9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
18 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.” 19 And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. 20 Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, 21 for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” 22 Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. 23 When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, 24 he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. 25 But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. 26 And the report of this spread through all of that district.
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26, NRSVue
Jesus issues one of the clearest, most programmatic statements of ethics in this passage from the gospel of Matthew. Likening himself to a physician caring for the sick, he tells the pious-types of his day that he has not come for them; they have no need of a doctor, they are already healthy. Instead, he calls into his company tax-collectors and sinners, or in other words, the socially and morally suspect. He does not scold or judge them but simply eats with them. He is a “man of the people,” and he calls his followers to follow him into their everyday homes, and encounter their lives and material needs.
The two sections of our text address two main themes: what it means to follow Jesus, and reports of Jesus’ healing miracles. In the first, Jesus calls disciples to follow him, beginning with the tax-collector Matthew (Matthew 9:9). As he is well-known to do, Jesus dines with people who the religious elites, or the publicly pious, or the socially well-to-do, of his day do not typically spend their time with, and so they question his followers for socializing with them (Matthew 9:11). Jesus answers on behalf of his disciples, and does so with a clear statement of purpose. In the same way that a physician spends their time with the sick, and not with the healthy, he keeps the company of tax-collectors and sinners rather than those who might be considered morally upright or socially upstanding (Matthew 9:12). However, Jesus does not appear to condescend or patronize these people, nor does he make demands of them before they enter his company. He simply dines with them in a house, an everyday activity in an everyday setting. He quotes the prophet Hosea, saying that the religious elites of his day, the Pharisees who question him here, should go learn what it means that God desires mercy and not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13).
To be clear, it is wrong to conclude that this is an anti-Jewish text, or that Jesus is rejecting the Jews or Judaism writ large. The message here is not that Jesus calls gentiles instead of Jews. Christianity emerged historically out of a complex network of Jewish religious sects, and Jesus’ conflicts with groups like the Pharisees in Matthew 9:11 did not entail a complete rejection of Judaism. Ethics and attitudes of the heart are matters of concern for all, regardless of religious affiliation, gender, or social status.
The two key statements in Matthew 9:13 — mercy, not sacrifice, and sinners, not the righteous — seem to follow a similar pattern of “this not that,” but there is a subtle difference between them. When Jesus quotes Hosea and uses the phrase “mercy not (kai ou) sacrifice,” the phrasing does not suggest that God desires mercy instead of sacrifice. The contrast is an intensification; mercy is desired more than sacrifice. It is common to see the Hebrew prophets misinterpreted when they criticize the formal sacrificial practices of their time. More often than not, their harsh criticisms of sacrifice came from the deep conviction that they really did have great importance. So in other words, Jesus quotes Hosea to say that sure, formal religious practice is good, but mercy is better. However, when Jesus says he has “not come to call the righteous but (alla) sinners,” the sense is the opposite. The phrase is not comparative, it suggests a replacement. It is not better that sinners hear the call, Jesus does not call sinners more than the righteous, he calls sinners instead of the righteous.
Jesus gives two commands in this passage, and the first is to “follow me” (Matthew 9:9). How might we be called to follow the divine physician? Who are the sick in need of a physician? Of course, many people become medical professionals to alleviate suffering and sickness and can offer care to those in need, but how might others follow Jesus the physician?
The second command Jesus gives to the Pharisees: “go and learn what this means” (Matthew 9:13). In this text, Jesus is in the company of tax-collectors and sinners “in the house” (Matthew 9:10). While we are not told whose house this is, we could suppose that it is the house of the tax-collector Matthew named in Matthew 9:9. In any case, we can say that Jesus’ fellowship with these social outcasts occurs right at the heart of their everyday life. It is in the space of a personal domicile, not a house of worship, where Jesus is notorious for enjoying the company of sinners. What are some ways that a person or community in the United States can adopt the ethic of mercy Jesus articulates here? There is no set program or recipe for mercy outlined in the text here, and any formalized, cookie-cutter style approach will be alienating and impersonal to people who already do not feel comfortable in a religious community. It will require some clear and honest perspective and a willingness to earn the invitation into the everyday lives of people.
When I think about Jesus’ call to sinners instead of the righteous, I think about how Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, has concluded that “religion has become a luxury good for the middle class, married college graduate with children.” Citing data from the Cooperative Election Project at Harvard University, Burge notes how religious affiliation increases with education and income level. A person with a master’s degree is much more likely to attend a religious service than a person with a high school diploma or less. The trendlines are similar for income level, and “middle class professionals” are the group of people “who are most likely to attend services this weekend.” Similarly, people who are married “are much more likely to be in a religious service than those who are divorced, separated, or never married.” Burge’s conclusion hits particularly hard when considering Jesus’ words in our text:
“Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life: college degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t… [Religion has] become a hospital for the healthy, an echo chamber for folks who did everything “right,” which means that it’s seeming less and less inviting to those who did life another way. Do I think that houses of worship have done this on purpose? Generally speaking, no. But they also haven’t actively refuted this narrative.”
Every church has its unique circumstances, histories, and particularities which will not be reflected in a survey. However, the data does not suggest that the “tax collectors and sinners” of our day are not commonly found among the “religious.” While Jesus may have been notorious for sharing company with the religiously and socially outcast, the American church surely is not. Perhaps it is a cliché, but what would the wandering first-century prophet to the underclasses of Palestine think of weekly gatherings of the well-to-do organized in his name? How can a church do more than just become more “inviting to those who did life another way” and bring mercy into their lives? How can church communities become more than a “hospital for the healthy”?
While Jesus dined with the socially outcast, a “hospital for the healthy” misses out on the healing that comes through friendship and social support. A lack of social connections can have as drastic an effect on a person as an illness. In fact, the U.S. Surgeon General has called loneliness an epidemic in our country. Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight the health impact of loneliness, with one in three adults in the United States report feeling lonely, and one in four report a lack of social or emotional support. Social outcasts, shut-ins, the chronically ill, the elderly, these are all groups who do not fit in the “luxury good” church model but are modern-day analogues for groups of people with whom Jesus the physician spent time.
While Jesus healed the sick, a “hospital for the healthy” fails to understand how profoundly poverty affects one’s health. In miracle stories like ours in Matthew 9:18–26 the gospels depict Jesus as more than a mere physician but a miraculous healer. This may seem an impossible act to follow, but there are other avenues that churches might explore for new kinds of Jesus-inspired communities to bring healing by alleviating financial burdens associated with poverty. Here I think that systems of mutual aid and DIY culture might provide surprising sources of inspiration. For example, one popular type of channel on YouTube is a person who does free handyman work for people in need. One user does repair work like replacing an old fence, another does free car diagnostics and repairs, and another does landscaping work to clean overgrown yards for people who cannot do it themselves. Of course, advertising and monetizing views shape the ecosystem of YouTube, but these examples could inspire religious communities to do similar work for people around them. Churches could form groups of gardeners or handyman-types to do regular work for those in need. If they don’t have the know-how themselves, perhaps they could organize a workshop for their members to learn, or fund a “charity day” for a local tradesman or mechanic. They could organize transportation for the elderly or the sick and help them coordinate medical care. They could use church facilities for tool libraries, or medical supply cabinets, or food pantries.
Following Jesus’ self-description as a physician to the sick, two miracle stories follow in Matthew 9:18–26. A leader came to Jesus and asked him to revive his dead daughter (Matthew 9:18), and along the way there, a woman touched his cloak in the hope that she would be healed (Matthew 9:20). There are many things we could say about these two miracles, but what is common to both is that they are material in nature. Both the dead girl and the sick woman experience real, physical changes in their circumstances. These are not spiritual remedies for the soul, but material salvation for the body. How profoundly, though, can material experience shape the spiritual? How draining is it for the grieving to go back to work? How isolating can it feel to go through medical trauma? How liberating is it to be free from financially burdensome treatments?
I am not a medical professional myself, but I have heard many stories from my wife, who was an emergency room trauma nurse, about the trauma bay of an emergency room. Her descriptions suggest an intensely physical space filled with people, smells, and sounds. A person’s needs are immediate and fully unveiled, the experience can be terrifying and humiliating. If alert, one has a starkly honest reckoning with one’s situation, one’s past, one’s needs. I am sure that those “hospitals for the healthy” can, and often do, provide real care for their members when they go through crisis. I have seen it happen myself. However, how much do churches “screen” their patients whether they are aware of it or not? Are they sure that they are treating the sick, or is their care a luxury good for the already well?
Perhaps church communities would do well to remember how often spiritual truths are grounded in the material world of the biblical text. Just in this passage in Matthew, Jesus “walks along” with his followers (Matthew 9:9), he “sits” and “eats” in a house (9:10–11), he “gets up” and “follows” a person to his house (9:18, 23), and he “goes in” and takes his daughter “by the hand” to heal her (9:25). The settings for these actions are the everyday locations of the street and the home, and the miracles in this text affect the physical, human body (9:22, 25). Jesus is depicted as a physician providing care for the immediate, practical, material needs of others, and he calls to us: “Follow me.”
