He Came to Call Sinners

Text: Matthew 9:9-13 (Series A)
Theme:”He Came to Call Sinners”

Grace and Peace…
When people walked by the tax office where Matthew worked, and saw him sitting there, what did they see? In their minds, they saw a traitor to his people, one who collaborated with the hated Roman government. Being a tax collector was an occupation that attracted shady characters, because through cheating, a man could become fairly wealthy. When his fellow-Jews looked at Matthew, they saw a greedy, unscrupulous man, lacking in honor.
What did JESUS see in Matthew? Jesus knew all the same things about Matthew, and about tax collectors, better than anyone else. But Jesus didn’t focus only on negative qualities; He saw the person, Matthew. Matthew doesn’t tell us in his Gospel what the Lord saw inside him, but there must have been something there. When Jesus told Matthew, “Follow me,” this despised tax collector instantly quit his job, and became a disciple of Christ. That call to attach himself permanently to Jesus involved financial loss, yet replaced it with an infinite spiritual gain. And that gain was not just for Matthew! As an Apostle he left us one of the four inspired documents through which even today you and I come to know who Jesus is and what His kingdom is all about: the Gospel of Matthew.
When Jesus looks upon us, what does He see? Not the usual things that other people notice: the color of our skin, the shape of our bodies, the features of our faces. Nor does He know us by our reputations, or label us by our professions: Michael the pastor, Susan the doctor, Matthew the IRS agent. Jesus sees all these things, too, but they don’t carry the value for Him that they do with other people. These externals aren’t the focus of GOD’S vision of us. With us, like with Matthew, the Lord sees the person, the being made in the image of God, the soul destined to live forever. We may be bruised and broken, we may be afraid, depressed, and worried, and it may even be all our own fault, yet in each case, God sees the person. He calls to us with the same kind command that Matthew heard: “FOLLOW ME.”
All we know of Matthew’s start as a disciple, is that he completely renounced his old life, and began to follow Christ. To celebrate this new life, Matthew threw a big banquet in Jesus’ honor. He invited all the people he had been close to, the ones the Pharisees called “tax collectors and sinners,” the outcasts, who couldn’t have been “respectable” if they associated with Matthew. Matthew’s example here illustrates a Kingdom principle: Whenever someone truly meets Jesus Christ, becomes His disciple, and experiences His love, the first thing that one wants to do is to help others meet Jesus, and know Him.
This was grist for the mill of the Pharisees, who were always looking for ways to criticize and discredit Jesus. Self-appointed guardians of everyone else’s morality, they were typically scandalized and shocked. They confronted Jesus’ disciples and asked them, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and (notorious) sinners?” The thought behind their question is obvious. Basically, it’s “If this Jesus is really sent from God, if He is truly righteous and devout, He wouldn’t associate with such people. He would totally avoid them, just as we do.”
The key question is: What was Jesus doing there, and why? Later in the passage, He Himself gives us the answer to those questions. He was there as a spiritual Physician among people who were afflicted with the sickness of sin. Jesus was there ministering to the people, not sharing in their sins!
So, we cannot take Jesus’ example of eating with sinners and use it to justify having fellowship on their terms with people who follow Satan, and who hate or ignore Christ. We can’t use Jesus’ example to justify joining in sin with other people. That would be an abuse of Scripture that borders on blasphemy. The Bible also says, in I Corinthians 15:33-34:
“Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals.’ Come to your right mind, and sin no more. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame” (RSV).
No, when Christ is important to you; when He is your best Friend as well as your Savior; above all, when He is your Lord, whom you adore, obey, and honor, then you want to be with others who feel the same way. You seek friendships with people who can be friends in the only real sense of the word: people who love you enough to want to share with you the adventure of growing in the grace and knowledge of God. Conversely, you do not cultivate deep friendships with people who hinder, oppose, or ridicule that growth. True friendship is an affair of the spirit. If your spirit is joined to the Holy Spirit of GOD, that has a profound impact on such practical things as what you will or will not do, say, or take part in, as well as with whom you associate. It is a serious contradiction for me to say of myself, “Jesus Christ is the most important person in my life. I love Him and want to live for Him” — and then to say of people who despise Jesus, “These are my dear friends. I’m really committed to them, and I enjoy being with them. I do what they do, and share their ideas about what the meaning of life is.” One cannot love Jesus, and also be close friends with those who take Jesus’ name in vain, who laugh at God’s law, who scorn Jesus’ death on the cross, and who hate His Church, His Word, and the Sacraments. These things don’t jive, and they never will! “Bird of a feather do flock together.” That is why King David made these spiritual resolutions in Psalm 101:

“I will walk in the way of perfection…
I will walk with blameless heart within my house;
I will not set before my eyes whatever is base.
I will hate the ways of the crooked;
they shall not be my friends…
I look to the faithful in the land that they may dwell with me.
He who walks in the way of perfection shall be my friend.” (from the Breviary, Vol. III, pp 1170-1)
These are resolutions every Christian should make his or her own. They reflect a desire that arises naturally in the heart of anyone who knows and loves God; they reflect the work of the HOLY SPIRIT, setting the believer apart - heart, mind, and body - to be a dwellingplace of God, consecrated for holiness and purity. Moreover, this can happen without making you into a Pharisee in the process! The Pharisees made two serious mistakes on this occasion. FIRST, they thought they were competent to sit in judgement on someone else - Jesus. SECONDLY, they assumed that they themselves had no great problem with sin. Both assumptions were false!
The Pharisees were wrong to judge Jesus because they didn’t take into account His motive. Jesus wasn’t there to take part in the people’s sins, He didn’t approve of their sins. He even agreed tacitly with the Pharisee’s estimate of the crowd in Matthew’s house, by saying that they were, indeed, “those who are sick.” Their sickness was their SIN, their failure to love God, and to embrace God’s will for their lives. Jesus was among these people as the One who could heal their illness. He was there as the One who could, by the power of His grace and love, enable them to turn from sin, and start to live for God and with God. That was Jesus’ purpose there, TO CALL SINNERS TO REPENTANCE, and to entice them by His love away from the dominion of Satan into the kingdom of God. Jesus knew these people were sinners, but He saw them as persons, as precious children created in the image of God, as people who could become citizens of God’s eternal empire. They were sick; but they could be healed by the power of Christ’s love, if they would only, like Matthew, say “yes” to His call.
Similarly, no Christian is justified in associating with sinners in order to join them in their sin. We can’t approve of sin, not in others and not in ourselves. But we are not to totally avoid people who live outside the grace of God, either. That was one mistake the Pharisees made. They thought they had to isolate themselves from others who didn’t live up to their standards as if from a contagious disease; and they thought JESUS should have acted that way, too. But Jesus pointed out, what good is a doctor who won’t see his patients? A physician must see the sick if he is going to heal them, though without also becoming sick in the process. It’s odd that the Pharisees were shocked to find the One who had the antidote to sin and hell actually administering it to those who needed it. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”
Jesus certainly didn’t mean that the Pharisees were right in considering themselves to be spiritually healthy. He makes this clear in His next statement: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Jesus used the words of the prophet Hosea, that the Pharisees prized so intensely, to show them that their self-diagnosis was wrong. God is telling us all through the prophet that outward religious deeds, external right-eousness alone, without the interior disposition of the heart that God desires, are worthless. All the “sacrifice” in the world cannot make a man or woman right with God unless the HEART is right, and is filled with faith and love. As St. Paul says, “If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (I Cor. 13:3, RSV).
Jesus Christ was the physical embodiment of God’s love and mercy. He saw sinners as potential children of God, whereas the Pharisees saw them only as sources of contamination and disgust. In their desire to be faithful to God, the Pharisees had devoted themselves so completely to external righteousness that they had totally lost sight of the interior attitudes that God prizes most highly. God was in fact present among them, in the Person of His Son; what Jesus felt were God’s feelings, what Jesus did and said were God’s deeds and words. The Pharisees were so out of line with God’s heart that they wound up criticizing and condemning God! This was their sin. Jesus’ words to them laid bare the sin of self-righteousness, the sin of mercilessness, the lack of love and the absence of compassion, in their hearts. Their blindness to their own need for the Great Physician was further proof of their sin.
There are people today who live apart from God and in defiance of His laws. There are people who reject everything Jesus stands for. It’s not sinful for those of us who love Christ to recognize such people for what they are. It is sinful for us to fail to reach out to them with the message of Christ’s love, and the forgiveness that He alone can give. To condemn sinners for their sins, and then refuse to share God’s remedy with them, will make a perfect Pharisee out of anyone who claims to be a Christian. Those who know and love God are called to imitate His Son, and to go among today’s “tax collectors and sinners.” We aren’t to approve of their sin, or join in it, and so betray everything sacred by thinking, acting, and talking as the godless do, but rather give a quiet, persistent, humble, and loving witness to the reality and power of the LOVE we have come to know in Jesus Christ. To consider yourself a Christian and yet refuse to reach out in love is to be - in the worst possible sense - a Pharisee! When Jesus called you into His kingdom, He said to you as He said to Matthew: “FOLLOW ME.” Jesus explains elsewhere what that means, that the disciple is to become as much like the Master as is possible. That means doing what He did. Jesus has set His pilgrim people, the Church, right in the midst of the sinful world and its rebellious, lost, and hurting inhabitants, and said to us: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16, NRSV).
The Lord calls us, indeed He commands us, never to consider ourselves as inherently better than anyone else. St. Paul asks us in I Cor. 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (RSV) Whatever righteousness, knowledge, goodness, holiness, hope, joy, love, or faith we Christians possess, we have only by the grace of Christ. Our status as God’s children is not a reward for our goodness, but a sheer gift of divine mercy, of which we are completely unworthy. The thing that will most quickly and certainly ruin our life in Christ and make Pharisees of us is PRIDE. It must never be given a foothold in our hearts. As we reach out to those who do not know or love God, the content of our testimony must be what St. Paul writes in 2 Cor. 4:5: “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (RSV). If, for Jesus’ sake, we are servants, not only of God, but of everyone around us, then we will not become Pharisees, but can rather be like our Master, filled with love, sharing in humility the joy and vision of infinite beauty that Christ has poured into our hearts.
A final point: WE NEVER STOP BEING SINNERS. If you ever think you’ve reached the point where you can say, “I’m now completely holy and perfect; I can stop working on it,” you can be sure than you’ve become a bona fide Pharisee! The absolute knowledge that we are sinners, that we always need God’s mercy and forgiveness, that apart from Christ we can do nothing - this knowledge ought to keep us HUMBLE. It ought to make us want to cultivate holy friendships, with people who love Christ as we do. And this knowledge of our weakness and need ought to make it impossible for us to ever withhold compassion from others who are caught in sin. We don’t have to approve of their deeds, but we must never condemn other people as unworthy of God’s love - or of ours. In this, above all, we are to be like our Master, for He “desires mercy, not sacrifice.”
Our Lord Jesus still associates with sinners. After all, He is among us this morning. He is not here to approve of our sins, but to SAVE us from them, to forgive us, and to give us His power to fight against the darkness within us. He is here to call, and to give Himself - not to the self-righteous who think they have no need of Him, but to the sinner, the weak, the hurting, those whose fragmented existence cries out for healing and wholeness, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. God is here among us for those who know they are sick, and who trust - however weakly - that the love of Christ is the only remedy for the soul. Know this, and rejoice! For you are loved. AMEN