Matthew 9:9-26
Jesus existed. That may sound like a bit of a no-brainer. After all, you are sitting in a Christian church on a Sunday morning when you could be eating a bagel and watching “Meet the Press,” because we are a “Meet the Press” sort of crowd. But a church president, not ours, once told me that Jesus was completely made-up. Not that she didn’t believe specifically in the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection or the whole walking on water thing. She was throwing out the baby, the bath water, the whole darned tub, and the Sea of Galilee for good measure. I had a lot of questions that I chose not to ask.
Adam and Eve? You can have them. Totally a myth. Satan in the desert? Yeah, and Elvis at the donut shop. But there are certain figures in the Bible that reek of historicity, that it is reasonable to believe existed, if not in the exact same form as the later stories about them.
For example, while certain smug scholars spent years claiming that King David was a myth, others were digging away in the hard dirt of Palestine, where thirty years ago they discovered that a wall at the site of the ancient Israelite city of Dan included re-used stone from an earlier monument, in a style called a stele. The site is called a tel, archeologist speak for the mound created by centuries of ancient settlement on the same site, so the stone became known as the Tel Dan Stele.
The inscription on the Tel Dan Stele, in Aramaic, claims that the person who erected the stele killed King Jehoram of Israel, son of Ahab, which is remarkable enough, because we have all these stories about Ahab and Jezebel. But the stele adds that the victor defeated both the army of Israel, the northern kingdom, and the army of Israel’s ally, the House of David, what we know as Judah or the southern kingdom.
The stone is dated to the 9th century B.C.E., and Jehoram died in the 9th century B.C.E., sometime around 842. Jehoram and his nephew, King Ahaziah of the House of David, were defeated by Hazael, the Aramean king, who of course spoke Aramaic.
This gives us material evidence of David’s existence pretty close to when he existed. But we didn’t need archeology to tell us David was real. The story in scripture, messy as it is, feels real.
In the same way, and despite the skepticism of that church president, Jesus was real. He walked around, teaching the people and challenging authority in the great tradition of the Jewish prophets. He was executed. His presence was so powerful that lives were changed by encounters with him, people experienced the inexplicable, including his real presence to his disciples even after they’d seen him executed.
There is zero reason to believe he is a fabrication. Jesus reeks of historicity.
Today’s passage from Matthew reeks of historicity as a sort of “day in the life” of disconnected events, because while we like to have a theme, sometimes life just happens.
First, we have the encounter with the tax collector. Now, I like taxes, because I like firefighters and food that has been inspected and public education and the million other services we buy with our taxes, though honestly, I’d be okay without the welfare for billionaires.
In the context of First Century Palestine, however, tax collectors were a bad thing. First, most of the taxes went to Rome, and no one liked the Roman occupation. Then there was the graft, as tax collectors were accused of collecting more than was owed and pocketing the difference. To be a tax collector was to be both corrupt and treasonous, profiting from harm done to your own community.
Jesus calls, and Matthew answers and follows, abandoning his post. Jump to dinner in “the house,” house owner not identified, and one of the many texts of contention, this one between Jesus and the Pharisees. They ask why Jesus dines with the unrighteous, people like Matthew. We might miss the full weight of this, since we operate with different categories of in-group and outcast. Imagine that you found out I was hanging out with Q-Anon folks. You’d wonder what was wrong with me. It’s that level of weird to religious folks that Jesus is hanging out with sinners.
It would be easy to jump to the answer Jesus provides, but let’s notice that in the Pharisees’ question is the assumption that Jesus is on the side of the righteous. This is another reason to believe this text represents historic memory, for while the followers of Jesus would come into conflict with the Pharisees as the movements diverged decades later, at this point Jesus is still not that much different from the Pharisees. They see him, at this point in the gospel, as the leader of one Jewish spiritual movement among many. The story has been adjusted for that later anti-Pharisee agenda, but not completely.
And speaking of other spiritual movements, immediately following the call of Matthew and the meal with the unrighteous, we have a challenge from the followers of John the Baptizer, wondering why the Jesus movement doesn’t practice the same asceticism as those who follow John.
Jesus answers with a serious of metaphors, and though centuries of preachers have offered explanations, crafted well-argued sermons, they don’t entirely make sense. The first, that the wedding guest should celebrate now because they’ll be grieving when the groom is taken makes sense in retrospect, and is probably a late insertion after the crucifixion. But then we get a new patch on an old cloak, and I’m not sure whether Jesus sees himself and his teaching as patch or cloak, new or old. Then we get new wine and old wineskins, and at least there is wine, but what does it mean that the gospel is new wine? In other places Jesus doesn’t reject the Law of Moses, so what is the old skin?
While I think the bridegroom part is a late addition, I still see historicity here. The movement around John the Baptizer and the movement around Jesus had some similarities, but Jesus broke with some aspects of the prophetic tradition, was very different than John in some ways, so there were most certainly folks who said “Why is Jesus out here partying? That’s not what prophets do!”
Finally, we close out with two miracles, the daughter of the synagogue leader and the woman with menstrual issues, for this is what the text means when it says hemorrhaging. Elsewhere, the synagogue leader’s daughter is still alive when he asks for help, and the hemorrhaging woman is the reason Jesus arrives late. Either way, it is essentially the same story. And I’d like to lift up a couple of things.
First, there is a radical subversion going on here. The male synagogue leader can come right up and ask for assistance. In that culture, the woman cannot, not only because it is inappropriate for a woman to walk up and ask for help from an unrelated male, but also and especially because she is considered unclean.
Again, this isn’t some random woman who bleeds. Everybody on the scene, everybody hearing this story in the cultural context of early Christianity, would understand her to be unclean. And what is worse, under the purity laws of the time, uncleanliness was contagious, so her touching Jesus should have made Jesus unclean too.
Never mind her faith. Can we talk about her courage?
She seizes her opportunity at great risk. And it works. She is made whole, and Jesus, who should be angry at this transgression, offers only love, for he does not call her “woman,” as he does in his encounter with the Canaanite woman, but instead calls her “daughter,” a relational term, a term of endearment.
Finally, we arrive at the synagogue leader’s home, where his daughter is dead. And here too, ancient listeners would understand that cleanliness comes into play, for a corpse is unclean. Just as a holy man should never touch a menstruating woman, especially one with menstrual hemorrhaging, so a holy man should never touch a corpse. But like Elijah, Jesus does, resurrecting the dead.
We start, with the call of Matthew and dinner with sinners, and end, with the two healings and the risk of contagion, and maybe there is a theme after all, for in each of these encounters, these stories that feel like they represent communal memory, in each of these Jesus reverses the human mechanisms that exclude and wall-off, and instead offers restoration, offers wholeness, for as he says, he is physician come to heal the sick.
Humans push humans away. God draws humans back together, back into the circle of community, those who are viewed as sinners, those who are viewed as unclean, even those who are dead to their family, which feels particularly relevant during Pride month when we draw the circle wide enough to include so many who have been denied and pushed away by their families of origin.
The gospel that excludes is not the gospel. Everyone is at the table. Tax collectors. Even Judas. Everyone can experience love. And while we may not have the power to heal every broken body, may not knit back together the fragments of every broken heart or shattered mind, we, like Jesus, can see what is whole and holy in our sisters and brothers.
The Way of Jesus isn’t about fancy clothes and fish symbols on the back of a luxury SUV. It is about people as real as a tax collector who needs a better path, about a man who will do anything for his child, about a woman at the margins who seizes her chance.
It is about you and me and the history of the every day, of broken people, and of the power of love. May it always be so.