A sermon on Matthew 9:9-13 by Nathan Nettleton

A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

The religious people said to the followers of Jesus, “Why does your teacher eat with disreputable outcasts and sinners?” But when Jesus heard this, he said, “It’s not those who are healthy who have need of a doctor, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

As most of you know, I have been quarantining for the last fortnight because of a covid infection which, though very mild in its symptoms, has lingered on a bit longer than usual and kept me in isolation to avoid infecting others. So this difference of opinion between Jesus and some devoutly religious Pharisees grabbed may attention this week, because its central point is illustrated with the image of quarantining to avoid infection.

It is Jesus who introduces the idea of sickness into the conversation, when he says, “It’s not those who are healthy who have need of a doctor, but those who are sick.” He is bringing sickness into the conversation because he recognises that the question that is being asked is based on the same idea, even if it hadn’t yet been spelled out. When the devoutly religious people suggest that anyone who is serious about godliness shouldn’t be spending time in the company of disreputable sinners, they are showing their assumption that in order to stay godly, we need to isolate ourselves from the ungodly because ungodliness is like a contagious virus and we can’t afford to risk being infected by these people. 

Now, given that I have introduced the parallel to my own covid related quarantining, and that we have all had multiple experiences of quarantine lockdowns over the last few years, I need to avoid further confusing the issues here by pointing out that there are two different sorts of quarantine isolation at play here, and the one I’ve just been doing is actually not the image Jesus is using at all. Much of our national conversation over these few years has been about the morality or otherwise of lockdowns and quarantine, so the image in this passage shouldn’t be hard for us to grasp, but even before we start extending it as a metaphor for other sorts of moral behaviour, we often get these two different sorts of quarantine confused.

In the sort of quarantining I have been doing in the past two weeks, I am the contagious one. I have had covid, and because it is an infectious illness which could kill someone, I have locked myself away, out of circulation, to avoid passing it on to anyone else. That’s not the type of quarantine that Jesus is alluding to.

The other type is where you avoid mixing with other people when you don’t have the virus in order to avoid catching it. You are well, but you choose to avoid those who might be sick and potentially contagious, so that you can maximise your chances of staying well. It’s self-protective rather than protective of others.

Part of the reason we sometimes get these two mixed up in our heads now is that the mandatory statewide lockdowns that we went through in 2020 and 2021 were not entirely one or the other. They were a bit of both. We were all told to stay home and isolate in order to avoid catching the virus, but also in case we unknowingly had the virus, so as to prevent us from being out in the community spreading it to others. So the logic of the lockdowns was actually both, and now we sometimes get them mixed up in our heads.

One has a clear moral dimension. When I am the potentially contagious one, as I have been recently, I have a moral responsibility towards my neighbours which Jesus sums up as “Treat others the way you would hope they would treat you.” Or translated into this situation, “Stay away from others when you are contagious just as you would prefer infectious people to stay away from you.” 

The other one does not have such a clear-cut moral dimension because, instead of being about posing a risk to others, this one is just about the risks you are willing to expose yourself to. Just like skydiving or scuba diving or even driving a car, everyone makes different decisions about the levels of risk they are willing to take with their own health and safety, and we don’t regard those decisions as morally better or worse. Moral concerns are generally about the beneficial or destructive impacts that we have on others or on the world.

So where is the moral judgement coming into this conversation between Jesus and the moral crusader Pharisees? 

Well, the thing is that the Pharisees would not agree with what I just said about moral concerns being mainly about the beneficial or destructive impacts that we have on others. And actually, neither would lots and lots of people nowadays. Especially lots of religious people. 

For lots of people, morality is understood more in terms of purity, or remaining uncontaminated. Certain sorts of actions, behaviours, lifestyles, attitudes, or patterns of thinking are seen as impure and contaminating us, and therefore need to be avoided, regardless of whether they have any impact on anyone else. 

Taken to an ugly extreme, this view of morality underpins things like white supremacist views that see segregation and maintaining racial purity as a moral imperative, and that kind of view certainly existed in Israel in Biblical times. Ezra and Nehemiah both railed against Israelites marrying foreigners on the grounds that it introduced impurity into Israel, and these Pharisees that Jesus was talking with would certainly have seen themselves as proud upholders of Ezra and Nehemiah’s legacy.

But it would be cheap and lazy of me to just write off this view of morality by linking it with the extreme versions like Nazism and apartheid, because you can certainly find some justification for it in the teachings of Jesus. There are slabs of stuff in his sermon on the mount where Jesus says that it is not just what you do that matters, but even what you just think about doing. If you look on others with anger or contempt or lust or murderous hostility hidden in your heart, even though it stays hidden in your heart, you are already as guilty as if you had acted on it, says Jesus. So it would be quite unfair of me to pretend that Jesus simply sees morality as about our impact on others while these Pharisees see it as about inner purity. Jesus clearly values purity of heart and mind too. “Blessed are the pure of heart,” he says.

Indeed, although I have no doubt that Jesus would have had some disagreements with the Pharisees over what did and didn’t constitute sin or immoral behaviour, that is not the disagreement in this passage. When the Pharisees ask, “Why do you eat with outcasts and sinners?”, Jesus does not respond by arguing that these people have been unfairly labelled as sinners and that they are actually perfectly good people. Rather, he says, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” There is no disagreement that they are sinners.

The disagreement is over how one should relate to sinners. For the Pharisees, standing in that tradition of Ezra and Nehemiah, sinners are to be avoided as much as possible, and preferably purged from the community. You need to quarantine yourself from contact. Purity is to be maintained by complete separation from impurity. 

When Jesus quotes another of the Hebrew prophets in opposition to this view, he is taking sides in a dispute that has run all the way through the Hebrew Bible. “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’” he says, quoting Hosea. For in its origins, sacrifice had always been about rooting out evil, about purging the impure from our midst. This had become a bit hidden by the rise of substitutionary animal sacrifice, but originally it was the guilty ones themselves who were sacrificed. The gods were appeased and the community kept pure by literally sacrificing those who might render it impure.

This sacrificial impulse is still alive and kicking today. It is exactly what is going on in the Baptist Association of New South Wales, and what a number of Victorian Baptists are hoping can be done down here too. In the name of purity, they are expelling the churches and pastors they see as impure for their support of the queer community and same-sex marriage. Arguments for tolerance fall on deaf ears because their fundamental belief is that communing with sinners is itself sinful and dangerous. To their ears, the call for tolerance sounds as crazy as a call to throw away all covid precautions and invite the infected and contagious to mingle among us freely.

What Jesus does with his comparison of sinfulness to sickness is unmask this and highlight that this concern about avoiding sinners is actually based on fear, fear of contagion. And quite frankly, lest any of us start feeling all superior, everyone of us who has ever worried about our children falling under the influence of bad company has bought into the same fear as the Pharisees and the New South Wales Baptists. We fear that sin is contagious and will contaminate us and lead to our downfall.

Jesus, with his line about only the sick needing a doctor, rejects this fear outright.

It is interesting though, isn’t it? Because by introducing the comparison to sickness, Jesus is not exactly saying that their fear of contagion is groundless. The sick can be contagious, and Jesus is the one who introduces the comparison to sickness. So what is Jesus saying, and what are the implications for us?

I think there are two levels to this. For the first, we take our cue from his depiction of himself as a doctor. “It is not the well who need a doctor, but the sick.” Medical staff take genuine risks to do their job of helping the sick get well. If you want to avoid all contact with sick people, don’t work in a hospital, because hospitals are full of sick people with contagious illnesses and infections. So offering yourself in service of the sick is inherently risky. We know that. That’s why we held up our frontline health professionals as such major heroes during the pre-vaccine height of the pandemic. They were putting their lives on the line for us.

“That’s what I’m doing,” says Jesus. “You go and do likewise too.” Yes, there are risks in serving the sick or the morally contaminated, but facing that risk in the name of bringing care and hope and healing is more to be admired than fearfully avoiding all possible risk to yourself. In many previous pandemics down through the ages, it has been followers of Jesus who often stood out for their willingness to sacrifice their own health and safety to keep caring for their sick neighbours. Self-sacrifice is the one place where mercy and sacrifice can be reunited.

But I think there is another level in what Jesus is doing and calling us to follow him in doing here, because this issue of mixing with those who were seen as contagiously immoral comes up over and over in his ministry and is a constant bone of contention with the religiously pure moral crusaders of his day.

You see, when Jesus unmasks the fear element in their belief that they should quarantine themselves off from contact with the sinful and ungodly lest they be infected, he is actually unmasking the fragility of their faith in the power of love and godliness. Jesus, in contrast, always appears to be operating on the assumption that his love and mercy and godliness have not only vaccinated him against the threat of ungodliness, but that they are themselves far more contagious than their opposites. Jesus seems to assume that his love and mercy and godliness are far more likely to rub off on sinners than their sinfulness is to rub off on him. It’s a question of faith. Which one do you think is more powerful, more contagious, more life-changing?

Jesus is challenging us to follow him in moving freely among the lost and sick and broken and to spread contagious love and mercy and hope. He’s calling us to believe that these things are stronger, and that they will not only protect us but they will be contagiously spread by us and will infect others in life-saving ways.

That seems like a good note to finish on, but I think I need to first briefly address one potential misunderstanding in what I have said. I used the New South Wales Baptists and their current purge of churches that support queer Christians as an illustration of the fear factor in purity based moral thinking, but I also said that Jesus didn’t dispute that the sinners in question were sinners, and having said both of those things might leave some of you LGBTI+ folk feeling that I have left you labelled as sick sinners and proposed nothing more than tolerance of you. I need to clear that up before I sign off here.

It is typical of fearful purity based moral thinking that it is risk-averse, and that it tends to assume that conservatism is safer than embracing change. I have had other pastors say to me that they accept that my arguments for the full acceptance of same-sex couples in the church are persuasive, but, “What if you are wrong?” they say. “Isn’t it safer to maintain the traditional position just in case?” 

Well, even at the level of simple logic, why would it be any safer to be wrong in one direction than wrong in the other? And for myself, if I’m going to risk being wrong, I’d rather risk being found to have been too accepting of outcasts and sinners because at least that accusation would put me squarely in the company of Jesus.

But here’s the real answer. When you follow Jesus in letting go of your fears of being contaminated, and begin to trust in the contagious power of love and godliness, and actually sit down at table with those who others have written off as outcasts and sinners, remarkable things can happen. And one of those remarkable things is that sometimes you find that you are not just the transmitter of contagious love and godliness, but you are the receiver of contagious love and godliness from the people and places you least expected it. Sometimes when you encounter people up close as human beings instead of keeping them at a distance as suspect moral categories, your eyes are opened to the image of God alive and well, and to the unmistakable signs of the Spirit of God pouring forth where conservative religion said it could not.

So, to my queer sisters and brothers, I confess that I was once one who would have regarded you as sinners who should be purged from the church in the name of purity, but your contagious love and graciousness and forgiveness have infected me with the Spirit of God and not only changed my view of you, but challenged me to trust more fully in God whose love and mercy is far more infectious than anything any of us might fear. I thank you.

When we eventually agree on a new name for our church, we will probably lose our nickname SYCBaps, but until then, I’m more than happy to wear that name as a sign that we know ourselves to be those who are in constant need of the contagious healing touch of the great physician.