Dear Friends,
Recently, I’ve been thinking about Matthew 9, the story of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector, eating with society's outcasts, and then, on his way to heal a dying girl, stopping for a woman who'd been ill and isolated for twelve years.
What strikes me most is the order of things. Jesus doesn't wait for Matthew to clean up his life before calling him. He doesn't wait for the woman to introduce herself properly before responding to her. He simply sees people the world had stopped seeing and moves toward them.
When the religious leaders object to Jesus eating with "sinners," he answers with a line from the prophet Hosea: God desires mercy, not sacrifice. That's not mercy as a nice little ‘extra’ alongside our religious observance, it's mercy as the whole point of it. Mercy is the main ‘thing’! It's so easy for any of us who care deeply about our faith to slip into sorting people into who belongs and who doesn't, who's respectable and who isn't. Jesus just keeps undoing that sorting!
I love the way that when the woman reaches out to touch his cloak, Jesus doesn't treat her as an interruption to his more important errand. He stops. He turns. He calls her "daughter", one word that restores everything those years of exclusion had taken from her. And then he goes on to the little girl, takes her hand, and tells her to get up.
This story about two healings, woven together, tells us something about how God works: not at a distance, but through stopping for the person right in front of us, through entering grief and exclusion and refusing to let them have the last word.
So, this is the question we must grapple with: who is reaching for the edge of our attention right now? Who have we, without really meaning to, learned to look past? Mercy isn't only found in dramatic rescues, it's found in the willingness to stop, even when we're busy, even when something else feels urgent, and to see the person in front of us. Friends, may we continue to be a church community known less for getting our boundaries right and more for the mercy that moves toward people.
With love,
