Faith and Blood – Sermon Preached on 7th June 2026 (Second Sunday of Trinity)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4.13–25; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

“Jesus … saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

Hanging? Too good for ‘em!

They’re scum! Blood-sucking parasites draining the people dry.

Well, that’s what the people Jesus lived among would have said about tax collectors. We might recognise the sentiments. But the Roman Empire’s tax men weren’t like HMRC. They used armed enforcers to collect far more than they were supposed to, and lined their own pockets; this was technically against the law, and later on Emperors tried to rein them in, but in Jesus’ time, abuse by tax collectors was rife.

Jews in Palestine despised their own tax collectors well beyond the ordinary contempt felt elsewhere in the Empire, because they were seen as collaborators with a foreign occupier. So tax collectors were not just parasites, but traitors too.

So Jesus bumped into a Jewish tax collector named Matthew, but didn’t call him a scumbag, or tell him off, or quote the Bible at him, but simply said: “Follow me”.

And Matthew placed his faith in Jesus. The first thing he did was to throw a dinner party for Jesus, with yet more tax collectors and other “sinners” present. It must have been quite the party; I bet it was lots of fun.

There were some people watching all this from the group called the Pharisees. The Pharisees really wanted to obey God, but had ended up obsessed by doing everything according to a strict reading of the letter of the Bible, to the point that they lost their focus on more important commands of God like justice and mercy. They told Jesus they didn’t like Him eating with these sinners and tax collectors. And he answered them by telling them to go and learn the meaning of this phrase – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. Now, that obviously has a direct application to the imperfect group of people eating dinner with Jesus, but that’s only part of its meaning.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice” is a direct quote of another part of the Bible, the Book of Hosea, which the Pharisees would have known well. The prophet Hosea lived centuries before, at a time when some of the Jewish leaders had turned away from the God of the Bible to worship foreign idols. Hosea was warning them to turn back, but not to the outward forms of their religion like sacrificing the right animals on the right days, but instead by drawing closer to the knowledge and love of God, and by living out the demands of God, like showing mercy.

Then the story jumps forward a little. Presumably Matthew is still with Jesus, although it doesn’t say so explicitly. There are two remarkable healing miracles affecting two very different people. One is a woman who has been living with a discharge of blood for twelve years, the other is a leader of a synagogue whose young daughter has died. The way the stories are woven together should show us that we’re supposed to consider them as a linked pair.

The woman with the discharge of blood is an outsider, not because of her lifestyle but because of her medical condition. The laws of Moses rendered a woman with a discharge ritually unclean, so this woman had been in a state of permanent ritual impurity for twelve years. She would have been barred from the Temple, and because anyone she touched became temporarily unclean, the sort of people who worried about religious rules would have avoided her. Anyone with pretensions to being a holy man would definitely have avoided her. So when she reached through the crowd to touch Jesus’ garment, she was rendering Him ritually unclean. A lot of supposedly holy men would get angry at a moment like that. But Jesus instead tells her, “Your faith has made you well.”

The synagogue leader came to Jesus already with faith that He could heal his daughter. Unlike the others, he wasn’t an outsider at all, but a holy man and a pillar of respectability who would have performed all the rituals and followed all the rules. But unlike the Pharisees, he puts his faith in Jesus. Jesus is for everyone, it seems, insiders or outsiders, as long as they put their faith in Him.

Now, our other reading is from a letter St Paul wrote to the community of Christians that had already formed in the great imperial capital of Rome, just over twenty years after the death and Resurrection of Christ. It’s about the ancient prophet Abraham and why he was right with God. You can’t be more of an insider than Abraham. He is the founding patriarch of Judaism, and therefore also of Christianity. And while we’re at it, Muslims believe he is their founding patriarch too. Talk about having cultural reach! Matthew the tax collector, the bleeding woman, the synagogue ruler, and Abraham come from very different places, but have one thing in common: faith.

This is the gist of Paul’s argument: the laws that Jews kept to stay right with God were given to Moses. But Abraham lived a long time before Moses. He didn’t have the Law of Moses. What kept Abraham right with God, therefore, must have been faith. And if faith alone was good enough for Abraham, Paul argues, it must still be good enough for people living then, and living now. Why this mattered so much was because while the first Christians were all Jews who believed Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, and who therefore kept the Jewish ritual laws as a matter of course, by the time Paul wrote that letter a lot of people from other backgrounds were starting to put their faith in Christ. Paul was arguing that the Church was open to them, that their faith in Christ was enough, without them having to convert to Judaism or keep the Jewish ritual laws.

Now, let’s think about rules for a moment, and the problem with thinking that if we can just stick to them, we’ll always be good people who never do the wrong thing. Firstly, we all break the rules sometimes. We all break them for bad reasons sometimes. But we also break them for good reasons sometimes. We also know that we can, when it suits us, stick to the letter of the rules in ways that are ethically shady and allow us to get one over on other people unfairly.

Now, we can’t have a functioning society without rules and laws, and if we seek to live as honest people, then we’d better have good reasons before we break them, and accept the consequences of doing so. But you can keep the rules and be a rotten person. In fact, we’re all rotten people some of the time. That’s why we all need God’s mercy.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” That’s what Jesus tells the Pharisees to think about. God always desires to show mercy to us, even when we’ve been living bad lives, even if we’re the sort of scumbags who set ourselves up in business as tax collectors. God’s door is always open. The way to open the door to God’s mercy is through faith in Jesus Christ, and Jesus is always reaching out to us to follow Him.

But be aware that if you put your faith in Jesus, He will change you. He will send you the Holy Spirit to push and prod you out of the ways you are doing wrong. Faith in Christ will lead you to healing and mercy, and perhaps to a great dinner party with the wrong sort of people, and in directions you could never have predicted.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.