June 8, 2008 + Infectious Holiness + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26



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In this text we get a series of rapid fire vignettes – each one is nice on its own – Jesus calling Matthew the disciple, Jesus healing the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, and Jesus restoring life to a 12 year old girl. Each encounter is worthy of its own sermon – yet today I want us to look at what they mean as they sit together in the 9th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Because as we take them as a whole, a theme emerges. Matthew is teaching us about Jesus’ understanding of holiness.

So in this sermon about holiness – I want to start with infection – disease – this will come in very helpful in just a bit,

How do you feel when the person before you in line at the buffet sneezes over the food? Or the person behind you in line coughs so hard that your hair moves and you feel the mist of it on the back of your neck? Or when your co-worker’s eyes are red and weeping puss and she says, oh this pink eye again! Can I borrow your cell phone?

As a society we have some common understandings about how illness is transferred. Germs thriving on a door handle, bacteria suspended in the air from a sneeze. Usually our response to curtail the spread of the disease is quarantine. Our strategy is to isolate the infection to stem the spread. So you miss a day of work or your kid stays home from school. As we order our life together in community, we agree that the inconvenience of the individual is better than the pandemic sweeping through the whole collective.

Over the years different communities have believed different things about what exactly is contagious. In hindsight they might seem so silly, but when its our strategy that we believe to be true we know it on every level of our being.

At one point the night air was thought to be responsible for malaria – so mothers closed the windows at night, and only a few years ago, it was believed that HIV/AIDS could be caught from just being close to some one with the disease, so those who were stricken with it were shunned. Fear of illness and sickness works at more than just the rational level – I remember when my brother-in-law was in his last round battling cancer. He was swollen and his skin had turned yellow, he was coughing for breath and it was all because of the cancer in his body, but I still felt a catch in my stomach about letting my kids draw near to him. Death was hovering so close, it frightened me and I wanted to protect my kids.

Keep this body awareness with you as we enter today’s text.

In Jesus’ day, the prevailing attitude about holiness was that it was in need of constant protection – like the boy in a bubble with out an immune system - holiness was forever using hand sanitizer, opening bathroom doors with her elbows, never eating out in restaurants, keeping her toothbrush six feet from the toilet. There were all kinds of laws and customs that sought to protect personal and corporate holiness. These laws didn’t hover on the edge of life, they saturated every aspect – what people ate, how they prepared food, who they ate with, where they worked what they did, who they were friends with, who they spoke to, bought from, sold to….

So Matthew gives us these three pictures of Jesus in action and together they give us the heart of how Jesus understood holiness - the power and person of God. To the early readers of the Gospel – people who had internalized the myriad of holiness laws, as they read today’s text, its as though Jesus is licking the hand rail on the subway stairs.

In the first story, Jesus is calling Matthew, the tax collector to be a disciple. We know the story so well it can be hard to feel the shock of it – Jesus is not at the Harvard Divinity School Job Fair looking for fresh, spiritual leaders for his movement. No! Jesus is trolling for disciples at the tollbooth?

In the Bible tax collectors are often grouped with sinners and prostitutes and gentiles – not the best of company, certainly not the holiest. The reason was that they were the front line of the Roman occupation – they occupied the place in daily life where people were regularly confronted with the humiliation and burden of the Roman occupation. Already in Israel, there was a temple tax on basically everything. When Rome invaded and occupied Israel, they added another layer of tax on basically everything and then some. The tax collectors worked in sort of a franchise arrangement, where they had to pay Rome the basic taxes they collected, but anything that they could get over and above was theirs to keep. Obviously this created a system rife with corruption and extortion. So as the average working person came up to the toll booth and had to surrender another 10% of the value of the goods they were bringing to market, they had a fair amount of bitterness and suspicion that they were getting robbed, sort of like how we’re feeling these days at the gas pump. A tax collector was considered unclean because they represented the political power that was recklessly disregarding the Temple, the law, and in fact God.

So Jesus befriends this Tax collector, calls him to be a disciple, and again, take note, Jesus is NOT taking Matthew as a diamond in the rough, he is not saying, oh Matthew, you’ve got so much spiritual potential, let me take you away from this terrible life and get you cleaned up and holy-ed up. This is not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, putting it all behind her. Jesus and the other disciples actually go to Matthew’s house and attend a dinner party – eating and drinking with all of Mathew’s tax collector, sinner friends, laughing at their irreverent jokes. They get to see Matthew close up – noting his quirky taste for expensive Merlot and his extensive collection of Bionic Man posters, his love for life and his generous heart. Jesus is embracing the whole of who Matthew is…

The next two pictures Matthew gives us are interwoven. The leader of the local synagogue comes to Jesus and tells him that his daughter has just died, and asks Jesus to bring her back to life.

That’s a big ask! – not only in the bring back from death respect, but in Jewish law, to touch the dead was a HUGE breach of the purity code. Holy people didn’t rub shoulders with the dead and dying. By touching a dead person, Jesus would be putting his own cleanliness, his own holiness at risk.

So the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus and asks him to go lay hands on his daughter it’s a very bold request. And Jesus doesn’t dodge it – let’s go! He says. Its pretty shocking that he said yes and a group of people went along to see what would happen.

In the middle of the crowd, a hemorrhaging woman worked her way up to Jesus and touched the tassel of his cloak. Again, a HUGE breach of the purity code. Women who were bleeding – menstruating or hemorrhaging, were not supposed to circulate socially. Her move to get close to Jesus was also very bold. And again Jesus doesn’t dodge her - he stops right there in the street (he could have just chalked it up to someone stealing a healing from him) – who touched me? And then Go my daughter! Your faith has made you well.

Have you seen the man with the oozing wound in his leg, and he’s sitting by the side of the off ramp at Crenshaw? He’s older, clearly in need of medical care – so we give him some change and then go when the light turns green. Or we write a check to help AIDS orphans in Africa or we cast a vote for immigrant rights. All good things, all good, AND that is not what Jesus is doing here – he is not saying you are healed now go back to where ever it was you said that you came from and let me get on with my holy man agenda – he is saying My Daughter – he sees her as a beloved child of God, not an outcast.

Here is the big reveal that Matthew has for us – Jesus’ understanding of holiness runs counter to the prevailing attitude. For Jesus it’s not the sin that is contagious, its holiness that is contagious. He understood that holiness possesses a transforming power over uncleanliness.

When he is answering the Pharisee’s critique for his affiliation with Matthew, Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea as he describes what God is after “I want mercy not sacrifice”. This is a bit cryptic to our ears

On one hand we have sacrifice - Sacrifice was the means of restoring relationship under the purity laws. Once holiness had been threatened, sacrifice was what was done to remedy the situation – like antibiotics getting pumped in by an IV.

Sacrifice was the prescribed way of maintaining holiness and purity. A system of tithes and offerings that prescribed how to right a wrong and restore the purity. Like every system, it could become an end in and of it self and could be hijacked to perpetuate the very wrongs it was supposed to condemn.

Mercy, “hesed” on the other hand, which is also translated, compassion, comes from the Hebrew root for womb – The mercy and compassion, the love that I have for the one in my womb. Mercy is what God desires.

Because God is compassionate, forgiving, accepting, nourishing of both the righteous and the sinner – the rain falls and the sun shines on everyone, because God accepted them, God’s people were supposed to go and do likewise.

Jesus understood that holiness and purity were infectious, contagious and transformative - this freed him up to include those people who had been excluded and quarantined under the purity laws.

So he goes to the home of the dead child and touches her and restores her to life. And the bleeding woman touches him and is healed and ends 12 years of isolation and he takes the disciples over to Matthew the tax collector’s house and they get to meet his tax collector friends.

So you’re thinking the take away from this morning’s sermon is – let bleeding women touch you, its ok to touch dead people, and have a tax collector over for dinner. Pretty manageable and pretty irrelevant, I don’t know any tax collectors, and honestly, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about them.

As we seek to live into this passage, the edge comes when we start to dig around to find out who our modern day our tax collectors are. Who are the people that we as a society marginalize for the good of all concerned? I imagine that there might be some general categories of people that would be hard to bring into our community – people who kill, people to harm others. Ed was telling me that smokers get a fair amount of hazing across the board…The edge comes into stark focus when we factor in our individual experiences.

– So a person who has been falsely charged, arrested, and thrown in jail reaching out to a police officer?

– Or a person who grew up with a father who abused alcohol and sent the family into financial crisis reaching out to a drunk who was doing the same to their family?

How to we embrace those people who represent the things and people who have wounded us the most?? How do we extend “hesed”/ compassion?

At one level it is beyond complicated how we work through our own wounds to reach out to others – it takes all the wisdom and strength God can give us.

At another level – it is the most straightforward thing. We know we need to do it, so we start by doing what we can – we put a coin in the man’s cup, we hold our tongue instead of lashing out with venomous words, we beg God to change our heart, change the situation, to and then we come back the next day and see what it is that is in our power to do.

Matthew is telling us that Jesus operated as though holiness was contagious and in its embrace what was broken is transformed and made whole. Jesus didn’t huddle inside his holy apartment with the security bars on the windows and six deadbolts on the door. He opened it all up – with reckless, divine love.

Jesus is saying, I am going to embrace sin when I find it with a bear hug of holiness. I am going to surround it with the transforming power of God’s purity.

So when Jesus walks up to us as we are sitting at the tax collector booth, and he strikes up a conversation with us – we can trust that he isn’t the kind of guy who is going to date with an agenda to change who we are, he’s not going to constantly be nagging and fixated on all the ways that we fall short.

But he comes to us, celebrating who we are – a child of God, and in his genuine embrace what is broken in us becomes healed, what is unclean is made pure, and we become more fully who God created us to be. And we move from our place on the edges to a seat at the table, a place in God’s family.