Bible Passage: Matthew 9:9-13
Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: June 11, 2023

Bulletin June 11, 2023

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

Do you have a dining table in your house?  Years ago, almost everybody did.  If you do, think for a moment about who gets to sit at your dining table and eat with you?  Have you ever stopped to think about that?  Not too many, is it?  That table is special.  It is used on days like Thanksgiving.  Your family gathers at that table.  Dear, close friends are invited to sit at that table.  It’s kind of a special place.

If table-fellowship is special for us, understand that it was even more significant at the time of Jesus.  To eat, to dine, to fellowship over broken bread was HUGE in Jesus’ time.  This explains something we see in our text.  This morning we meet some people who are appalled at Jesus’ table-fellowship.  They can hardly believe that He Eats with Sinners!

 Our text begins with Matthew telling the story of the day Jesus called him to full-time discipleship.  As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting in the tax collector’s booth. He said to him, “Follow me.” Matthew got up and followed him. (v. 9)  Matthew was a tax-collector.  Tax-collectors were Jews who worked for the Romans collecting taxes from their countrymen.  Perhaps Matthew collected taxes on goods and merchandise being transported into and out of Capernaum. Tax-collectors were often greedy and overcharged their Jewish brothers and became rich doing so.  They were despised by their fellow Jews.  They were banned from going to synagogue on the Sabbath.  They were rejects.  But Jesus says to this one, Follow me.  And Matthew does.  He gets up and begins following.

In his joy, Matthew hosts a big dinner at his house with Jesus as his guest of honor.  Matthew records this detail about his dinner party,  As Jesus was reclining at the table in Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were actually there too, eating with Jesus and his disciples. (v. 10)  Matthew invites many of his buddies from the office, fellow tax-collectors.  And we are told many sinners were there.  Who are these “sinners”?  Isn’t everybody a sinner?  When people are referred to as “sinners” in the Gospels like this, it is being used of people who openly lived in violation of Old Testament laws.  They were not the “decent and respectable folk.”  But here we have this dinner party.  Tax collectors and sinners!  Breaking bread…enjoying fellowship with the Lord Jesus!  Scandalous!

You bet it was!  Some Pharisees observe what is going on and they say to Jesus’ disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? (v. 11)  Someone has described the Pharisees as a “dining club.”  They were the ones who criticized the disciples for eating with unwashed hands.  They seemed obsessed with keeping all the rules when dining.  One scholar tallied it up that in the rabbinic writings he studied, there were over 300 “rulings” pertaining to Pharisees and over 240 of them had to do with rules for eating.  To them, Jesus was breaking all the rules of acceptable “table-fellowship.”

Jesus was quick to jump in at this point!  The healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ In fact, I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. (v. 13)  The tax collectors and sinners were sick!  They needed medical attention, STAT.  They needed the medicines of God’s mercy.  This is exactly why Jesus came.  If this world were populated with squeaky clean perfect people, the Son of God could have stayed in heaven.  There would have been no need for the Great Physician of souls to make a house-call on earth.  But we are sick!  Sin-sick all!  You are, I am.  Sick unto death.

A while back I read a book about the sick wards during the Great Flu pandemic of 1918.  It was awful and gross.  The beds were filled with people dying agonizing deaths.  The hallways were stacked with the dead.  The smell of death was heavy and everywhere.  That is this world.  And Jesus – blessed be his name – came right down here, into the sick ward to give us the medicine of mercy.  To live and die and rise.  And then to give us his life, his death, his resurrection.  The cure for death.  He did it for Matthew and the tax collectors and the sinners in our text.  He did it for you.  He did it for me.

Some misunderstand our text.  They say, “You see!  Jesus was inclusive and tolerant and accepting.”  They want a “woke” Jesus in a rainbow tee shirt.  Notice what Jesus says in our text.  I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.  He came “to call.”  He did not come to say to tax collectors and sinners, “You’re good!  It’s all good!  Whatever makes you happy!”  He came to call them.  And we remember what Jesus’ call was:  Repent and believe the good news.  He came to FORGIVE sin, not condone it.  This is what mercy looks like.

The Pharisees didn’t understand sin-sickness and they didn’t understand mercy.  They thought their outward piety and rigid obedience was what it was all about.  Jesus says, Go, learn what this means, [then he quotes what the Lord says in Hosea] I desire mercy not sacrifice.  We learn the lesson of mercy in what we see in Jesus.  May we learn to see people the way Jesus sees them.  May we learn to see, not the needle marks in the arms or the alarming tattoos or the piercings of the defiant bumper stickers, but may we see precious souls in the eyes of Jesus.  People Jesus was willing to eat with.  People Jesus was willing to die for.

Our text today really is a little prelude to heaven.  That’s right.  Heaven is pictured in Scripture as a great banquet.  Isaiah tells us we are looking forward to a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine – the best of meats and the finest of wines. (Is. 25:6)  The book of Revelation calls our eternal home the wedding supper of the Lamb (19:9).  Imagine, you and me at God’s dining table in heaven!  Eternal table-fellowship with Jesus!  Praise God we have a Savior who eats with sinners!

Amen.