Episode Transcript
CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
THE WORD OF THE LORD
Matthew 9:9–13 NIV
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
CONSIDER THIS
Matthew is not searching for Jesus.
He is sitting at his tax booth, doing his job, collecting money from his own people on behalf of Rome. He is complicit. Comfortable. Likely wealthy. Almost certainly despised. And Jesus sees him.
Jesus does not begin with a lecture or a list of demands. He does not ask Matthew to clean up his life first. He simply says two words. “Follow me.”
And Matthew gets up.
That may be one of the most astonishing sentences in the Gospels. Matthew gets up. He leaves the booth. He leaves the money. He leaves the identity that had defined him. Mercy wakes him up.
Then comes the dinner table. Jesus sits with tax collectors and sinners, and the religious leaders cannot understand it. “Why does your teacher eat with people like this?”
Jesus answers with a metaphor of healing. “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Then he quotes the prophet Hosea. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
This is what awakens us. Mercy does not shame us awake. Mercy calls us awake.
So many of us are trying to earn what Jesus is already offering. We mistake sacrifice for surrender. We think God wants our performance, when what he desires is our presence. Mercy interrupts that cycle. Mercy says, “You are seen. You are called. Get up.”
And like Matthew, once we are awakened by mercy, we cannot keep it to ourselves. We open our tables. We invite others. We begin to live differently.
Mercy is not permissive. It is powerful. It does not leave us where it finds us. It calls us to rise and follow.
PRAYER
Jesus, thank you for seeing us as we are and calling us anyway. Thank you for mercy that meets us in ordinary places and awakens us to new life. Free us from trying to earn what can only be received. Teach us to follow you with grateful hearts and open hands. We pray in your name, amen.
