Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Our readings today are, I think, linked by common themes of faith and new life. We will be mainly talking about todays beautiful gospel reading, but for some context, we briefly need to begin with Genesis and Romans.
Our Lord is constantly creating; he didn’t stop at day six of creation. God the Holy Spirit is the “Lord, the Giver of Life,” and is constantly creating life where there is no life.
So, holding this thought, we look at the remarkable faith of Abram. God is about to create the most amazing thing, a whole people for himself and he needs Abram.
We have to remember that Abram was not Jewish, just faithful. God asked and he trusted and obeyed. There were no Jews, there was no Jewish law, that was still 500 (or so) years away. Just a promise of a great blessing – “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great and you will be a blessing” (Gen 12:2). The result of Abram’s faith was that indeed he became the father of many nations.
Now Paul makes much of this. Paul writes in today’s reading from Romans, that God and Abram were in a right relationship, what we call righteousness, purely because of Abram’s faith – not by all the works commanded by Jewish Law as Jewish law didn’t exist.
This is the heart of our faith. We come into a loving and righteousness relationship with God by faith alone. There is nothing we can do, as such, to earn redemption, sanctification or salvation.
It is through faith that God’s power is made known. The God who is always creating life where there is no life.
And in our Gospel, Jesus is busy creating new life in God’s newly included – sinners! Starting with the tax collector Matthew, the writer of this gospel. We have spoken about how despised tax collectors were, so picture this Jesus who seemed to be all over the countryside teaching and performing great miracles is suddenly right in front of Matthew saying, “follow me.”
The crowd remark how amazing it is that Jesus would bother with one so universally hated as a tax collector. Amazingly, Jesus has such authority that when he spoke, Matthew obeyed him. And the result of Matthew’s faith? Brand new transformative life resulting not in ill-gotten wealth, but the very gospel that bears his name.
The Pharisees are outraged that Jesus would defile himself with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus says, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Jesus is saying God, the divine mercy, welcomes sinners like Matthew who repent and follow Jesus.
instead of praising the great mercy and love of God, the Pharisees can’t tolerate this divine mercy and judge Jesus. They remove themselves from the new creation possible because of the cross – the creation of a new holy family; children of God and brothers and sister to one another.
So this newness of life through faith we see exemplified in Abram and Matthew, is also a dominant theme of the healing of the two women from today’s reading.
Both of today’s healing are about touch. The first is, if I can just get Jesus to come and touch my daughter she will live. The second, if I can just touch Jesus I will be made well. Jesus just loves touching people.
The Gospels use the words “hands,” “fingers,” and “touch” nearly two hundred times, and the words nearly always refer to Jesus. Phrases like: “Jesus put out His hand and touched him . . . So He touched her hand . . .. He went in and took her by the hand . . . Then He touched their eyes . . . Immediately Jesus stretched out His hand . . . Jesus came and touched them. . . Then little children were brought to Him that He might put His hands on them and pray . . .”
Touching was shockingly intimate. Not only does Jesus repeatedly touch people, but the very lowest of the low. Both these people were unclean; the woman with the bleeding that wouldn’t stop and the daughter because she was dead.
Under the law the ritually unclean could not be holy, so they could never take their place in the temple or synagogue to worship God, but in Jesus they are Holy! How beautiful. Their faith has made them daughters of God.
Jesus truly loves the despised, the hopeless, and the unclean. New sight for the blind, new health for the sick, and new life for the dead. This is the what the newness of Jesus means. Our God is ever creating life where there is no life.
We see in these healings, that this newness can only come through faith. Another way to put is, it is only accessible to faith. In both these healings, the writer Michael Green notes, ‘faith is the hand that grasps the astonishing new thing presented in Jesus.”
It was so with the bleeding woman in the crowd and it was so with the father of the little girl. It is faith itself that brings us into contact with Jesus.
Even when we are full of inadequacy and fall short, our faith is sufficient as long as that faith is located in the person of Jesus Christ. The Pharisees represent what can happen when we locate our faith elsewhere.
In a God without Jesus, faith in rules written by humans leading to contempt for all others, and a faith in a sort of divine book-keeper God, by whom you are protected by the fine print and everyone else rejected.
The power of Jesus is not displayed to the unbelievers. The crowd around the woman didn’t see the miracle they so eagerly awaited. It was a very private matter and our Lord dealt with it very privately. Only the faithful woman was aware of the great liberation of new life given to her by the sheer grace of or Lord.
It was the same with the “flute players and crowd making a commotion” (code for professional mourners). Their lack of belief meant that Jesus ejected them, and they were not part of witnessing the newness of life in the leader’s daughter.
So the thing Abram, the bleeding woman, and the father of the little girl have in common is faith. Faith that God would bring new life. To Abraham whom Paul describes as being ‘as good as dead,’
To the bleeding woman who could not socialise with anyone for twelve years and, who we read elsewhere (Mark 5:21-43), spent all she owned on doctors to no avail.
New life absolutely for the daughter of the leader of the synagogue. New life too for all of us, personally and as a parish. Newness through faith because our Lord is always bringing new life. And, if we are aware of it, we keep the faith at our end, knowing that something so new as to be unimaginable is coming.
Finally, wonderfully, our faithfulness is a gift and part of the fruit of the Holy Spirit, given purely in response to God’s own faithfulness, mercy, devotion and love to us, which is new every morning. Let me pray …