WHO NEEDS THE DOCTOR?
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Text: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
It’s no fun to be told you have cancer – or heart disease or diabetes or dementia, or just that you’re getting old. Most of us have experienced some diagnosis or another that has caused anxiety, if not actual pain and suffering. For me, as I face treatment over the next couple of days for prostate cancer, it has been a blessing to have people express their concern and offer their care. At the same time, it is strange to receive such solicitous expressions when I am experiencing no symptoms, except for the worry that comes with being told you have the big “C”.
I don’t know, and don’t expect to know, anyone who will never have a need for healing. Who needs the doctor? All of us. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Not that the focus here is so much on enmity as it is on the recognition that each of us is a creature with limitations, not the least of which is that we will die. In the end, there is a key lesson about the ways in which we are indebted to our Creator that Jesus is sharing with his hearers in this passage from Matthew’s gospel, though he expresses it with more than a touch of irony. Jesus’ adversaries, religious leaders of his day, were hung up on complex rules and regulations designed to insure the purity of their religious tradition. These folk were the self- appointed arbiters of what was pure as well as the self-absorbed enforcers of the law as they understood it.
Jesus, on the other hand, was much more inclined to operate from a debt code than from these purity codes. For him, all that anyone has and all that anyone is is gift from God. There is no one that is not indebted to the Creator for the very gift of life. That sense of indebtedness makes it very difficult for anyone to lord it over others of God’s creatures. As we will see, mercy rather than sacrifice, compassion rather than law and ritual characterize Jesus’ ministry.
Today, the lectionary actually lifts two separate sections from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ healing ministry. The first focuses on the calling of Matthew and the second on an event that combines both a miraculous healing and a resurrection from the dead. Following the extended teaching gathered into the Sermon on the Mount, the writer of Matthew offers several stories of Jesus’ active ministry, including the healings of a leper, the Centurion’s servant, Peter’s mother-in-law and a paralytic, as well as the calming of the sea and the exorcism of the Gadarene demoniac. As these stories accumulate, the adoring crowds grow along with the opposition to Jesus’ teaching and methods of ministry.
In the midst of this work, Jesus and his entourage come on a tax collector, a man named Matthew, sitting at his toll booth. Either we have our own woeful tales of tax collection or we’ve heard these biblical stories enough times to know that tax collectors are not well-loved. In this setting, tax collectors were downright despised. The Romans depended on taxation of locals to maintain their civil and military occupation. However, instead of collecting the taxes and tolls themselves, placing them in direct conflict with their resentful subjects, they sold the rights to collect these taxes to wealthy locals who, in turn, hired local underlings to do the actual dirty work. Of course, to make such a system lucrative required skimming or overcharging or both. Tax collectors would have been hated and considered unclean in such a purity-conscious culture.
Yet, out of the blue, Jesus reaches out to one of these low-down, dirty cheats and calls him to discipleship. For reasons not fully explained in the text, Matthew was ready. Maybe it was his own sense of self-loathing for the condition into which he’d sunk; maybe it was that, having heard the stories about Jesus, his own calloused heart had begun to toward a different life; maybe his was a spiritually sensitive soul, languishing in the harsh reality of doing what he had to to survive while longing to be liberated. Whatever Matthew’s inner story, he shuts up shop and follows Jesus. He doesn’t have to be asked twice. In fact, he is so excited about his new-found faith and the one who has so befriended him that he invites Jesus home for supper.
But this is no ordinary supper; there is a celebratory feast at Matthew’s house that night. It is a party, all too appropriate for one who “was lost and is found again,” and it includes Matthew’s family, friends and associates, undoubtedly a suspect collection of characters. Outside the sniping religious leaders confront some of Jesus followers: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? Why does he hang out with the wrong kind of people? Doesn’t he know he’s contaminated himself by even being in the presence of such scum?” One implication, of course, is something like, “Doesn’t he realize how much better off he’d be hanging out with us? He would be such a fine addition to our ruling party, once we polished off his rough edges and taught him the true meaning of our laws, our rules and regulations…well, yes, and our spiritual understanding and our very particular way of doing church, which everyone knows, or should know, is the right way.”
They are upset with the way Jesus’ teaching and ministry confronts implicitly - and overtly - their way of doing things. His way is not only a challenge to their carefully crafted interpretation of the Mosaic Law, but also to their highly ritualized temple practice and, ultimately, to their power and authority. I can only imagine that some of them really did wonder why Jesus did not want to be one of them.
When Jesus hears what the religious leaders are asking, he utters one of the most profound truths in all the gospel. “Those who are well have no need of the physician, but those who are sick.” Who needs the doctor? People in distress and pain, people who suffer in poverty and labor under oppression, people lost and wandering, people who are homeless and friendless and struggling with inner demons. If you’re on top of the world; if you’ve got it all figured out; if you’re sure that your way is THE way; if you believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, then what in the world would you want the doctor for? Of course, he’s toying with them. He, and they, know full well that they don’t have all the answers to life’s questions, at least not all the right ones.
In fact, in the very next breath, he confronts one of their major deficiencies. Drawing out a text from the heart-wrenching testimony of the prophet Hosea, he offers them a bit of advice, “Go and learn what this means, friends. God says ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ It’s not that everything you stand for and teach is wrong; but your priorities are surely out of line with God’s. It’s mercy first, boys; then see what’s left for religious regulation and ritual. You know, if you decided to start with mercy, you might find yourselves celebrating around the table in some dining rooms you never thought you’d enter.”
“You see,” he concludes, “I’ve come to call not the righteous but sinners. If you have no need to repent, no need to change anything in your life, no need to turn yourselves more fully toward God and God’s light, then you have no need of me. I’ve come with a message from God about the way it is in God’s realm, but if you already know all about it, then you don’t need to be bothered by what I have to teach.”
Who needs the doctor? Anyone who’s looking to live closer to God, who wants to center her life more fully in God, who wants to open his heart and mind and soul and strength to God’s empowering spirit, who yearns for an end to enmity, who seeks truly to love their neighbor as themselves. If this is not what you’re looking for, then Jesus is not the one you’re looking for either. Feel free to move on to another doctor who will tell you what you want to hear and prescribe the pills you want to swallow. For the time being, his accusers do disappear from the text, though we know they continue to lurk around the corner and will eventually do him in – or at least convince themselves they have.
For now, there is more work to be done. He’s sitting, teaching his disciples and some of the followers of John the Baptist, when a community leader interrupts him with an urgent appeal. His daughter has died. The leader has heard of the many miracles that Jesus has been performing. Is it possible – hope against hope – that Jesus might try his hand at bringing the young girl back to life? Now there are a couple of remarkable things about this scene. One obvious point is the father’s faith that sends him to Jesus in the first place. As we will see, Jesus’ healings and other miracles are often the direct result of someone’s faith. But it is also remarkable that this father shows such deep and passionate concern for his dead daughter. In a time and culture when women and children were not highly valued, his grief over a dead girl seems extravagant. Not only is this a man of faith, this is a man of deep compassion. Perhaps this story is placed here to show that all community leaders were not cut from the same cloth as Jesus’ critics and accusers. This community leader kneels and pleads for Christ’s compassion. Who needs the doctor? A father in agony over the death of his darling daughter.
And to his credit, when their procession is interrupted by another in need – a woman who has suffered for twelve long years with a hemorrhage of blood, the community leader does not complain because Jesus stops to exercise compassion toward her, too. Nor does Jesus hesitate to affirm her. She has tried to remain hidden and unobtrusive as she attempts to steal just a little healing power from him. No one will notice her in the crowd if she brushes up against him. “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made whole,” she says to herself. But he knows, he feels her presence, he senses her behind him and turns, not in rebuke, but in mercy. He is not concerned with the impropriety of her action, of the violation if his space, of the ritual uncleanness that will fall on him because she’s touched him. His response, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well” and, sure enough, it has. Who needs the doctor? Any woman or man who has suffered long in pain and obscurity, who has hoped for healing and who has faith that the One who comes from God and acts for God can indeed make them healthy and whole.
Finally he reaches the bedside of the dead girl. The mourning is already in full flower. The flutes and the wailing can be heard long before they reach the house. They laugh at him when he says, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” Surely they know death when they see it. Who needs a doctor so blatantly to misdiagnose the situation? And then, suddenly, there she is standing in front of them, alive and well. The story they hear is that he simply stretched forth his hand, once more risking the defilement by touching a dead body, taking her own small hand in his and she got up. Who needs the doctor? Any child of God who is confronting death and hoping for resurrection. That one can grasp the outstretched hand of Jesus the Christ and rise to walk with him in newness of life.
Who needs the doctor? I imagine a whole lot of people very much like you and me. Amen.