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- What attributes of God’s character does this passage reveal?
- How does the passage point to Jesus?
- How should the truth of this passage change me?
- How do the events of today’s reading help you better understand the grand narrative of Scripture?
Matt. 9:1-17
Jesus told the self-righteous Pharisees, “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9:13a). In thinking about that, I realized that, while sacrifices are something men do for God, mercy is God’s. So in essence, this statement means that God desires His gift to us rather than our gifts to Him. I think it is a matter of more than just desire, however. This isn’t so much a statement of preference as it is of what is necessary to heal the rift between God and man. Man is the one who is broken. There is nothing wrong with God, so the healing must come from Him. What God really desires is that we understand that our own efforts at righteousness can’t heal us. Only God’s mercy can do that.
Mark 2:1-22
Another interesting detail here. The first place Jesus went after He called Levi, or Matthew, to follow Him was Matthew’s house. I would have thought that Jesus would take him away from his old life and all that he was familiar with. But He didn’t. Instead, Jesus entered into Matthew’s environment. God changes us by meeting us where we are. God does not want us to separate ourselves from the world. Rather, He asks us to distinguish ourselves from the world by doing things differently – both from the self-righteous crowd and from those who blatantly oppose God.
Luke 5:17-39
When reading through this passage in Mark I was wondering about the title of “sinners” for some of the people at Matthew’s table. Tax collectors seem to be in a category all their own, but who were the so-called sinners? In Luke’s rendition, I see he noted a, “large crowd of tax collectors and others” (from Lk. 5:29). It was the Pharisees, then, who used the label of “sinners”. Ah – so “sinners” meant people who weren’t like the religious leaders. Got it. Jesus played along with their pious labels, tagging the Pharisees as “righteous”. Except that they weren’t. The point being, of course, that those who consider themselves “righteous” fail to recognize their need for God. Which makes the “sinners” those whose repentant hearts know they need God’s mercy.