Trinity 1 . Learn what this means...

Trinity 1 2026 8 and 10am W Malling

Romans 4.13, Matthew 9. 9-13, 18-26

“Go and learn what this means” says Jesus, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”

Some things can be learned in a few minutes, or a day or so. We may have learned things in childhood which we’ve never had to revisit; times tables, how to read. Once we’ve mastered them, they stay with us. But there are other things which take a lifetime to learn, and, in truth, we probably never feel we’ve got them completely sorted out; the meaning of life, the mystery of love. Every person we meet, each twist and turn of our paths, changes our perspective, teaches us something new, but only if we let it. 

In today’s Gospel we meet some people who choose to let life teach them, and some people who don’t.  

None of what happens to Jesus on this particular day is on his to do list. He is just walking along and stuff happens. He comes across a tax collector, someone despised as a collaborator with the Roman oppressors, sitting at his tax booth. This man, Matthew, was the last person Jesus should have wanted to associate with if he claimed to be a loyal, faithful Jew, let alone the Messiah.  And yet Jesus does notice him, pays attention to him, calls Matthew to follow him, to join him on a journey of discovery which will lead through the cross, to the resurrection, and the new community of the Church, of which Matthew will one day be a leader.

The Pharisees – self-appointed gate-keepers of what was considered to be right and holy – are aghast. What kind of teacher worthy of the name would keep such bad company? The disciples of John the Baptist are equally baffled, but as Jesus explains to them, sometimes you have to put aside what you thought you knew and start afresh – new wine needs new wineskins. 

As if that wasn’t enough, though, Jesus then has two more encounters, equally unplanned and equally challenging. A leader of the synagogue, a prominent man, comes running to him, completely distraught. His daughter has just died, but maybe, maybe, Jesus can pull her back over that boundary between life and death, if he is quick enough. It’s a big ask and not just because it’s a big miracle. It’s a big ask because, if this little girl is dead, and Jesus comes and “lays his hand on her” he will make himself ritually unclean according to Jewish law. It will take seven days, and some complex rituals for him to be purified again. It’s not something you would lightly ask of a stranger.

But Jesus sees this man’s desperation and goes with him anyway. They haven’t gone far, though, when he is interrupted again, this time by a woman who has suffered from haemorrhages for many years - some sort of gynaecological condition. Her condition would have rendered her unclean in the eyes of the law, just like a dead body, and her impurity would transfer to anyone she touched. But she’s desperate too, and maybe she thinks that what Jesus doesn’t know won’t hurt him, so she quietly reaches out to touch Jesus’ cloak, thinking he won’t notice. But he does, and he knows that it’s important not to let her slip away anonymously: for her sake so that she knows she has nothing to be ashamed of, for the sake of the onlookers, so that everyone watching knows she is healed and can be restored to her community, but also because he wants to be crystal clear about what the kingdom of God is meant to look like, what God’s priorities are.  

These stories – the calling of Matthew, the healing of the woman and the raising of the little girl are all linked by those words Jesus speaks to the Pharisees. “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’”. He’s quoting from the Old Testament prophet Hosea (6.6). This isn’t new. These are words those around him should be very familiar with, but knowing the words and ‘learning what they mean’ are two different things.

The law of Moses was meant to be a great gift, a guiding principle to help people live together in the way God wanted them to. The sacrificial rituals at its heart were meant to provide a way of sorting things out when they went wrong, resetting the balance. But the trouble with laws is that it’s very easy to let them become an end in themselves and forget what they were meant for, and that was often what happened; they became a way of sorting the insider from the outsider, the acceptable from the unacceptable. 

The Bible –the Old Testament and the New – repeatedly proclaims a God who is bigger than this. One of God’s primary attributes is summed up in the Hebrew word “hesed”. It’s often translated as “mercy”, but it’s really far bigger than that. “Hesed” means loving-kindness, compassion, empathy; it is rooted in an awareness of others as whole, human beings, with feelings and perspectives as real and important as mine are to me and yours to you. It’s about seeing others as unique, complicated, multi-faceted, precious people, each one created and loved by God. That’s “hesed”, and the Bible tells us that it’s how our merciful God sees us, and how Jesus saw those he encountered, whatever their society thought of them. And it’s how we are called to see one another too. But it’s not easy to do. It’s much easier to stereotype, to lump people into clumsy categories, to scapegoat, to make quick assumptions about who matters and who doesn’t than it is to see each person as an individual. 

That’s why “Hesed”, mercy, is something we struggle so much to practice. It isn’t something we can learn in a day, or a week, or a year. It takes a lifetime. You can’t sign up for an evening class in it or learn it from a YouTube video either. It is learned, as it was for Jesus, in the encounters we have with those around us: the person in the queue behind us in the supermarket or sitting next to us on the train; the colleague at work; the family member who drives us nuts. In each encounter, in each moment, we are offered a chance to open our eyes, to pay attention, to trust that God is at work, to expect that something sacred is happening in the people we meet, even if we will never know what it is. If we can do that, with the help of God, perhaps we might “learn what it means” to live mercifully day by day.

Amen