THIRD SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
8 June 2008

It's said there are only two things in life that are certain, death and taxes, and both figure in today's Gospel! In fact, if you look closely, Jesus actually does three things in the passage we've just heard: He calls Matthew from the receipt of taxes, he heals a women who has been suffering from internal bleeding for many years, and he restores Jairus' daughter to life. And it seems to me that there, in a microcosm, is the Gospel: Jesus calls us; Jesus heals us; Jesus raises us to new life.

First of all, the call of Matthew. As I've said before, tax-collecting in the Roman world was operated on what we would call a franchise basis... you bought the rights to collect what was due, plus a mark-up for your troubles. It had the double effect of making sure taxes were collected and of keeping the middle classes (those involved in the scheme) loyal to Rome, since their well-being was intimately bound up with that of the Roman authorities. And it could make you very wealthy, if unpopular, since it was effectively a licence to extract as much as you could from your fellow citizens. And Matthew, almost on a whim, gives all this up to follow Jesus, not knowing where it will all lead.

Then the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage. It's important to realise that in this particular case, this is not simply a phyisical healing. Under the Jewish Law the woman's issue of blood would also have made her religiously impure, unable to socialise with others (which is why she creeps up on Jesus from behind) and unable to fulfil the obligations of her religion... she was, in effect, cut off from both society and her God; completely isolated. And all that vanishes in an instant when she is cured.

And finally, the raising of Jairus' daughter. As we saw in our fellowship group this week, Jesus never works miracles for their own sake, or even simply because of his compassion for the suffering. Rather, Jesus' miracles are pointers to something about his own identity. And so this miracle points us to the life he came to bring.

One of the reasons the death of a child seems so cruel is that a child has barely begun to experience life. Jesus gives her back not just life, but all its possibilities, brutally cut short.

So it is with us. Responding to Jesus' call can mean leaving aside a lot of what makes life comfortable and certain. It can mean not knowing where things will lead. But when we respond Jesus heals us, not necessarily in the phyical sense, but in the same way that he healed the women in our Gospel story, overcoming the separation from God and others which our sin has caused. And he opens up to us the possibility of life as it was meant to be lived, life in all its fulness as he himself called it. Instead of living a life cut short by our preoccupation with ourselves, he shows us a new way of living which is truly open-ended and which leads to eternal life in his presence.

But there is another dimension to this story as well... the question of who all this is for. The answer is, Everyone. That's partly what our Epistle is about, when Paul speaks about the promise made to Abraham that he would become the father of many nations. His offspring are not just those who keep the Law of Israel, but all who respond in faith to God's call.

But it's also the question raised by the Pharisees when they ask Jesus' disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Because to their way of thinking, God's gifts were reserved for the righteous. If you were good enough, then you could enjoy God's blessings. But Jesus turns this completely around. In the language of our Epistle, It's not righteousness that leads to faith, but faith that bears fruit in righteousness. And so he has come to call not that who are already good in the conventional sense, but those on the outside: people like Matthew the tax-collector, or the woman with the hemorrhage unable to fulfil the Law's demands because of her condition.

We need always to keep that in mind. We who have responded to Jesus' call, known his healing, and received the gift of his life, cannot by our attitude cut others off from what we have received. The Church, it has been said, is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints; and we need to be sure its doors are open to all.

Like Jesus, we need to see through the artificial barriers convention erects, making friends with those who are otherwise cut off from life, or even like Matthew, deeply unpopular.

Jesus calls us; Jesus heals us; Jesus raises us to new life. And through us he wants to extend his gracious invitation to others, that all may come to know the life he came to bring, the glorious freedom of the children of God.