Everyone is on the move in this week’s text; even a dead girl!
Even the text itself seems to be on the move and in a hurry. Compared to Luke and even to Mark, the shortest of the gospels, Matthew’s version of these events is brief and to the point.
And this brevity begins with the call to Matthew.
Jesus is moving, walking along when: he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth. That is all we know about Matthew. This is about as stripped down and as basic a description as is possible to give; he is a man. We also know that he is sitting and that he is sitting at the tax booth. The next verse infers that Mathew is a tax collector, and we do find out in the next chapter that it is so, but now, for all we know, he could as likely be a taxpayer as a tax collector. What is important here is that one minute he is sitting and the next he is up and following.
In the second verse of the text, movement is reversed. Instead of Jesus moving and the tax collector sitting, Jesus and his disciples (including the newly discipled, Matthew) are sitting and many tax collectors and sinners are moving, coming to Jesus.
This text gives us constant movement and flexibility that we could contrast with the rigidity and lack of flexibility in old wineskins and old cloth (in the verses that have been left out of the lectionary text). Jesus is always moving in this text. He is moving when he meets Matthew, moving when he goes to Matthew’s home, moving when he turned and spoke with mercy and compassion to the woman, and moving when he responds to the call from the synagogue leader and goes to his home.
The second part of our text, where we have two completely different stories, links to the first part with its internal movement (the lectionary compilers help us to see the links by omitting verses 14-17). In verse 9, we read: And he(Matthew) got up and followed him. In verse 19, we read: And Jesus got up and followed him.
What are we to make of this? Following, in Matthew’s gospel, is about being a disciple of Jesus. It is this way all through the text (Matthew 4:19, 8:19-22, 10:38, 16:24, 19:21-28). What does it mean here? Is Jesus now a follower/disciple of a leader of the synagogue?
In the Gospel of John, Jesus is explicit; he does only what his father tells him (John 5:19, 5:43, 6:44, 8:28). Matthew’s gospel is less explicit, but Jesus does experience himself as responding to the call of God. Jesus, himself is a disciple of, as he repeatedly names God in this gospel, his father in heaven (Matthew 8:8-10). And we remember that in this gospel, Jesus rejects hierarchies: And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven (Matthew 23:9). Jesus is a follower/disciple and a leader. Could Jesus be, in some sense, in this moment, a disciple/learner of a leader of the synagogue? Perhaps, in the flow of Jesus’s life, things are not as fixed as we think...
And the other characters in the text respond to the flow and movement of Jesus. Matthew got up and followed Jesus, the haemorrhaging woman moves beyond custom and decency to touch Jesus, and the synagogue leader moves beyond even rationality and common sense: my daughter has just died; but… Matthew, the leader of the synagogue, the woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages, and Jesus respond to the call to be on the move. This whole little text is a choreographed rhythm of call and response.
Movement, we might ask, to what purpose?
In both the call of Matthew by Jesus and the call of Jesus by the leader of the synagogue, there is a movement toward home. Discipleship in Matthew’s gospel is a hard road (8:19-22, 10:5-38, 16:24, 19:21). But, before discipleship goes on the road, it goes to the heart of things, to home. The house is the symbolic unguarded, intimate place where pretence is unnecessary and where we are met in our unvarnished unconstructed true state. Perhaps this is why we have the story of the woman suffering from haemorrhages inserted here. Her home, her body, is damaged and needs healing and restoration. Houses feature in Matthew’s gospel It is in the house, the home, when discipleship begins in this gospel (8:14, 10:12-14). It even does so for Jesus; in Luke’s gospel he was born behind an inn; in Matthew, he was born in a house (Matthew 2:11).
However, inside the intimate place, the place where peace and wholeness should be the experience, there is, in this text, no peace. In Matthew’s home, it is the undermining criticism of the Pharisees: Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? In the synagogue leader’s home, it is the chaos of the flute players and the crowd making a commotion. In the woman’s ‘home’ it is disorder, brokenness, and, because her bleeding made her frequently ritually unclean, a loss of community.
It is those in the depths of who they are, in their homes, are sick, disordered, undermined, in chaos, and out of community, who are in need of a physician. They know their need because, in the home, in the secret heart of who we are, there is truth. We might think that we can avoid these truths, but we lie to ourselves at great cost. Perhaps there are those who are fit enough, rich enough, successful enough, or lucky enough that they can deny their own pain and disorder for twelve years but in doing so their humanity leaches away (Matthew 16:26).
Jesus goes to the heart of this when quoting the prophet Hosea, he says: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. One of the ways of translating the Hebrew of Hosea that Jesus would likely have known was: I desire mercy more than sacrifice. Given that Mathew’s gospel is more positive about Jewish laws and customs than some of the other gospels (5:18-24, 23:23-28), would it be likely that Jesus would prefer this translation? But Jesus does not here say more than, he says but. Why does he take the harder line?
Sacrifice is bounded and predictable. You know when a sacrifice at the temple begins and ends. A sacrifice’s form has a ritual structure. Sacrifice can be contained. Mercy, on the other hand, is boundless and vast. Mercy and compassion, in the first instance, are not actions, they are states of being. Compassion is not something that can be turned on and off again. The emotion of compassion and being compassionate are welded together – one cannot exist without the other. One experiences compassion for another before one is compassionate toward the other. And it is when we have experienced the mercy/compassion of another that we express the same. It is when we have been seen in all our ordinariness, in our unadorned reality and are still welcomed that we know mercy.
Everyone in this text experiences mercy/compassion in the heart of who they are. The cleaved and shattered Matthew who, so publicly displays his lostness (is he Roman or Jew?) experiences, in the house, the intimate place, welcome and restoration. The leader of the synagogue, that pillar of the community, whose family is literally falling apart before his eyes – and in public, experiences, in his home place, the touch of life and restoration. And the woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years, whose brokenness was so obvious and whose loneliness was so exposed discovers courage/heart, trusts her experience and is called, daughter.
We are all the sinners that Jesus came to call into mercy and compassion. Several English translations have sinners and righteous in quotes here because, of course, as every good Jew and certainly every Pharisee knows, there is no one righteous, not even one (Psalm 14:1-3). If no one can be labelled righteous, what is the point of all being labelled anything? Except, perhaps, human beings? Like the leader of the synagogue, all of us are in need of a physician to restore us to life, to, like the woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages, make us well, and, like Matthew to welcome us into our full and whole humanity.
The movement in this text is away from brokenness, despair, and hopelessness; from sameness, predictability and givenness, and toward wholeness, restoration, hope and the surprise of life.