Mercy, not sacrifice

St Matthew’s Day, 21-9-2021

[Ephesians 4:1-7, Matthew 9:9-13]

When he invited Matthew, a tax-collector, to follow him, Jesus was subverting the social order of the empire and beginning to build the Reign of God. When he heard his name called, Matthew was busy collecting tolls from the passing traffic: taxes that helped to sustain the Roman empire by maintaining the excellent roads that supplied affluent Romans with luxury goods, and made it easier for Rome’s armies to continue cruelly oppressing the peoples they had conquered.

Like many people who are stuck working within large institutions, Matthew might not have wanted to contribute to the oppression, but his fellow Jews nevertheless despised him for doing it. His position may have given him a little power and wealth, but he had no reputation. The ordinary folk – and the gospels – lumped him with prostitutes and the detested pagans. It is astonishing that Jesus called Matthew by name, and he responded at once. Matthew’s conversion was radical: both the call and his response were a step towards disrupting the order of the ‘empire’, for Jesus had come to dismantle, to deconstruct the world of human selfishness and separateness, and show us how to replace it with the Reign of God.

The text continues: ‘And behold..!’ something surprising is about to happen. Jesus defied convention again by attending a banquet – possibly in Matthew’s house – with the ‘unworthy’ and the ‘unclean’. Then as now ‘respectable’ society used dinners to make social statements: slaves and servants had their roles to cook and serve; every guest had their allocated rank, or fought to get a higher place. Once again, Jesus defies the conventions – rooted in selfish ego – which divide us, and need to be dismantled.

At meals Jesus met people, understood them, taught and converted them. He was building true community, which isthe Reign of God. Just by being among the rejected, he is showing us that no one is beyond God’s mercy… except maybe [for a time, until they see the light] those who deny God’s mercy to others. Jesus calls himself our physician. In the paragraphs just before this, he had healed a paralysed man by forgiving his sins, showing that both sickness and sin can and will be cured, as we become forgiving communities, building the Reign of God. Sickness – or any other misfortune – is not God punishing us for sin. Jesus, God among us, is showing us to deal with and overcome both sickness and sin in our lives.

Jesus told his scholarly critics: ‘Go and learn…’ what God meant in the prophecy of Hosea [6:6]: ‘I want mercy, not sacrifice’. Mercy is not just pity for those who are unfortunate or suffering. It means to give them justice; to free them.

What do Christian preachers, we Dominicans, offer people? Do we stay in our sanctuary and say: ‘Yes, we have a ‘preference for the poor’… we preach about their condition, and give them charity’? Or do we want, and work with all our heart and strength to analyse and explain why people are kept poor, then help them to get the same protections and privileges that we enjoy?

We live in comfort today because in the past our ancestors committed huge injustices. Most of Australia was stolen from its First Peoples. Europeans with superior technology colonised and exploited Papua New Guinea and other Pacific nations, including China. Do we reflect, and admit our recent sins of invading and smashing Iraq and Afghanistan for profit, then refusing to help manyof the refugees who flee from the chaos there? Don’t these deeds in our past, from which we still profit today, make us ‘sinners’ who need God’s mercy, just as the world’s exploited peoples today need our mercy?

What is sacrifice? It comes from sacrum facere: ‘whatever makes us holy’. Out main ritual, celebrating Eucharist, can make us holy if we ‘share Jesus’ sacrifice’… which was not to be slaughtered like a sheep to ‘please God’, but to live fully in love to bring about the Reign of God.

So for us to ‘offer the sacrifice of the Mass’ means to give ourselves totally, as a community joined in Christ, unselfishly doing all we can to build up the community of humanity. Sacrifice means being merciful to the people in our own house, and to our Uighur sisters and brothers as far away as Xinjiang; and all the refugees stuck today on the banks of the Rio Grande; the shores of the English Channel; and in Australia’s own ‘detention centres’.

Many structures in our society and our church are not merciful. Our church still calls gay people ‘intrinsically disordered’; it still drags the victims of sexual abuse through the law courts, ‘strenuously defending’ the church’s money and the reputation of clerics, instead of treating the victims with real mercy and pastoral care. And our Canon Law itself is still biased against victims.

But we just read from Ephesians that the risen Christ calls us together into amazing unity: us and the people just mentioned. We all have God’s Spirit in us, so we each need to use our different gifts

to challenge and to tear down these real barriers, especially the barriers of prejudice in our hearts.

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