8 June 2008 Troublemaking Jesus
Genesis 12:1-9; Matthew 9: 9-31, 18-26
This is a great gospel because in it we see Jesus having an absolute field day, and we find him just almost leaving a trail of wreckage behind him, only it’s good wreckage, because the things he’s destroying need to go to go.
First on the scene is tax collector Matthew. About a year ago we had a brand new traffic warden in our part of the West End who on his first day had a gloriously happy time cheerfully ticketing everything in sight, including cars with valid parking permits. Which zealousness might have been commendable, but it didn’t exactly endear him to the locals. Well Matthew was just about that popular, only less so. He’s a tax collector, a collaborator with the Romans. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus can see past his job and other people’s hatred, to see Matthew.
Where you or I might see just a figure everyone loved to hate, Jesus can still see the man. Jesus sees
Matthew, and the amazing thing is that Matthew knows himself to be seen and is so seduced by this once in a lifetime encounter that he just gets up from his counter and follows, and presumably the light-fingered crowd round about – once they get over the shock - think its their lucky day.
Having wrecked one taboo, now Jesus really gets into his stride. After he has a meal shared with people most folk wouldn’t share the time of day with, now we see him scandalising, if you like, “disgusted of
Morningside” in one of his most shocking encounters with women. Just on Thursday night last week I went with a friend to see the new film of “Sex and the City”. My excuse being that a friend of my friend, a
Scottish folk singer, sang the bit of Auld Lang Syne which is part of the soundtrack and he wanted to hear it.
It was, I have to say, a kind of mass hen night, which made the two of us feel definitely out of place.
Which is exactly how Jesus should have felt in this as in other stories, not so much in encounters with women en masse, but even more of a challenge, in his encounters with women, one-to-one. Because Jesus shouldn’t have been there; should never have put himself in this position. This is a woman, and he does not know her, and she’s haemorrhaging blood which makes her ritually impure – and contaminates him by any contact he has with her. She’s even seen as being under a curse by the righteous, treated as if her condition is her fault – and anyone who touches her would have had to perform several ritual washings and wouldn’t be able to mix with other people again until after sundown.
But just as Jesus recognises the human being in Matthew so he does the same with this woman. He acknowledges her touch and her need and he brings her out of hiding, right to centre stage and he restores this woman to her dignity, not caring a fig whether anyone approves or not.
But he’s not finished yet. This busy day of wrecking has one more stage to go. Because this Jesus, whom we know is going to be Lord over life and death has one more taboo to break, and it’s the taboo of death itself.
He goes into the bedroom of a dead child, a dead female child – that’s two strikes against him already, and touches her. Again, the only remedy for that spectacular transgression would have been multiple washings, but death is the last taboo of all, and he’s having none of it.
I’ve sometimes heard people who’ve been bereaved say that after a loved one has died even old friends might cross the street almost as if you could be contaminated by sadness, but this is just one more wall that
Jesus tears down, because for the God of life and death no human being falls out of his love whether it’s a tax collector, or a bleeding woman, or a dead child or anyone. Every human being is centre stage – and noone is told just to go away and hide.
So it’s been a busy day for Jesus… But all this is as relevant and as urgent today as on the day when he shocked all those disapproving bystanders. Because he’s saying: Don’t give up, because God isn’t giving up on you. We’re the children of crazy old Abraham to whom a promise was given and it’s exactly in those times in our lives when we’d like to hide ourselves away that God repeats the promise to us. We’re not dirty, unclean – no-one needs to wash three times because they’ve touched us. We’re more than the job we do or the money we have, and we are infinitely more than anyone’s opinion of us, even our own.
Last night I was part of a sketch in my eldest daughter’s dance school variety show in support of Macmillan
Cancer Care. In the classic “Class sketch” which featured in the Frost Report years ago, you might

remember, a bowler-hatted John Cleese casts a contemptuous eye on a trilby’d Ronnie Barker (that was me):
“I look down on him because he is middle class”; then Barker, “I look up to him because he is upper class, but I look down on him because he is lower class”. And poor old Ronnie Corbett of course has to look up to everybody because he doesn’t have much choice. “I know my place”, he says, stoically. But of course, it’s only funny because it is way too close to how we are.
But our trouble-making Jesus today destroys all of that terrible way of seeing other people and ourselves. He sets us free. He restores us. Like those Pharisees who had such a lesson to learn, we’d better not look down on anyone because God won’t have anyone look down on us. Today, God wants to take you by the hand, and give you a better sense of who you are than you have ever experienced in your life. Amen.