Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, on 7 June, 2026, the Second Sunday After Pentecost
Texts for this day: Genesis 12:1-9; Psalm 33:1-12; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.
‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:13)
When I was a naive university freshman, I missed an midterm exam because I’d gone home for the Thanksgiving weekend, a four hour trip, and coming back I misread the bus schedule. So the day after my missed exam, I timidly knocked on the office door of my professor and asked for another chance. To this day I wonder what he, a tenured and distinguished professor of philosphy, thought when he looked at me, a callow youth, who couldn’t read a bus schedule.
He could have said “Sorry kid, at least you learned a valuable life lesson”, but instead, he said, “You’re in luck, I haven’t started marking yet”. So he led me to a little room, gave me the exam, and told me I had an hour. I had barely studied, and I remember writing some rubbish about Plato, and I got a middling grade. But, more improtantly, I was shown mercy.
I hadn’t thought of this in forty five years, but it came back to me as an example of what showing mercy looks like. It also led me on a bit of a thought experiment .
Let’s say there was a professor, a distinguished teacher who loved to enrich peoples’ lives with the wisdom they’d accumulated over many years. What if that teacher didn’t just show mercy to hapless freshmen who missed an exam? What if this prof spent their time going to dive bars looking for delinquent students and teaching them over jugs of beer? What if this prof so loved teaching that they gave their wisdom away for free rather than within a tuition course? And what if, when the A students came to the prof and said “Hey, what about us?”, they said, “Well you don’t need me, you’re smart and you’ve got a library, go read books”. You can imagine that the Tenure and Review committee might start reconsidering this prof’s employment in the same way that the Pharisees regard Jesus with suspicion and hostility.
One of the lessons that scripture teaches us, over and over, is that we are here in church, not because God admire us as wonderful specimens, but because God is merciful and knows our needs. Or, to borrow Jesus’ language from today’s gospel, church is like a waiitng room to see the doctor. By and large, we’re here because we need God’s help to be the people that we’d like to be, rather than the people we are. And wanting that help can be as simple and as basic as a sick person wantig to be better.
This is a point that it is made more clearly by our gospel reading than it is by our second reading. Paul, writing in Romans, uses Abram as a model of faith. After all, he responds to a God he barely knows, leaves his home, and wanders off on the strength of a vagye promise. Thus, says Paul, Abram’s “faith was reckoned to him as righteousness”.
This language makes Abram sound like a biblical superhero, and might lead us to conclude that God only wants people whose faith is deep rooted and unshakeable. But what about the people in today’s gospel who come to Jesus for help? What kind of faith do they have?
Well, I would say that their faith is genuine, but that it comes from a place of desperate need. The woman with the flow of blood has been suffering for twelve years, and when she sees Jesus, she seizes her chance. Jesus tells her that “her faith has made you well”. The father of the dead child was probably friends with the Pharisees who condemned Jesus for hanging out with sinners, but, with his beloved child lying still at home, he’s willing to forget his friends’ criticism of Jesus and goes to him for help. Jesus follows him home, and restores life and laughter to his house.
Today’s readings teach us that faith can take many forms, It can be calm and heartfelt, or it can be urgent and desperate. Faith can be a response to God’s call to begin a new and better life, as is the case with Matthew, who could have ignored Jesus and said, no, I’m quite comforable with my life, working for Rome. But Matthew said yes. Perhaps Matthew was already sick of what he’d become, sick of working for the Romans, and followed Jesus because he wanted a new life and a new start.
Faith can be a decision to do new things and go to new places, trusting that God is leading us and with us. Or, faith can be in those moments of despair and anxiety when we turn to God because we don’t know where else to go.
In such moments, it’s tempting to think that God is like the professor in my opening story, someone behind a door on which we timidly knock, wondering what the answer will be. But the reality, as we see in today’s gospel, is much different and much more encouraging. There’s no door to knock on. Jesus already sees us with eyes of compassion, he is with us in our joys and in our heartaches, and he will always respond with the mercy and grace that flow from the heart of God.
