured around a reading of Matthew’s Passion narrative, with five of us from the congregation assuming various roles in the narrative, and the choir reading the part of the crowds. The five readers got together here on the Saturday before Holy Week to practice, with Pastor Jean reading the part of the crowds that the choir would read on Good Friday. In Matthew’s gospel, when the crowd says they want Jesus to be crucified, Pilate takes some water, washes his hands before the crowd and says, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” Then, Matthew says, “the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and our children!’” (Mt 27:24-25).
When Pastor Jean read that line, “His blood be on us and our children!’” I said, “And that is one of the signature verses from Scripture that has fueled antisemitism for centuries!” At which point Em Antal said, “Whoa! That’s true!” Pastor Jean said she found it hard to believe that such a statement could actually be in the Bible! But it is, and that verse, “His blood be on us and our children!’” has been used as a deadly weapon against Jewish people ever since. So, as a group, Joe and Em Antal, Richard and Darlene Weaver, Pastor Jean and I, decided to remove that verse from our Good Friday liturgy altogether.
Our congregation has been in a collaborative partnership with our brothers and sisters at Temple Israel for several years. We take the ongoing reality of antisemitism seriously. We are followers of Jesus, who was Jewish at his birth, at his death, and in his ministry. And we will do whatever we can to see that the Bible will not be used as a weapon of violence and hatred against the very people whom Jesus called his own.
Thank you for listening to these thoughts that I hope will be helpful to us as we hear the readings from the gospel according to Matthew in the coming weeks with a particular sensitivity to the context within which it was written. And now, we join Jesus and his disciples, who in today’s lesson from the 9th chapter of Matthew are walking down a road in Galilee. Here, and in the lessons we will hear in coming weeks, Jesus is demonstrating, in deeds, what he told us, in words, in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy,” (5:7) and “In everything do to others as you would have them do for you; for this is the law and the prophets” (7:12).
In today’s lesson, Jesus encounters three people—a tax collector, a leader of the synagogue whose daughter has died, and a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years. Each of these are people Jesus could have avoided—and, accordingly to some of those around him, should have avoided—but Jesus engages with them. What Jesus will show us, time and again on the road to Jerusalem, is that we cannot put boundaries around God’s love, compassion and mercy.
First, Jesus encounters a tax collector and says, “Follow me,” which the tax collector does. Tax collectors were hated in those days because they were viewed as complicit with the oppressive Roman Empire. For Jesus to have beckoned that tax collector to follow him would have been seen by many as outrageous. Later, when the Pharisees ask why Jesus is having dinner with the tax collectors and sinners, Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick…For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Tax collectors and sinners are God’s children, to be treated with love, compassion, and mercy.
Next, we find the story of two people who come to Jesus not because he has called them to follow him, but because they are in desperate situations. They are from very different circumstances and social status: a man who as the leader of the synagogue would be way up the ladder in terms of status, and a woman who, as a woman, would have been way down at the bottom of that ladder. They share one thing in common: their faith in Jesus’s healing power, which he has been demonstrating in his ministry throughout Galilee.
The man kneels before Jesus and expresses his faith that if Jesus will come and lay his hand on his daughter who has died, she will come back to life. Jesus follows the man to his home. Along the way, the woman, who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, comes up from behind and touches the fringe of Jesus’ cloak because, as she says to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus, feeling this happen, says, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And, indeed, she is made well! Then he goes to the leader’s house, takes his daughter’s hand, and makes her well, too, bringing her back from death to life!
Jesus doesn’t care about the social class distinction between the daughter of the lofty leader of the synagogue and the lowly woman who has had the audacity to touch his cloak. Nor does he care that many in the crowd would frown on the fact that he had touched a dead person, or let a hemorrhaging woman touch him—both of which actions would, according to religious law, make Jesus impure. What mattered to Jesus was showing love, mercy, and compassion to those around him, no matter who they were, and no matter their life circumstance.
The tax collector who chose to leave his livelihood to follow Jesus, the temple leader who came to Jesus and knelt before him to implore him to bring his dead daughter back to life, and the hemorrhaging woman who came to Jesus and touched the fringe of his cloak, all came to Jesus believing that through him their lives would be transformed, and their burdens removed. In each case, they turned their lives over to the power of God’s love, compassion, and mercy, and their lives were, indeed, transformed!
During our time together this morning, and when we leave here to go about our day, we will at times hear the sound of motorcycles—sometimes very loud motorcycles—heading up and down West Market Street. This is Founders Day weekend, when thousands of people have come to Akron to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, 88 years ago. They come here in thanksgiving that, having “turned their will and their lives over to the care of God, as they understand him,” to quote the Third Step of AA, they found healing and new life. On Founders Day, I always hear the sounds of the motorcycles during our worship service as hymns of thanksgiving.
The well-known Presbyterian minister and author Frederick Buechner, who died last year, wrote a beautiful biography, Telling Secrets, about his life journey, beginning as the son of an alcoholic who died by suicide when Frederick was ten years old. Buechner writes about how he came to know the power of the 12 steps of AA through participating in Al-Anon and through his ministry as a pastor. He describes the people who come into the basement rooms (or in our case, the Fellowship Hall) of churches for AA meetings, saying “In one sense they are strangers who know each other only by their first names and almost nothing else about each other. In another sense they are best friends who little by little come to know each other from the inside out instead of the other way round, which is the way we usually do it.”[1]
“They come to know each other from the inside out instead of the other way round.” That’s how Jesus came to know the tax collector, the temple leader, and the woman who touched the fringe of his cloak—not from their externals, but from the inside out: from their deep, inner longing for new life. That’s how Jesus comes to know each of us, today: not from the externals through which we generally get to know each other, but from the internals: our hopes, our fears, our deepest longing, our desperation, even. Jesus comes to know us from the inside out, and loves us every step of the way, no matter what!
After all, there is nothing we can do to make God love us any more, or any less.
Amen.
[1] Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 90-91.