Crossing the Line

Proper 5A: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-34

In CS Lewis’ beloved children’s book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the inhabitants of the fantasy world of Narnia thrill to the news that the great Aslan has been sighted, that he’s coming to save them. “Aslan is on the move,” they whisper excitedly. Today’s lesson from Matthew’s Gospel could righty be titled, “Jesus is on the move.” For over the course of a few verses, we see Jesus going from person to person, encounter to encounter, bringing healing and wholeness and reconciliation everywhere he goes.

First, he meets Matthew, a tax collector, which was a position of public scorn, not just because people resent having to pay taxes, but even more because those taxes were going to their enemy, Rome, making Matthew a collaborator, a traitor. But rather than denounce him, Jesus invites himself to dinner at Matthew’s house. Then Jesus is approached by a woman with an “issue of blood.” We aren’t told what her diagnosis is, probably a fistula, a tear from giving birth. But whatever the cause, the result was she was an outcast from society, considered unclean, untouchable, unlovable. Jesus heals her, without even intending to, just by her touching him. This happens while Jesus is on his way to see some else in need, a dead twelve-year-old girl. When he gets there, though, Jesus insists she not dead, only sleeping. And at his command she awakens and is restored to her family. Next he restores sight to two blind men. And then he exorcises a demon-oppressed man, casting out the demon and enabling the man to speak again. Jesus is on the move, performing one amazing, unprecedented miracle after another, bringing God’s good rule to bear in many people’s lives.

But there was more going on than meets the eye. Jesus’ wondrous acts of healing aren’t just about being compassionate and caring, but about the larger work of restoration and reconciliation. You see, sociologists and anthropologists often make a distinction between “healing” and “curing.” Curing is the straightforward task of arresting disease and restoring physical wholeness—restoring sight, fixing a fistula, loosening a tied tongue. Healing likewise involves curing the ailment but it also respects what that means to the sick person. In particular, it recognizes how when you’re sick, it affects your relationships, with others and with God. I mean, when you’re sick, you don’t much feel like being around others, and others don’t much want to be around you either. To be “healed” is to be cured, yes, but also to be restored to these relationships, reintegrated into society.

What we see Jesus doing in this passage then is not just curing but healing. The bleeding woman, the dead girl, the blind men, the dumb demoniac, even the tax collector have all been isolated, kept from others on account of their condition, but now they are healed and enabled to rejoin society.

Now, you’d think that everyone would be happy about this, ecstatic. Our brother or sister was lost but now they’ve returned. And probably many who witnessed these wonders were happy. But not everyone. Some—the Pharisees, for instance—were not only not impressed; they were outright critical of Jesus, his healings, his eating with tax collectors and sinners, his mixing it up with unclean spirits—how unbecoming of a holy man!

It’s not that the Pharisees were pitiless, wholly unsympathetic of the plight of these wretched souls. Well, maybe there was some of that. But really, what was at the root of their reaction was fear, fear that by engaging with the unclean, some of their dirtiness, physical and spiritual, might rub off on them. And if that happened, they’d lose not just their health, but their integrity, their status, maybe even their standing before God. It was better, safer, to stay in a holy huddle, keeping themselves unstained by sin, that is, by sinners. In their mind, there was a clear line between the holy and the profane, the godly and the great unwashed. God was on their side, the side of “the holy,” and everyone else was left on their own.

That’s why the Pharisees are so scandalized by Jesus. They can’t understand why he, a holy man, is spending so much time across that line, hanging out with reprobate, degenerate sinners. So Jesus sets them straight. He has no interest in reinforcing those boundaries. “I’ve come not to call the righteous, but sinners,” he says, “Those who live upstanding lives don’t need me—or don’t think they need me. But those who have done wrong, who are left out, who are unfit for polite society, who’ve by all account lost God’s favor, they do need me. I came for them, for the sick and the sin-sick, to save them.”

Jesus came to save sinners. If you’ve spent any time in church, likely you’ve heard that before. It’s a fundamental belief, axiomatic for our faith. And yet, we Christians have a history of forgetting it, more set on drawing lines and enforcing them, than on crossing them. Oh,! you’re part of the wrong denomination or religion, you’re of another race, you belong to a different class, or the wrong political party—you stay over there, on that side of the line, and we will stay over here on this side, the “right” side, the side of the angels.

No matter how openminded or tolerant or compassionate you think you are, I’m 100% sure you have prejudices—we all do—for some people and against others, on account of a belief they have or a mistake they made or the lifestyle they live. I’m not saying that there aren’t good reasons for holding these prejudices, that right and wrong are relative, that there aren’t better and worse ways live. But often we let our prejudices, our judgements get in the way of our bearing witness to Jesus’ message of grace. We let our judgments trip others up on their way to Jesus.

But it’s not only us Christians who think church isn’t for some people. You may be surprised to learn, as I was when I first heard it, that our assumptions about who goes to church today and who doesn’t are way off base. Christianity is often disparaged by cultured despisers as a religion for the poor and uneducated, those who don’t “know better.” But the reality is quite different. The segment of the population that is statistically most religious, most active in church attendance, is not the lower class but rather those who are college educated, who have a decent job and are married with kids.

So how do we make sense of this? It seems that church has come to be seen as a place for people who have it all together, not a place for people who don’t, who are barely making it, who try and fail on the road to recovery. For many people, those inside as well as outside the faith, church is seen as a refuge for saints, not a hospital for sinners.

How this got to be this way, why people see the church this way, I don’t know, but it’s not true to the Gospel. It’s not what Jesus taught us, not how he lived, how he served others. Jesus didn’t hang out with those who had it all together. He went to those whose lives were a mess, who needed saving, who needed healing, who needed him, and he healed them, with impartiality, without regard to whether or not they “deserved” it.

Anna and I have been watching this medical drama about an Emergency Department, and the doctors, nurses and the patients they care for. It’s a fictitious portrayal of emergency medicine, but I’ve been struck by the effort the doctors and nurses on the show make to be nonjudgemental in how they deal with their patients. They do their best to treat the presenting medical problem, but also treat their patients with compassion and respect: an incurable alcoholic, a homeless mother, a morbidly obese man, a heroin addict, an illegal immigrant injured during an arrest.

The doctors and nurses don’t always live up to their high-minded ideals. Their biases do come through at times. But they aspire to care for the emergency before them, without consideration of who the person is or what they’ve done.

Something like this, I think, is on display in Jesus’ ministry. He treats the need before him. Maybe it’s not a need that the other person can see, or ask for, but the point is, he doesn’t restrict his grace to the “right” kind of people. And we are to do the same. That’s how we are to treat others, when we are engaging with them in Jesus’ name, when we are sharing with them about the Gospel, or when we are just being friends with them. We all have biases, judgements about who is deserving or worthy. But we are to do as Jesus did and not lose sight of the person behind the predicament, the soul behind the sin.

A colleague of mine, a deacon, tells of an experience she had one Sunday, on the way to her church. As she was walking to the church, she heard a great commotion from one of the nearby houses. Without any regard for her own safety, she went to investigate and found a man towering over a woman, making threatening gestures, with a frightened woman crouched before him. Upon seeing the intruder, the man turned to the deacon and demanded, “What do you want?” My colleague answered, “You need to stop.” “Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” The deacon thought for a moment and then answered, “I’m going to stand here until I can see Jesus in you.”

With that, the man’s demeanor changed. He dropped his arms and began to weep. Through his tears, he said he hadn’t heard anyone speak that way to him, to say such things about him, in a long time, not since his grandmother passed away. He told her how much he missed his grandmother and how ashamed and powerless he’d been feeling. His tough exterior had been breached by kindness, and grace found a way to enter in.

I’ll tell you, hearing that story, I was amazed that this little woman—she’s not at all physically imposing—dared to get involved in this domestic violence situation. Those kinds of situations are often the most unpredictable, most dangerous situations police have to deal with. I was even more impressed, though, by how she responded to the man’s challenge. I think my first thought would have been to physically get between the man and the woman, to protect her. But I concede that what my colleague did was better and braver and more Christian. She dared to look past the sinner before her to precious child that God saw.

Oscar Wilde offered a keen insight: “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” This is true for each of us and it’s true for other people too, even people we think of as the worst. No one is irredeemable. St Paul was a Middle Eastern terrorist, persecuting Jewish Christians. St Matthew, as I said, was a traitor, a collaborator with the enemy. St Peter abandoned his friend to die and then denied he ever knew him. John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” was a merciless slave trader, St Mary of Egypt a prostitute, St Francis a spoiled, entitled rebellious teenager, and St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, began as a hot-tempered soldier obsessed with duels, gambling and the pursuit of women. Then there’s St Olga, who killed an entire clan in revenge for her husband’s death. Yet, despite the heinousness of their sins, each of them became through grace a believer, a saint. Every saint has a past, and every sinner a future.

That understanding is in fact what is behind Jesus’ teaching a little earlier in Matthew’s Gospel: “Judge not lest you be judged.” Jesus there was not telling us to not use our judgement, our ability to discern between true and false, good and bad. He is not endorsing the unspoken agreement popular today which holds that I agree to not say anything about your life if you don’t say anything about mine. No, what he is saying is that we never know what is in store for a person, how they might change, how God might yet draw them to him. So we have no right to foreclose the possibility of their redemption, to condemn them, to decide their future. In fact, Jesus calls us to be part of their future, to share in what Jesus is doing, to reach out to them, that they may be healed, saved too.

Jesus is indeed “on the move,” in his passage and in the world today, crossing boundaries of propriety and respectability, unconcerned about being associated with the sick and sinning, unafraid that their dirt might rub off on him, but hoping rather that they might “catch” something of his holiness, his grace. And he invites us to follow him, to be part of his saving mission, and to find ourselves saved, healed in the process. For that we say, thanks be to God!