Psalm 50 , Matthew 9.9-26
There’s a cartoon I saw recently. It goes the rounds on the internet quite regularly in one form or another, but the slogan is always the same. “I’m staying inside today; it’s way too peopley out there!”
As an introvert, I know the feeling. I love people, but lots
of big gatherings and chit-chat can leave me feeling very exhausted.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus has what seems to me to be
an extremely “peopley” day, full of interruptions and crowds. I feel tired just
reading about it.
First he meets Matthew, the tax collector, as he strolls
through Capernaum where he lives, and calls him to leave his tax booth and
follow him. By lunchtime he’s been joined by all Matthew’s tax collector
friends along with a random assortment of others, who’ve invited themselves along
to see what’s changed their old friend’s life so radically. Then the Pharisees
turn up, aghast that someone who claims to be doing God’s work, as Jesus does,
would choose to eat with to such a disreputable bunch of people. And hot on
their heels are some disciples of John the Baptist who are equally aghast for a
quite different reason. They don’t mind who Jesus eats with; they are just
offended that he is eating at all, rather than fasting as their teacher would
have done. And then, after all that hullabaloo, just when we might have excused
Jesus if he had wanted to slope off and have a siesta, into the melee comes the
leader of the local synagogue, whose daughter has died and who is evidently so
desperate that he is prepared to beg for the help of this unconventional new
preacher.
Jesus goes off with him, straightaway, but on the way, yet
another need is presented to him, as a woman with some sort of gynaecological
condition quietly touches his cloak. She hopes he won’t notice, because she
knows that contact with a woman who is bleeding will render him ritually
unclean and complicate his life. But
Jesus does notice, and far from being angry, he stops and takes the time to
heal her before going on to raise the little girl from death, having dealt with
the crowd of flute players - professional mourners who are there to prepare for
her funeral.
Like I said, an incredibly peopley day, and everyone who is
part of it has a different agenda and different needs. The tax collectors need to
know they are loved and accepted. The Pharisees need to know there is a clear
line between good and bad, and that they are on the right side of it. The disciples
of John, who are never happy unless they are miserable, need to make sure everyone
else is miserable too. The woman with the haemorrhage needs to be healed and
restored to her community. The leader of the synagogue needs his daughter back.
And the flute players, while they might not have been so heartless as to have
wanted her to die, needed the lucrative job of playing at her funeral.
Jesus couldn’t please them all, but what he could do, and
did do, was give them all time and space, opening up new possibilities for
them. “God desires mercy and not sacrifice” he says to the Pharisees, quoting
the Old Testament prophet Hosea, and in a way this is what this whole peopley
day is about. Jesus demonstrates what this means as he makes his way through it.
Mercy can sound like a rather condescending word to us. It
perhaps conjures up visions of a judge letting someone off with a lesser
punishment, or someone being given a second chance because we feel sorry for
them or they beg hard enough, but the Hebrew word Hosea uses - “hesed’ - is much bigger than that. It’s often
translated “loving kindness” or “steadfast love”; it seems to me to be a love
that is characterised by spaciousness. It is a love which gives people room to
be themselves, accepts them as they are, and, paradoxically, because of that,
it also gives them room to change and grow; they don’t need to dig their heels
in or be defensive, because they aren’t being attacked. Jesus gives that
spacious love to everyone he meets on this peopley day, meeting them where they
are, and offering them room and time to see new possibilities if they want to.
It’s easy to see where that happens in his dealings with
Matthew and his tax collector friends, with the synagogue leader and his
daughter, and with the woman with the haemorrhage. He welcomes, calls and heals
them, restoring them to life physically in the case of the little girl, but spiritually
and socially for the others. Matthew would have been despised by his community,
because the taxes he collected on behalf of his Roman overlords mainly went to
support their military occupation of Galilee. Tax collectors were
collaborators, traitors. We don’t know how he came to take on this role, but
once he’d started, it would have been hard to get out of, but Jesus sees
possibilities for Matthew, and his friends, which no one else, including
themselves, could. The woman’s bleeding would have rendered her, and anyone she
came into contact with, ritually unclean. So for twelve years, she’d have had
to isolate herself from family and friends, cut off by her illness. By the time
she meets Jesus, she’s come to the point where she doesn’t even seem to be able
to make room for herself – she literally wants to be invisible – but Jesus sees
her and gives her the dignity of time and space. That is “hesed”,
spacious love in action.
But Jesus also shows that spacious love to the other groups
in the story, the ones who don’t agree with him, who challenge him, who ask him
questions, in that he takes them seriously, he listens to them and answers them;
he doesn’t just write them off, ignore them or attack them. Even those flute
players and mourning crowd weren’t just sent packing, as if they were a
nuisance; they were given an explanation which opened up the possibility that
this might be a story which would end in life, not death. “she is not dead,
but sleeping” says Jesus. Whether they could stop laughing long
enough to take that in was up to them, but the space was there, the invitation
to see a different future.
It’s challenging to live a life of spacious love, to be open
to others, instead of endlessly defensive. Jesus can do it because he is rooted
in the spacious love of his Father for him. If we find ourselves unable to
listen to others, wanting to demonise them before we’ve even met them, perhaps
it is because we don’t have that sense of security ourselves. As the Bible
says, “We love because he first loved us.” If we think God’s love has
limits, then we will inevitably worry that if others get more, there will be
less for us, so we’ll try to ration it out to those we think deserve it. The
message of the Bible, though, is that there is plenty for everyone, that it is
inexhaustible.
As we follow Jesus through his “peopley” day, perhaps it
might lead us to think of the people we meet in our days. Who do we welcome,
and who do we avoid or resent? Who do we not even notice, and why might that
be? And are we secure in the knowledge of God’s spacious love for us, so that
we can let it overflow to those around us too?
Amen
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