Today’s gospel passage presents five scenes for our attention. The first scene is brief, a single verse, and astonishing in its brevity. There’s Jesus walking along, he sees Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, he says, “Follow me,” and Matthew gets up and follows him. The second scene is a dinner at a house, where Jesus and his followers are being questioned for his sharing a meal with tax collectors and other notorious sinners. We sense there’s tension. Then there’s the scene of a parent pleading for his dead child, interrupted by yet another scene of a woman suffering from severe illness who touches Jesus. He tells her to be courageous, calls her “daughter,” and she is made well. Then the third scene continues in the fifth, at the leader’s house, where Jesus interrupts a funeral, makes people laugh, and raises the dead girl. The arc of this five-scene-narrative universe is short, but astonishing, and it’s bent toward fullness of life.
Jesus calls Matthew to follow him, just like he called Peter and Andrew, James and John at the beginning of his ministry in and around Capernaum.[1] Those first disciples were fishermen, an honorable, respected profession. Jesus finds Matthew sitting in a booth by the road, and it’s safe to assume he’s at his job as a toll or tax collector – far from honorable, not respected, his profession is habitually mentioned in a single breath with prostitutes or the broadest possible term of exclusion, sinners. In the gospels, tax collectors and sinners go together like mac ‘n cheese, except that nobody likes them. And Jesus calls at least one of them. And not just that, he eats with them, and not accidentally, more than once, and with many of them. And with whom one chooses to eat was a matter taken very seriously in first-century Jewish and Roman culture.
So the opening scene of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector, and Matthew responding without any noticeable hesitation, that scene opens the door to the house where we get to see what that means: it’s a dinner party, and clearly Jesus enjoys hanging out with the kind of people who don’t get many, if any, dinner invitations.
The door is open, we can see the whole dining room, and suddenly we realize that we now need to take a good look at where we see ourselves in the scene: at the table, in the company of Jesus, or at the door, with the baffled ones, or mildly angry ones, who ask, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” It’s a good question, you know, we don’t want our kids to hang out with the wrong crowd, because bad habits rub off, bad choices might become harder to avoid, strong principles might be watered down, and if we don’t want that for our kids, why would we expose ourselves to that kind of company, to folks with questionable ethics, you know, folks who’ve lied and cheated and laughed at racist jokes or even told them? Aren’t those kind of boundaries important, and shouldn’t we do our part to draw and maintain them?
Jesus knows what we’re worried about, he’s overheard us talking at the door, he knows what and how we’re thinking, and he says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” It’s a saying everybody knows, and it’s a reminder that curing people has been part of Jesus’ ministry from day one. “Jesus went throughout all Galilee,” we read in chapter 4, “teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”[2] Jesus didn’t just talk salvation, according to the Gospels, he lived it. In him, God’s saving power became present among us, feet on the ground, heels and toes in the dirt, hands on blinded eyes, fingers in deafened ears, kind embrace of hardened hearts, compassion touching the untouchable, rescue for the parched and the drowning, deliverance for people victimized by powers from which we cannot save ourselves, rescue from sin and despair.
“I have not come to call the righteous but sinners,” he says to us. I have not come, I hear him say, to call the righteous into gated castles of perfection. I have come to call sinners, to touch and be touched by what is broken and make it whole. I have come to call sinners and walk them into righteousness. I have come to remind you who you are – all of you, forgetful bearers of the divine image!
Do we see ourselves standing at the door, looking at the room, or are we sitting at the table where Jesus calls sinners to gather and find new life? He quotes the prophet Hosea and says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘Mercy is what I want, not sacrifice.’”[3] Kindness between people is what I want, loyal love, deep respect for every bearer of the divine image – generous sacrifices are terrific, but in the absence of kindness toward neighbors, they are meaningless gestures. Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want.
Go and learn implies movement, it implies study and discovery, growth and transformation, it implies watching how Jesus embodies God’s mercy and learning from him, learning with him, how to be as he is, and do as he does. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” Jesus declares in the sermon on the mount; “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”[4] Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want. Go and learn what fulfillment looks like. Go and learn what divine mercy infusing every dimension of human interaction looks like. “Blessed are the merciful,” he says, “for they will receive mercy.”[5] Blessed are the merciful, for they will discover that all of life is a river of mercy, and not a cosmic tit for tat.
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” This is the third scene, a sudden interruption of dinner conversations and shared reflections on the wideness of God’s mercy. This is Matthew’s version of the scene. In Mark’s version, the child is near death, and the father is desperate for Jesus to come quickly and heal her.[6] The urgency is palpable; any delay unbearable. In Mark’s story, news of her death arrives while they’re on the way to the leader’s house. In Matthew’s story, the girl is dead, and the father kneels before Jesus and tells him to come and lay his hand on her – and Jesus gets up and follows him.
Those words stunned me earlier this week. “And Jesus got up and followed him.” This moment of rising and following is the mirror image of the call scene at the tax booth, only here it is Jesus who follows. This man’s need, this father’s faith carries just as much authority as Jesus’ call to discipleship. Jesus calls, and a person follows – and here we see the reverse of the dynamic of persistent mercy, a person calls, and Jesus follows. And he follows this parent to the darkest place imaginable. What was it he said? Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want. We’re watching mercy move, we’re watching mercy flow and infuse the darkest place imaginable. We’re watching mercy disrupt the young woman’s funeral.
There is laughter when he says she’s not dead, only sleeping. This is the only moment anyone laughs, explicitly, in the Gospels.[7] Some are laughing at Jesus, deriding him. But others are laughing because of Jesus. “When the Lord restored Zion, we were like those who dream,” it says in the Psalm; “our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.”[8] Some are laughing at the fool who can’t tell the difference between sleep and death, but we are laughing with the Lord of life, to whom death is mere sleep.
When the parent knelt before Jesus, telling him, “Come and lay your hand on her, and she will live!” Jesus didn’t simply get up, he rose up. The language of resurrection is beautifully ambiguous and suggestive. One rises in the morning to take a shower, and it simply means to wake up and get up. Only Jesus didn’t simply get up, he rose. And the next one in Matthew’s story to get up like that, is the girl whom Jesus took by her hand, and she rose.[9]
We are laughing because the arc of this five-scene-narrative universe is short, but astonishing, and it’s bent toward resurrection and fullness of life. “Call to us now, and we shall awaken,” we sometimes sing in the company of sinners gathering at the table of the Lord, “we shall arise at the sound of our name.”[10] In response to mercy’s call, we shall awaken, arise, and arrive.
[1] Matthew 4:20-22
[2] Matthew 4:23
[3] Hosea 6:6; quoted in Matthew 9:13 and again in 12:7
[4] Matthew 5:17
[5] Matthew 5:7
[6] See Mark 5:21ff.
[7] Here and in the parallels in Mark 5:40 and Luke 8:53; laughter is implied in Luke 6:21, 25
[8] Psalm 126:1-2
[9] See also the scene in Matthew 8:24-26 in which Jesus was asleep (!) while the boat was being swamped by waves, and he got up to rebuke the winds and the sea; and, of course, Matthew 28:6, where no translation suggests “he was awakened.”
[10] Gather Us In, Marty Haugen