Scripture: Matthew 9:9-13; Galatians 3:28; James 1:27; Hosea 6:6 Series: 2023
Preaching on Matthew 9:9-13, Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, Wilson argues that Jesus deliberately sought out real sinners, not just the socially marginalized but those who harmed others. The Pharisees’ error was thinking sin too strong and God too weak, treating the church as a fortress for the saved. Drawing on James 1:27 (unstained by the world) and Galatians 3:28 (all one in Christ), he contends purity means engagement, not separation, since separating ourselves is what stains us and divides the world. Using John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony as a model of prideful, division-producing religion versus Pope Francis’s image of the church as a field hospital, he calls the congregation to offer mercy not sacrifice, caring for the wounded among them because they too are sinners and that is where Jesus is met.
Illustrations: jesus-as-your-wayward-child, winthrop-city-on-a-hill, pope-francis-field-hospital, field-hospital-conflict-zone
June 11, 2023
Field Hospital
As Jesus continued on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at a kiosk for collecting taxes. He said to him, “Follow me,” and he got up and followed him. As Jesus sat down to eat in Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners joined Jesus and his disciples at the table. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard it, he said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. Go and learn what this means: I want mercy and not sacrifice. I didn’t come to call righteous people, but sinners.” - Matthew 9:9-13
Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. This is really important. Sometimes, though, these actions are presented in a way that Jesus ate with the good kind of sinners, not the bad kind of sinners. Thinking about it in a different way. If Jesus were your son or your daughter, I’m not putting you in the position of God the Father, I just wanna use this thought experiment about how we think about other people. So Jesus is your son, and he is hanging out with the wrong kind of kids. He’s hanging out with the kids that stay up late, that disobey their parents, that break the law, that are doing drugs you haven’t even heard of. He’s hanging out with those people. If your son or daughter were hanging out with the wrong crowd, how would that make you feel? If your partner were staying out late with the wrong crowd( and we all have the wrong crowd in our mind) if they were staying out late with the wrong crowd, how would that make you feel? When Jesus is talking about sinners, it’s not a metaphor. Jesus went out to help those who are in need of God. Those who had broken communion and covenant with God, not just the people whom society had spit upon, but the people who had spit upon society, who had separated themselves from society, who had harmed others, who had hurt others. It is entirely understandable that people would be offended by the actions of Jesus. The Pharisees are being extremely rational here in Matthew nine. Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? It’s like a neighbor coming up to you: why does your daughter hang out with tax collectors and sinners? Not the good kind of sinners. The ones who commit the hard sins, the bad sins. Why does your son hang out with tax collectors and sinners? The disciples don’t respond, but Jesus does. “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. I didn’t come to call righteous people but sinners.”
I think, today, many of us have this idea of sin that sin is too powerful. Sin is too tempting, it is overwhelming. We cannot let anyone we care about be exposed to the idea of sin or else they are lost to us forever. The problem with the Pharisees is that they thought sin was too strong and God too weak. They thought being a tax collector was so strong that nobody could reach that person anymore. They thought that the actions of sinners was too strong and all the could do was corrupt others. Sinners had broken communion with the people and with God, and the only good left for them is to die in peace. That’s what the Pharisees thought. That’s honestly what many of our churches today act like. We want to talk about sin and that’s fine on a very personal level, but churches and christians also talk about bad people the way Jesus never does. Jesus never calls people good or bad. He does divide up the righteous and the sinners, but here he goes to the sinners instead of the righteous. When Jesus calls someone righteous, it is tongue-in-cheek. He is referring to someone who thinks that they are righteous, and he did not come for them. Yet most Christians don’t follow this logic. To them, the church is seen as this fortress for the saved in the midst of the horrors of this world. This is a very pagan idea.
Some may point to James 1 to back up this idea. James has this great line about what true religion is. True religion is serving widows and orphans in their need and keeping itself unstained by the world. But the question is: what does it mean to be unstained by the world? It’s not keeping oneself away from the world, but keeping oneself unstained by the world. To answer the question, we have to look at the life of Jesus. How did he keep himself unstained by the world? He did so by by serving, by loving, by spending time with sinners and tax collectors, by eating with sinners and tax collectors, by calling sinners and tax collectors to follow him, by seeking out those who are sick in their soul and offering mercy, offering a new life. In fact, if we look at the life of Jesus, the way to be stained by the world is to keep ourselves away from others. The way to be stained by the world is to keep ourselves away from sinners . The irony, of course, that we are all sinners. If you try to keep yourself pure by staying away from the wrong kind of people, you are in fact staining yourself by the world. This is what the world does. It divides us. It divides us again and again and again. It divides us by race, by class, by income, by neighborhood, by school, by education, by language. It divides us again and again and again. It divides us by manners and background and mental health and parental support. It divides us again and again and again. It divides us by the good guys and the bad guys. In Christ Jesus, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female. We are all one in Christ Jesus. As Paul says in Galatians. How we are one matters.
When the pilgrims came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century, John Winthrop sought for their colony to be like, in the Sermon on the Mount, a city upon a hill whose light would shine across the world about the possibility of God’s life in the world. And yet, the Massachusetts Bay colony did not shine the light of Christ but the light of division. It was founded by people who refused to be united in faith back home and then came to this world and refused to admit even the humanity of the indigenous peoples around them. For instance, the Massachusetts colony would’ve been destroyed were it not for a smallpox outbreak in like 1638 that they saw as a sign of God’s favor. 40% of the indigenous people around them died from smallpox. This was a sign of God’s favor on the colony. Sermons were preached praising God for the death of the savages. Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. Go and learn what this means. I want mercy and not sacrifice. Jesus quotes Hosea the prophet in Matthew 9. The sacrifice spoken of here is the sacrifice of the temple. Mercy is what we offer to our brothers and sisters. Sacrifice is about my purity. Mercy is about community. I think John Winthrop offers one model of what it means to be the church, to be the followers of Christ, to trumpet our own righteousness, and to be like a city upon a hill, out of pride and not humility, to invert the language of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Another way to be the church is to be a field hospital. Some of you are veterans and served this country well or have veterans in your family who have served. A Field Hospital is the first line of care in the midst of a conflict zone. A field hospital can’t do everything. They can care for the people most wounded and they are present in the midst of conflict. Pope Francis used this language right after he was elected Pope in a letter, and I have been drawn to it ever since then.
The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…And you have to start from the ground up.
The kingdom of God is not a castle far away to be kept clean and pure, but a field hospital, and we care for sinners because we are sinners, because we are not any better than anyone else. We care for sinners because that’s what Jesus does and that’s where we meet Jesus. And if we don’t want to do what Jesus did here, if we don’t wanna meet Jesus in the faces of the sinners and tax collectors, why on earth would we think we would enjoy heaven or life everlasting? If we don’t want to be with God now and praise God now in the midst of this world, if we’re not willing to do that even if it is with the wrong people, why would we think we would wanna do it eternally?
The care of the church for sinners does not come from the pastor or staff but from you. You are the church. Take care of the wounded in your midst. Let others take care of your wounds. Walk with each other and offer others space to walk with you. Hold close to God’s love. Offer mercy, not sacrifice. Offer hospitality, not self-righteousness.
Let us pray, Heavenly Father, in your wisdom you came into the world as a child. You meet us where we are, not where we’d like to be. You meet others where they are, as well. Help us to be open to your movement in the broken people of this world. Help us to see your light in others and care as you care. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.