Pentecost 3

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Pentecost 3
PROPER: 5A
PLACE: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Kingsville
DATE: June 9, 2002


TEXT: Matthew 9:9-13 – And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

ISSUE: Jesus’ ministry had a significant relationship for the dispossessed, as indicated in this passage. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. The ministry of Jesus, while often romanticized and whitewashed, is clearly revealed as dealing with the least and lost. The righteous Pharisees are dumbfounded. Jesus’ coming to the sick was not a matter of literal sickness, but of concern for the dispossessed, those who had loss of meaning and place in the community. The passage reveals the grace of God expressed in Jesus Christ. It requires that we examine ourselves and how dispossessed we might be without the grace of God in Christ.
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The picture that many people have of Jesus in their minds is often the picture of a very pure stained-glass kind of figure. We have images of Jesus that come from Sunday School that often depicts Jesus as looking down upon a sick person, or a child, and placing his hand of blessing upon them. Jesus is often portrayed in white robes, again a sign or symbol of purity. The stained glass images of Jesus as Good Shepherd makes him this very tall, well dressed, almost kingly looking in his appearance. Jesus for many is considered to be much more divine than he is human.
In sharp contrast to that image, we are given another kind of picture of Jesus in this day’s assigned lectionary reading from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. In the passage, Jesus is walking down the road and he selects another disciple named Matthew (Levi?) who is a tax collector or toll taker sitting in his booth. Jesus asks Matthew to “Follow” him. It is obvious from this clear direction that Jesus selects Matthew the tax or toll taker to be a part of his selected inner group of disciples. In the next scene, Jesus is in Matthew’s house enjoying a dinner gathering with other tax, or toll collectors, friends of Matthew, and some sinners.
We know that tax collectors were not exactly known at the time to be the more reputable types of persons. Selecting a tax collector to be a follower, might be a little bit like asking the homeless person standing at the traffic light at a busy corner who is collecting money, and who is not really homeless at all, but a scoundrel, to accept a nomination for a position on St. John’s Parish Vestry. There were different kinds of tax collectors. There were the chief tax collectors, like Zacchaeus, who hired other cronies to assist them. The majority of tax collectors were more commonly known as toll collectors. They collected tolls from people crossing boundaries, bridges, using certain roads. They were not respected by the elite, and were considered to be unclean or impure. A tax or toll collector in your house would make the house unclean. They rummaged through trade items and touched anything, making them unclean, sort of like lepers.
Tax and toll collectors were collecting tolls for the Roman Government. They were like an American Citizen collecting contributions for terrorists’ organizations. Only the most reprehensible people would take such a job. They were usually the down and out folks that couldn’t make it anywhere else, the scum of the earth. Contrary to what you might have learned in the past tax collectors really didn’t make much money, according to Social Science commentaries that have studied the period. A chief tax collector had to put up a lot of money to buy the right or get a license from the Romans to collect taxes. He had to put that money up front. Then, he had to recoup the money he had put out for the license. Sometimes they made it, and sometimes they didn’t. Especially, if the chief tax collector had to hire other scoundrels to assist him. He may well get ripped off by them, as well as having to do some cheating himself to make a profit. The whole system was given to corruption, not mention that the tax collectors and toll collectors were generally hated by the elite, and avoided by the general population. They were a hated group for what they did.
In this story, what does Jesus do but ask one of these characters, Matthew, to follow him. In the next scene, Jesus is sitting at dinner with a whole bunch of Matthew’s fellow tax collectors. I mean, who else would go to dinner with them. And you can imagine that it was probably quite a party. It is likely that there were some falling down drunks. There may have been some women, but they were likely to be flute players, erotic dancers, and prostitutes. Such a scene is not made clear in this passage, but do keep in mind that Jesus was thought to be himself a drunkard. Look at Matthew 11:19. When the Son of Man came, he ate and drank and everyone said, “Look at this man! H is a glutton and wine-drinker (drunkard), a friend of tax collectors and other outcasts!” Who do you suppose those other outcasts were? More than likely the lady flute players, erotic dancers, and prostitutes. Let’s not be too naïve. What’s going on when the woman in the Gospel account of Luke (7:36f) slips into the dinner partye and pours perfume, fragrant erotic oil on Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. Come on now, folks, this dinner party with the tax collectors was no church supper!
In these days there was little that was secret. You could try, but it was a very open society. The Pharisees, the righteous community leaders they knew what was going on. They question the disciples, and remember questions were usually an attack on the honor of a person: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” It simply means your teacher has no honor or status association with the dispossessed. How do you defend our accusation?
Well Jesus does, and he does it with a proverb and a quotation from the prophet Hosea.
v The proverb: “Those who are well have no need for a physician, but those who are sick.”
v The Hosea passage: “I (God) desires mercy, not sacrifice.”
v And Jesus concludes: “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
The proverb here does not mean that the people that Jesus is dealing with are literally sick, but that they are the dispossessed whose lives are deprived of meaning. They are hopeless lives with little or no future, and dispossessed not only from community but from a relationship with God. He has come to bring the love and compassion and the mercy of God to them. Jesus does not preach morality or even religion. He is not taken with the righteous sacrifices and religious rituals of the Pharisees. He comes to restore, reconcile is the churchy word, all that are lost from God to a right relationship. All they have to do is believe, and accept the fact that God loves them. Too good to be true? You bet!
You see what is going on here. Jesus is conveying the love and the mercy of God available to all people. Jesus is teaching that God desires a relationship of love with all people. Both the people of the time, especially the righteous seem to be measuring their relationship with God in terms of religious duties and good deeds. This fact is not exactly foreign to our own time. We often, at least on the exterior, seem to measure our honor and worth by how good we are, and how profitable we are, how religious we are, and how righteous we are in contrast to others. The others are the sinners and we are the good guys. Our problems come when we don’t measure up to what we think the standards are, and then we have to struggle to get back in the good graces of the community and with God, because we see righteous perfection, exterior goodness, or religious devotion as the standard! We are then inclined to direct people’s attention elsewhere, to the poor and the bad.
The fact of the matter is that the righteous are in as great a need as the dispossessed or the people we often look down upon. Jesus gathering with the tax collectors in his time is hardly any different than Jesus attending a Bachelor (or Bachelorette) party of our own time. Fact of the matter is that there still are many drunkards, drug abusers, thieves and connivers, abusers among the so-called righteous (i.e. the clergy) in our own midst as there are in other classes of people. We all have our ways of putting other people down, with which we have a gripe or complaint.
Hope for the world and for ourselves is in taking hold of the fact that God in Christ comes to the least of us, comes to us in our more demeaning moments, and our less honorable moments to bestow his presence and grace as Christ came to the toll takers, the lusty men and women, and the prostitutes. If God in Christ comes for the dispossessed and the least, then he has come for you and for me. He comes for the Palestinians as much as the Jews, for the Catholics and the Protestants. Once we all get that fact, and really believe that Christ is savior of us all, the sooner we will see ourselves as the children of God, and brothers and sisters of one another.
Jesus breaks into the human condition to provide a healing relationship with God the restores and gives us our honor, worth, value, esteem, and meaning. Lord have mercy upon us, and may we learn to have mercy upon one another.