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9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” 18 While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples. 20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. 23 When Jesus entered the synagogue leader’s house and saw the noisy crowd and people playing pipes, 24 he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. 25 After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. 26 News of this spread through all that region. (Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 NIV)
My younger brother was a tax collector. He majored in commercial art at a Texas university and got his degree and in a way got into the "family" business, following in the footsteps of our Dad's first cousin, who had led an interesting life in the IRS. One of his daring exploits was being undercover at the Houston Ship Channel on a foreign boat, and he had to escape in a small boat while being fired upon! Thank God my brother, to my knowledge, did not have any shots fired at him, but he spent dangerous time in Afghanistan during crucial times. He said to our Dad he was headed to "Europe," and left it at that. Matthew's job was just as dangerous for what the position entitled him to, and he was called into ministry at just the right time.
In the space of a few verses, Matthew gives us a single day in the ministry of Jesus — and it is a day that looks nothing like what the religious establishment expected the Messiah’s day to look like.
Jesus calls a tax collector. He eats with sinners. He stops for a bleeding woman who touches him from behind in a crowd. He raises a dead girl. And in between all of it, he tells the critics who challenge his table companions to go and learn something — something they should already have known: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
On Pentecost Sunday, when we celebrate the Spirit poured out on all flesh — on sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free — this passage asks us a searching question: where does the Spirit go? To the respectable, the already-gathered, the people who have their place at the religious table? Or to the margins, the overlooked, the ones whom no one else has stopped for?
The answer, in Matthew 9, is unambiguous.
Follow Me — and Bring Everyone You Know
The call of Matthew is one of the most compressed conversion accounts in the Gospels: Jesus saw him, said follow me, and Matthew got up. No deliberation recorded, no conditions negotiated. Just a look and an invitation and a life changed.
But what Matthew does next tells us everything about the Pentecost character of the Spirit’s work. He throws a party — and he invites everyone he knows. Tax collectors and sinners, the socially disreputable, the people the Pharisees would cross the street to avoid. He brings his whole world to the table where Jesus is sitting.
This is what happens when the Spirit moves into a life. It does not stay contained. It flows — like the rivers of living water Jesus promised — outward into every relationship the newly-called person carries. Matthew could not follow Jesus and leave his community behind. He brought them with him, to the only place he knew to bring them: to the table where the one who had called him was still sitting.
The Pharisees’ objection — why does your teacher eat with these people? — is the perpetual complaint of those who have confused the boundaries of religion with the boundaries of grace. And Jesus’ answer cuts through it: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” The Spirit is not poured out on the already-whole. He is sent to the ones who know they need something they do not have. That is not a lowering of the standard. That is the nature of mercy.
Two Interruptions and the Mercy That Stops
On the way to raise a dead girl, Jesus is interrupted by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years.
She is, by the ritual law of her day, untouchable. Her condition has made her ceremonially unclean for twelve years — which means twelve years of exclusion from temple worship, from communal life, from the ordinary human contact that most people take for granted. She has spent everything she had on physicians who could not help her. She is, by every measure the world offers, a person without resources and without access.
And she reaches for the edge of his cloak.
She does not ask. She does not announce herself. She does not go through any official channel. She simply reaches, in faith, toward the one she believes can heal her. And Jesus stops. In the middle of an urgent errand — a synagogue leader’s daughter has just died, the clock is running — Jesus stops and turns. “Take heart, daughter,” he says. “Your faith has healed you.”
Daughter. In a society that had made her invisible for twelve years, Jesus gives her a name that places her inside the family of God. The Spirit who is poured out on all flesh on Pentecost is the same Spirit that animated this moment of stopping — this refusal to let urgency override the person standing right in front of him. The kingdom of God has always made time for the ones everyone else walks past.
And then he goes on to the girl, takes her by the hand — another act of contact that ritual purity laws forbade over a dead body — and she gets up. The crowd that had laughed at him is left with nothing to say. Death itself has been interrupted by mercy.
For Reflection
The Pentecost connection in this passage is not decorative. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit of this Jesus — the one who called the tax collector, ate with sinners, stopped for the untouchable woman, and walked into a dead girl’s room and called her back to life.
When the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, it means exactly this: no one is outside the reach of the mercy Jesus modeled in Matthew 9. Not the socially disreputable. Not the ritually excluded. Not the person bleeding quietly on the margins for twelve years with nothing left to spend. Not the one everyone has already written off as beyond help.
Jesus told the Pharisees to go and learn what mercy means. That instruction has not expired. The Spirit-filled community is still being sent to learn it — to let mercy shape where we go, who we stop for, whose table we sit at, and who we bring with us when we come to the table where Jesus is.
Matthew got up and followed — and brought his whole world with him. That is still the shape of the Spirit’s work. Receive the call. Get up. And bring everyone you know.
PRAYER: Spirit of the living God, pour yourself into us until mercy overflows — until we stop for the ones everyone else walks past, sit at the tables where we are not expected, and bring our whole world to the one who called us. This we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, do what Matthew did — bring one person from your world to an encounter with Jesus, whether through an invitation, a conversation, an act of mercy, or simply by stopping long enough to see someone the world has been walking past.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember the Lord wants mercy not sacrifice.
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
