The scandal of mercy

All right. This morning's scripture reading is going to come from Matthew chapter 9. Matthew chapter 9. I'm just really thankful for the many hands that have come and have helped. And I just love seeing us as a body work together in this. And so really appreciative of everybody. Matthew chapter 9, and we're going to be reading verses 9 through 13.

As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, "Follow me." And he rose and followed him. And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" But when he heard it, he said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.' For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners."

Let's pray. Well, Lord, we just pray that you would speak to us through your word. And I just pray, Lord, that you above all would have your way, that we would just have open hearts to hear from you today, and that you might give me clarity of voice and mind. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Introduction

So, one of the things that we really see coming forth from this is that as Jesus is talking and coming here, and he calls Matthew into his life, Jesus is ultimately showing us and reorienting us and revealing what God's mission has always been: to come near to people, to come near to needy and broken people, not for them to come to him, but for him to first come down to them.

This is what Jesus has been doing as he has gone out and is doing ministry and has called this tax collector to himself. This has always been God's mission from the very beginning. If you really think from the very beginning, Adam and Eve sin in the garden and they are running from God. They are leaving. They're filled with guilt and with shame, and they hide themselves. God could go, "Well, this was a science project gone wrong. I guess too bad," and just kick it to the curb. But no, God came down, and he pursued them, and he killed an animal, and he clothed them. This signifying the cost of mercy and of grace, but he pursued.

Even later, as the children of Israel come out of bondage and out of Egypt, and they are in the wilderness, God in the same way creates a tabernacle where he meets with the people. In this place, there is the Most Holy Place, and on top of the Ark of the Covenant is a thing called the mercy seat, where the priest would come and sprinkle that blood before the mercy seat. So God's mercy comes down to us and meets with us in these places.

We find that ultimately what Jesus is doing here is redefining everything about the way that religion in this day and age has become. It's become about going to God, and it's become about getting your life fixed and right. And yet Jesus is reorienting everything to God coming down and drawing us up unto himself. That changes everything. In Matthew 9, that mercy is no longer a shadow, but it now has a face. It's in Jesus.

So what we're going to see here are three things: Why is Jesus here? What does he confront? And what does it all mean?

1. Why Is Jesus Here?

First off, as Jesus comes to Matthew, Matthew's a tax collector. If you know, in Jesus's day, tax collectors are known as sinners. They're known as corrupt individuals. Rome occupied Israel, and there was a system of exorbitant taxes that took place. Oftentimes tax collectors would profit by charging a surcharge to the current tax, and they would make money. They were known oftentimes as criminals or crooks or con artists.

They also, in Jewish times, are serving the empire. So they're working against the people of God, and in every way, culturally and religiously, they're seen as outcasts. They're seen as the enemy. They're seen as the least of these, worse than Gentiles in every way. Yet Jesus is going along, and he sees this guy who is a notorious tax collector, who's known for his role. He doesn't deserve salvation; he doesn't deserve God in his life. And yet Jesus looks at him, and he calls him to follow him.

Matthew would have, I'm sure, in the time of Capernaum and Jesus's growing fame, known about Jesus. The trade routes that would go along through a tax booth would often be lines of communication. He was aware of the ministry of Jesus and who he was. And yet we see here this picture of Jesus coming to someone who doesn't, seemingly from a religious perspective, deserve it—deserve the recognition, deserve the call. You would call, as a rabbi, this guy of all people to follow you? He's the least qualified and the least worthy of any of this! Yet that's exactly the kind of person that Jesus calls.

He calls him to belong. He calls him to be a follower. He invites him into his crew of people who will travel along and do ministry. Now, that's scandalous if you can really think about it. I mean, if you think about even in our modern day, just the people... you think about a con artist, or you think about people that are notorious sinners, or people that have cheated people. You think about the investment banker on Wall Street who's crooked, or the crooked politician that should have gone to jail, or whatever it is in life—and yet Jesus wants that person in his crew of followers.

There's a scandal to it in a way. It's completely a reversal of who should belong and who should be included. But that's what Jesus does: he invites the people not who belong or think they belong because of their merit, but just those who want to follow. So the invitation to Matthew and to all is, "Will you follow me? Will you come?" It's not to those who are well, to those who deserve it, to those who are pretty good people. No, it's just anyone—anyone, all who are unworthy, all who don't belong. Jesus says, "You can belong. You can be known, invited, seen, loved, included." It changes everything.

Yet that mercy as it is, that invitation to belong, calls for a response. It invites all of us not just to say, "That's a nice thing," but to understand what he's doing. Matthew very much understood the scandal, and yet the beauty, the overwhelming privilege of what Jesus was asking and what Jesus was inviting him to. Everyone else around him—maybe even Matthew himself—"Who, me?" Yeah, Matthew!

Even for us as a church, we often can value people based upon their worth, their deserving. Maybe they're good people, they're clean, they've got their life together, and they've acted right, and so those are the kind of people we want to attract and draw. But that's not how Jesus values it, right? No, it's based on the one that God chooses, based on the one who will get up and follow, and that's who Jesus extends it to.

He also changes everything and redefines by renewing the original mission. The mission of God changed over time in Judaism. I had a professor in college that talked about salvation and talked about the message of the Bible. The way that he said it, he said: "Conceptually, it boils down to this question: Is it that we rise up to God, or is it that God came down and he draws us up to himself?"

The message over and over again, even from Genesis, as I said earlier, is that God came down, and he meets with us. It's not based upon our qualifications or anything else, and he draws us up to himself.

Everything in Jesus's day... there was a temple on a hill. The understanding of the Pharisees and all who looked on at people like Matthew would have been this: If you want to come to God, then you go to that temple up there, and you offer your sacrifices, and you get your life right, and you start acting right, and then God will accept you. That's the way that Judaism worked in Jesus's day.

And yet Jesus comes, and he sits with sinners and tax collectors—people that don't belong, people that shouldn't be included in the circles of holiness, people that we shouldn't be reaching out to. "They need to come to God and get their stuff right first!" And yet Jesus does the very opposite. He meets with people in their lives. He breaks bread with them. Especially in ancient Near East times, breaking bread and fellowship, this life-on-life, it meant community. It meant acceptance.

There is something even today about inviting people into your homes. There's another level of friendship that gets included with that. It's not just a coworker or somebody you meet on the sidewalk; there's a greater level of intimacy and acceptance and community that's built around the table. Here Jesus is having table fellowship with people who normally religious people of his day didn't hang out with, and yet he comes.

So we see this shift from the temple over there, where you go and you get your life right and you meet with God up there, to what it says in John 1, where Jesus came and he tabernacled among us. The temple of God moves from up on the hill to around the table, and in the neighborhood, and in front of the tax booth. It shifts and changes everything about Jesus's ministry.

It reminds us of that same model: that it's not just coming to God and getting your life right. No, it's God coming down and meeting with you wherever you are, not because you're worthy, not because your life is good or right, but because God loves and pursues his people. Jesus brings holiness and forgiveness and cleansing. It's a reminder that we are to befriend, just like Jesus, all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life—to break bread around tables, just as Jesus did here with tax collectors and with sinners.

We're so afraid sometimes. "What will people think?" That's sort of the question of the Pharisees in many ways: "What will people say when this religious rabbi is eating with those kinds of people?" It's the reminder that that's the God that we serve, and the God that he calls us to be: to go and be incarnational in the world around us, to enter into the lives of people, people who are different than us, people who might not be religious at all, and to share life, and in the right moments to see how God opens the door for us to be able to share the message of the gospel even in their lives.

2. What Does Jesus Confront?

As Jesus is changing and redefining and reorienting everyone back to God's original mission, what does he confront? Ultimately, he confronts the Pharisees. The Pharisees look and see that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, and that's what they say. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? These aren't the kind of people you should be reaching out to! These aren't the kind of people you should be associating with, Jesus. This is the wrong place for you to be."

See, the Pharisees represent religion. Religion is based upon the simple rule: obey and you'll be accepted. Get your life right. Do right. Do what God has called you to do. Fix the things that are broken, repent of your sin, and then God will accept you. But what happens over time when we begin to operate on that? Well, one, we can't clean ourselves enough to underestimate the depth of sin deep within us. A.W. Tozer said it like this: "It's not what we do that makes us sinful; it's what we are." There's something deep within us that's broken, and we've lost and twisted something about the humanity that God put in us, so that it's off-kilter and we tend to be prone to wander, prone to reject God, prone to go our own way.

There's something about religion that says if you'll conform, if you'll follow these rules, you can find acceptance. You can obey and be accepted. You can live your good life, you can avoid bad people, and this will lead to righteousness. But really, ultimately, that's a self-righteousness. It's a righteousness that starts to look at our works, and our life, and our goodness, and we begin to depend on that. We begin to slowly see that our life is based upon our good works. The problem with religion is that it makes us judgmental toward others. Pride takes root in our heart. It blinds us to our need.

The gospel challenges religion. It tells us that you are accepted, and therefore, through that, obey.

Something about what the Pharisees do here is that they misunderstand the heart of God. They misunderstand that God is calling them not to religious obedience.

Jesus is confronting something of the day and the age around him: legalism. See, the Pharisees had... they believed they had followed the rules, they had offered the sacrifices, they had done all the right things in their life, and so therefore they are accepted. For all the other people out there, if they want to get right, then you come and you offer your life and you do right. "And if you're a tax collector, you know what? You don't belong, and you never will belong. Maybe if you repent, you turn, you quit your job, and you start offering sacrifices, you'll be accepted, but it's based upon what you do. You come to God; you work your way up." It's all about you rising up to God.

What happens over time is that there's a self-righteousness that begins to birth within this, because you begin to slowly think, "I have obeyed. I've done what I'm supposed to. I'm a good person. I've followed the rules. Therefore, God, I've got holiness, and he accepts me because I'm a good person." Slowly that shift begins to not see God's mercy—the mercy that you have to come before with the high priest and sprinkle the blood in front of. No, you begin to say, "I am righteous. There's a shift because of what I've done, because of what I've done."

What it will slowly do in your heart is it will begin to make you proud. You will begin to look at other people who maybe don't have the same conformity to the rules, or the level, or whatever it is that you have—"I tithe more, I'm more generous, I follow the rules better, I'm stricter, I dress up better"—and you will begin to judge the people around you. You will begin to condemn them.

That's what the Pharisees ultimately do here. If people want to come to God, they need to clean their life up first. That's how religion always works, right? You follow the rules, you get your life right, you come to church, you read your Bible, you pray enough, you do all of these things, and then you start to kind of be a righteous person. You begin to look around at the world and even people in the church, and you can start to judge them. You can start to say who is worthy of God and who is not. The whole system begins to look at conformity to rules, and then we begin to become afraid to actually enter into other people's lives who might not be as conforming as we are, because it might impact us. It might taint us.

The amazing thing about what Jesus is doing is that he enters in. See, the way the Jewish system worked is that you abstained from things that made you unclean. If you came into contact with things—unclean foods, dead carcasses, whatever—that would taint and make you unclean. It got so far that eventually it was: stay away from sinners because they are unclean; Gentiles are not part of the people of God, stay away from them because they are unclean.

You can see more and more how religion begins to put up these barriers and these walls and say, "You're out there. We're in here. Somehow we're more accepted, we're more elevated, we're better. God loves us more, accepts us more because we've obeyed," and we sort of just throw truth at those who are outside. You can kind of see this great separation that begins to happen.

But there's something about Jesus and about the way that God works that penetrates and tears down the walls, because Jesus's holiness, God's holiness—it enters in, and when it touches unclean things, does he absorb it? No! His holiness and his power and his righteousness conquers and transforms those things. Jesus is not made unclean by his contact with sinful people. He's not made unclean by his contact with lepers. It's the power and the holiness of God that begins to transform and permeate out.

Do you see? The illustration might be like light and darkness. Anytime you turn on light in the dark, it's going to conquer it. It's going to drive out the dark. So it is with God's holiness. Unlike the Jewish system, which had gotten so strict about walls and barring things off because it might taint us, Jesus goes out into those places and says the power and the holiness of God will, like light, drive out and change and transform.

When he shows up at the tax collector booth, and when he shows up in people's houses and he breaks bread with sinners and tax collectors, he's spreading and invading his holiness into people's lives. He's offering himself, he's offering mercy to them, grace to them, and it penetrates.

Matthew looks in the eyes of the Savior of the world. Doesn't know it, but something about that guy said, "I'm seen. Everybody in the world has told me I don't belong, people hate me, I'm a cultural outcast, and he said I can belong. He said I can be in."

There's this power and this reversal that begins to take place that moves from religion, which says, "Do right, and then you can enter into the walls of acceptance," to God moving out, coming down into that space and into those places, granting mercy, telling people they can belong, telling them they are accepted, and inviting them to follow and to respond. It changes everything.

"He knows my name! He called me by name. He invited me. He told me I belonged. He gave me acceptance before I did anything to deserve it." That's what's happening in Matthew's life. That's what's happening in the lives of so many people as Jesus moves out of the confines of religion and brings the gospel.

That's the difference between religion and gospel. Religion says, "Follow the rules and you'll be accepted." Gospel says, "You're accepted; now obey. Walk in that." Who wouldn't want to when they've experienced such mercy, such forgiveness, when a person like Jesus says, "You can belong"?

Matthew had never experienced anything like that in his life. If we're honest, we've all been Matthew. I hope you can remember that. I hope you don't think that you've always had it all figured out, that your life has been clean, because you will start to become like a Pharisee, and you'll forget the need that you have for mercy. You'll start to say, "I'm accepted because I've done right, not because God came in when I was not looking for him and not interested, and he called me and told me I was loved and seen, that I could belong." That's gospel, and it's scandalous.

You see this, right? Everything in this world says you do, and therefore you're accepted. I mean, we feel it. We naturally feel it. We feel like even when we get the gospel, we always orient back to law. We always feel like, "Well, I got to keep doing..." No! Everything's a response. It's a response. It doesn't make you more accepted. It doesn't make you better, like you're going to get some higher level of salvation and acceptance. God pursued you first when you were not interested in him.

So Jesus confronts the religion of his day and invites people to belong, and it changes everything about it.

3. What Does It All Mean?

So Jesus here... why is Jesus here? Because he's redefining what it means to belong, and he's renewing his original mission—God's original mission from the beginning to invade, and to come, and to draw people to himself, and then to work through the lives of those people to come and gather their friends and all these different people in walks of life, and to begin to build a new kind of society, a new kingdom of people who will follow him, whose lives have been transformed, who didn't deserve it—a bunch of people who felt like that, riffraff, "And I didn't belong, and I didn't deserve, and my life is a mess," and yet God said that I belong, I could have a seat at the table. It shifts everything, and it produces a sort of gratitude and awe at this mercy that he has extended.

He turns to the Pharisees here, and he quotes a verse from Hosea: "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice."

"I meet the people who need me."

Ironically, the Pharisees here don't think that they need righteousness. They think, "I am righteous because I have obeyed. I'm not sick, therefore I don't need a healer and doctor, because I have my religion."

Jesus, sort of in an off-handed way as a teacher, says to these guys who know their Bible, who have taught their Bible... he quotes a verse from Hosea and says, "Go and learn what this means." It's a little bit insulting. "Are you kidding me? I know the Bible! I know what it says. I taught on that verse." Yet that's what he does: "Go, because you know the word, but you don't know it. It hasn't penetrated your heart and your life to understand the heart of God—his very heart."

So we talked about why Jesus is here, what he confronts, and what does it all mean? What it means is that we need mercy. Matthew needs it, but we need it too. If we ever forget that, then we begin to align our lives more with the lives of religious people who say, "I'm accepted because I've obeyed," instead of "God scandalously came and offered it to me."

Years ago, I struggled with addiction, and my life had a lot of things that were not going well. I was really confused, and something began to birth all of a sudden in me. I began to feel real guilty about some of the things I was doing, and it started to bother me. Months went by, and I was trying to fix it, and I couldn't fix it. You know, the religion thing, the God thing started to kind of come into the picture, and I started thinking about it.

But you know what scared me so much? What scared me is I actually thought that if I came and I asked God for help, he wouldn't take me because he knew what I'd done. He knew who I was. He wouldn't receive me. He wouldn't forgive a guy like me. It scared me to come to him because I was like, "If there is a God"—because I wasn't sure if I even believed in him—"and he does reject me, I'm lost. That's the worst of all." He's supposed to be gracious, and yet I was afraid. The enemy had me so afraid.

We can't forget our need for mercy. Mercy changes us from the inside out. It changes Matthew's heart and life here, because as he understands what he's been invited to, he's through that going to live a life that's completely changed, because God said he belongs. It was like he was named something other than what he was.

See, when God extends mercy to you, he calls you something different than what you are. You can be a tax collector, you can be a drug dealer, whatever, you can be a prostitute, and yet he says, "No, that's not what I name you." When he extends his mercy to you, he's calling you something different. He's giving you worth and value, and he's saying, "That's not who you really are. I know who you are. John, Sarah, Sandra—I made you. I created you."

Something about that awakens a person that makes them want to start to respond to that identity, to begin to live that out. That's what begins to happen in Matthew's heart. He doesn't want to live this old life anymore. He doesn't want to be the guy that's rejected; he doesn't want to be the outcast anymore. He said, "I belong. I can be part of the people of God. He invited me and included me." Matthew's life is all now about responding and living that out, living up to the thing that he's been invited to, because that's what God's mercy really does.

We should never forget it in our own lives. Mercy changes us from the inside out, not the outside in. It calls us first. It comes down and grabs us and draws us up to God. In that same way, we're also to turn and not look at the good deeds we did, but to realize, "No, you were accepted because God just loved you." Through that response, we are not to proceed in judgment and condemnation to the world around us, and not to look and say, "Well, I'm a pretty good person, that's why I'm really accepted," because pride will slowly do that to you. It will slowly make you into a religious person.

We have to see, just like Jesus, let him come in and reorient us and challenge us, just like he's challenging the way that things work in this time that he operates in here 2,000 years ago. It had shifted from the garden and from what he originally intended to a system that was very different than what God intended it to be.

So there's a warning to all of us to avoid becoming the Pharisee like that. We can start to clean up our lives, and we can live so tidy that we begin to put these confines around us, and we don't want to enter into the world around to break bread, to share life, to enter into people that are different than us, and just find that shared experience—that love for football, or whatever it is, or pickleball, or anything like that, or volunteering—and just see how God opens doors in those spaces with people very different than us, and allows us to be agents of his mercy, his goodness, his gospel in this world.

To sum up all of this: As I thought about what Jesus is doing here, and how he's changing everything, and extending, "I came to give mercy. I desire mercy, and not sacrifice," I thought about the story in Les Misérables. If you've seen the movie, it's pretty close to the book in many ways. In a very famous scene, Jean Valjean is a convict, and he's been set out of prison, and he stays with a priest overnight in his house, and he steals the silver. You're out of jail, man, and you're already committing a crime! Jean Valjean's not a great guy. He steals the silver, and the police were watching him, so he runs off, and they catch him, and they bring him back to the priest.

They say, "Hey, we caught the guy. Here's your silver back."

And the priest says, "Oh no, I gave that to him."

The police are completely dumbfounded. "What? You gave it to him?"

"Yeah, yeah. Jean Valjean, I'm mad at you—you forgot the candlesticks!" And he grabs these silver candlesticks that are also worth a lot of money, and he gives them to Jean Valjean.

The police are like, "So we can let him go?"

"Yeah, you can let him go. He's fine."

So they go off, and he's standing there with Jean Valjean, and he gives him the candles. He looks at him, comes in slowly, draws close to him, and says, "Don't ever forget it. Don't ever forget it. I have purchased you from evil and from darkness. That is no longer who you are. Keep your promise, Jean Valjean."

Jean Valjean, through this, the book talks about him shaking and being so bewildered by what was happening, and dumbfounded by what he was experiencing, thinking, "I didn't promise anything! What is he talking about?"

Jean Valjean leaves there disoriented. As the book continues, he doesn't immediately change. He actually winds up stealing some money from a little kid. And yet something begins to... the words of that priest begin to haunt him. "Why did he let me off the hook? Why did he extend such mercy to me?" It begins to fester in Jean Valjean, and he comes to a place where he begins to realize: If this guy has done this for me and I reject it, it means one of two things. It means I really am a wretch, and my life is going to move on this trajectory where people can even treat me nice and this is the way that my life goes—I'm the wretch of all wretches, I'm almost a demon. Or something about this is messing with me, and if I'm going to respond to it, it's going to change everything about me. I'm going to live out something about what he has called me to because of what he did. He gave me a new opportunity, a second chance.

Jean Valjean comes to this crossroads in his life as he begins to ponder that, and as it festers in his own heart. The author says that mercy began to dawn in his soul. It penetrated something in him. That priest had named him, and called him, and accepted him in a way that was not who he was in that moment, and he began to live in light of that.

Mercy calls us to live in light not of who we were, but of who God called us and who he calls us to become. So our life is always responding to that calling, and that naming, and that act of mercy. Mercy disrupts, and it overwhelms, and it shapes us.

Think about your own life. It shaped me when I experienced it that very first time, when I thought, "God's not going to give me mercy." And then he did, and he met me in a very powerful way one day, and it began to shape and stir something, and I knew I didn't deserve it. Like Jean Valjean, I began to live in light of it. I didn't want that old past to define me anymore.

But mercy costs something. God can't just wave his hand over someone and say, "Forgiven." Even for the priest, it cost him that silver. It cost him in that moment to extend mercy. In that same way, God pays for that costliness. He absorbs all of our guilt, all of our shame, all of our actions, and says that we don't belong, and he extends to us not just mercy, but he also extends to us his righteousness.

So you think about Matthew there: tax collector, his identity, his robbery, all of these different attributes that are on him. It's not just that Jesus waves his hand over that guy and says, "You're clean." He does, but he takes it and he pays for that. He absorbs it, and then—theologically they call it imputed righteousness—he transfers his holiness, his righteousness to Matthew.

So it's not the old Matthew we see; it's a new Matthew. As Matthew responds and leans in, he receives all of Jesus's credit and rightness and goodness. It falls on Matthew as a follower. It's redemptive, and he begins to live in light of that, so that God no longer sees old Matthew the tax collector—he sees his son. He sees the righteousness of Jesus sitting on Matthew.

For all the tax collectors and the sinners and all of the different people that will come to Jesus, that's what happens. God absorbs our sin. He pays for the cost, and then he gives us his holiness and his righteousness. It's that light penetrating that darkness, and when it does, it changes us.

It also commissions us, like Matthew, to throw the parties and to gather the different people from all walks of life, to gather around the table like them, to be present in the lives of people, and to extend mercy—whether it's them coming in here, or whether they gather in our homes, or whether we meet them in different walks of life. Sometimes it's through relationship as Jesus breaks bread, and sometimes it's a quick meeting in a coffee shop or at a tax collector booth. In the same way, standing like Jesus, calling people to belong, to be known, to be invited in, to know a God who loves them, so that they might receive that same mercy and righteousness from him.

Let me pray.