Texts: Matthew 9:9-17

“Friends”

1 October 2006

Texts: Matthew 9:9-17

When I think of friendship of the quality and magnitude of that displayed in today’s text, it is fitting and natural that I should be drawn to physicians of my own acquaintance for reasons of comparison to the Great Physician. I am certain that there are huge divergences between these men of the medical profession and Jesus but what I want to recall are the similarities. I also want to acknowledge upfront that it may be difficult for some of us to break through the mystique of white jackets and stethoscopes to picture our physicians as our friends—but I am quite sure that the effort is worth it both for the sake of the physician and for our own sakes when it comes to reducing some of the stress involved in interacting with doctors. I should mention my most recent heart surgeon who taught me a great lesson. He taught me that when I was his patient, I was HIS patient—I held for the hours of my most critical need his undivided and concentrated attention. I do not know the clinical term, perhaps it is something like “professional focus,” but what I do know is that investing it with “compassion” works. He was my friend without being particularly warm, or amiable—there wasn’t time for that at first. Caring for someone, I learned then, is focused, it is intensely personalized—you hold that person in your attention and fiercely brush aside all distraction and ancillary concerns! The atmosphere is charged. And, in that setting, under his authority, things happen for one’s ultimate good. They went according to plan if he had anything to say about it—and he was “in charge.” My experience was a clear, well-defined, firm and decisive medical intervention—a very good, caring thing. And, I trust it is a fair inference to make, this may serve to describe kind of spiritual interventions of which our Lord and Savior is Master. The second physician that comes to mind is Dr. McNanamy who oversaw my care when I was hospitalized with acute appendicitis—my appendix burst and the subsequent infection put me into a three day coma. It was my junior year in high school and I had just qualified for the state meet in three events. I never got to compete in the finals because I was a very, very sick boy. I was still critically ill when I came out of the coma. And I remember Dr. McNanamy standing beside my bed, charts in hand, and he said something like this, “Samuel, you made it through surgery. We now have you on a powerful, new antibiotic, Streptomycin, which we didn’t even have until this past week. We really needed it. Now, we have done everything that man and medicine can do. Now we turn to the Lord. He’s the Great Physician. So I am praying for you;but I need your help, son. You need to fight for your life. Will you pray with me and ask God for healing? Because I believe that if we all pull together, we are going to make it.” Then he quietly laid his hand on my arm, smiled and left the room. The third physician that comes to mind is Dr. Fred Skillen. He was my family physician growing up and he was the attending physician for my brother Jonathan who died by drowning at a very young age. But it wasn’t what this man did for me that I want to share, it’s what he did for my mother. She was devastated by the accidental drowning of her first adopted son. She was wild with grief and full of self-incrimination. She held herself entirely responsible. Dr. Skillen lovingly and carefully practiced soul care at that critical junction. He pursued an autopsy. He did so with a fierce rigor because he knew Jonathan’s history of mild, epileptic-like seizures. Jonathan’s health issues were troubling to the doctor. And because of his thoroughness, and his professional integrity he uncovered some anomalies that warranted a radically different cause of death. He was able, on the basis of laboratory results, to tell my grieving mother: “I am reasonably convinced that your son did not die of drowning. It is my opinion that when he entered the water he had already died, he had a brain seizure of lethal proportions. He didn’t suffer and he didn’t drown. And furthermore there was nothing anyone could have done to foresee, or forestall this unhappy result. But for reasons we shall learn about in heaven, Jonathan was simply called home early. Blaming yourself is pointless, Penny, there is nothing to be forgiven. We are all brokenhearted though. I am so sorry.” He attended the memorial service. Dr. Skillen was as focused as my heart surgeon, as prayerful as Dr. McNanamy and as friendly as the Lord Himself the day that He issued the call to Matthew, a summons to come and to become His disciple.

It is possible to read the gospel narrative many different ways without doing violence to its essential meaning. I would like to suggest that the episodes before us, the call of Matthew and the account of Jesus’ subsequent association with tax-gatherers and sinners are carried somewhat by the theme of reaching outsiders. Jesus plainly discerns the spiritual condition of “those who are sick” as well as the condition of those who are truly sick and don’t know it, namely the Pharisees. Jesus declares that those who are whole have no need of a physician—and then He puts His diagnostic finger on the spiritual tumor which afflicted His critics. It is as if He were saying, “You religious folks are so into your moralizing religion, and your sacrificial acts that you are deaf, blind and dumb to mercy.” Mercy here functions synonymously with love—love of God and love of neighbor, the first and second tablets of the Law. Because they are blind to mercy, they don’t recognize either the messenger of that mercy; or the necessity of mercy in the first place. It’s incredible how hard the world can become when social barriers become sacrosanct, dividing people into insiders and outsiders with walls of hatred and contempt.

Walls of hatred and contempt are apt descriptions of what Matthew experienced as a tax-gatherer working at the custom house in Capernaum, situated as it were on a major trade route to the East. Jesus’ swift leap over that wall, a simple, “Follow Me.,” must have seemed like sudden spring after a long, cruel winter. Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, a teacher of some eminence and reputation, was inviting Matthew to come be personal, to come be attached to the Master, to be His disciple. We do know somewhat what that meant to Matthew because it breathes through the gospel he later penned: the affection, gratitude and awe—they are all there. And, yes, we have the immediate, spontaneous response in the reception that Matthew held so that his colleagues, other outsiders, could find community in the intentional relationships of the emergent church. One preacher described the apostolic crew in the boat that criss-crossed the Sea of Galilee as the “early church” and wryly noted that things were “tumultuous” that week, even with all that leadership on board!

Now I want draw things together. I pursued the linkage of Matthew’s call (“Follow Me.”) through repentance and on to matter the friendship (“learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice”). Matthew’s change of lifestyle meant a move from self-serving enmity (as a tax-gatherer, or oppressor of others) to God honoring friendship (as a friend to sinners, a healer of relationships). On the way, it occurred to me that “friend to sinners” and “Great Physician” were two sides of the same coin. Our Lord was both friend and physician simultaneously. I was also reminded that those who choose to remain vulnerable, or susceptible to spiritual progress and those whom the Lord delights to visit and heal. As I prayed over these matters, the flow of the passage and the themes it contains, I was prompted to reflect on my personal experience with my physicians over time.

From Dr. Cochran I learned that friendship is intensely focused and it is this lack of distraction that makes the interaction genuinely personal. Friendship requires undistracted caring—you have to pay undivided attention. What you need, the occupations of your life—quite legitimate at other times—must be set aside for the sake of being present. There are times when a friendship actually resembles an intervention. From Dr. McNanamy, quite apart from his warm humility, I learned about partnering in healing. Because there are limits to what man and medicine can do, we must finally turn to and seek God’s help to obtain healing. From Dr. Skillen, I learned that the work of an attending and attentive physician extends into the realm of soul care—that paying attention to details can equip one to unpack issues of inordinate guilt or excessive grief. Yes, I know that everyone will grieve uniquely, that everyone’s guilt management is highly individualized—so it is risky to assert that either is inordinate, or excessive. But the truth is that our responses in both these departments can be life threatening—lives are wrecked by extremes of one, the other, or both! A friend risks pointing this out, and a true friend tries to show the person suffering a way out! Friendship is about soul care. There are pressing concerns that we have as human beings that no known medicine can touch, only forgiveness. And those who know this, and who are our friends will point that out. Follow Me means that we purpose to become a friend like Jesus to those who need a friend.

So intense focus, partnering and soul care are essential ingredients of our calling to befriend one another. These Christ-like attributes are skills that we can obtain and master—they are part of the equipping of the saints. Oh, that we would be quickened to take a deeper interest in one another with compassionate, searching hearts and freely embrace our friends as partners in healing, building each other’s faith up! May God move us this day to find time for our friends—to find time to service and to maintain the friendships He has gifted into our lives, or which He is presently gifting into our lives! May God sharpen our sense of insight, grant us humility, provide us with truth in love to bless each other. May God equip us in every way to offer soul care, to walk in forgiveness and to establish hope as never before. We should ask Him to take us to the next level. Following Jesus is a repentance that makes us better friends with Him and with each other . . .and, this is a truly beautiful and wonderful thing, with those around us who are friendless. There are some who are still waiting to be invited to the wedding banquet which we presently enjoy.

Amen.

1. Jesus presents Himself as the Physician of all souls and suggests that all souls are in need of His healing, just as they are of His divine mercy. To imagine oneself whole when we are in every part death stung by sin is a malady of pride most dangerous. Clarke, Mat. 9:11&12

2. Matthew signifies,the gift of God, Ministers are God’s gifts to the church; their ministry, and their ability for it, are God’s gifts to them. M.H.

3. I will have mercy (v.13) means

1st. That God prefers an act of mercy, shown to the necessitous, to any act of religious worship to which the person might be called at that time. Both are good; but the former is the greater good, and should be done in preference to the other.

2dly. That the whole sacrificial system was intended only to point out the infinite mercy of God to fallen man, in his redemption by the blood of the new covenant. And

3dly. That we should not rest in the sacrifices, but look for the mercy and salvation prefigured by them. This saying was nervously translated by our ancestors,I will mild-heartedness, and not sacrifice A.C.

4.Go ye and learn—צא ולמדtse velimmeda common rabbic saying prefacing a fact in Scripture--in this case: 1 Samuel 15:22 22So Samuel said:

“Has theLordas great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,

As in obeying the voice of theLord?

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,

And to heed than the fat of rams. A.C.

This he proves(v. 13) by a passage quoted out ofHos. 6:6,I will have mercy and not sacrifice. That morose separation from the society of publicans, which the Pharisees enjoined, wasless than sacrifice; but Christ’s conversing with them was more than an act of common mercy, and therefore to be preferred before it. If to do well ourselves is better than sacrifice, as Samuel shows (1 Sa. 15:22,23), much more to do good to others.

5. the same divine, almighty power accompanied this word to convert Matthew, which attended that word(v. 6),Arise and walk, to cure the man sick of the palsy. Note, A saving change is wrought in the soul by Christ as theAuthor, and his word as themeans. His gospel is thepower of God unto salvation,Rom. 1:16. The call was effectual, for he came at the call;he arose, and followed him immediately; neither denied, nor deferred his obedience. The power of divine grace soon answers and overcomes all objections. Neither his commission for his place, nor his gains by it, could detain him, when Christ called him.He conferred not with flesh and blood,Gal. 1:15,16. He quitted his post, and his hopes of preferment in that way; and, though we find the disciples that were fishers occasionally fishing again afterwards, we never find Matthew at the receipt of custom again. M.H.

6. Luke 5:32I have not come to callthe righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” The text is secure here only.

7.Note, They who are effectually brought to Christ themselves, cannot but be desirous that others also may be brought to him, and ambitious of contributing something towards it. True grace will not contentedly eat its morsels alone, but will invite others. When by the conversion of Matthew the fraternity was broken, presently his house was filled with publicans, and surely some of them willfollow him, as hefollowed Christ. Thus did Andrew and Philip,Jn. 1:41,45;4:29. SeeJdg 14:9. M.H.

8.Note, It concerns Christians to be able to vindicate and justify Christ, and his doctrines and laws, and to beready always to give an answer to those that ask them a reason of the hope that is in them,1 Pet. 3:15While he is an Advocate for us in heaven, let us be advocates for him on earth, and make his reproach our own. M.H.

9.

[1.] Sin is the sickness of the soul; sinners are spiritually sick. Original corruptions are the diseases of the soul, actual transgressions are its wounds, or the eruptions of the disease. It is deforming, weakening, disquieting, wasting, killing, but, blessed be God, not incurable. [2.] Jesus Christ is the great Physician of souls. His curing of bodily diseases signified this, that he arose withhealing under his wings. He is a skilful, faithful, compassionate Physician, and it is his office and business to heal the sick. Wise and good men should be as physicians to all about them; Christ was so.Hunc affectum versus omnes habet sapiens, quem versus aegros suos medicus—A wise man cherishes towards all around him the feelings of a physician for his patient. SenecaDe Const. [3.] Sin-sick souls have need of this Physician, for their disease is dangerous; nature will not help itself; no man can help us; such need have we of Christ, that we are undone, eternally undone, without him. Sensible sinners see their need, and apply themselves to him accordingly. [4.] There are multitudes who fancy themselves to be sound and whole, who think they haveno need of Christ, but that they can shift for themselves well enough without him, as Laodicea,Rev. 3:17. Thus the Pharisees desired not the knowledge of Christ’s word and ways, not because they had no need of him, but because they thought they had none. SeeJn. 9:40,41. M.H.

10.

Can the children of the bride-chamber, bridegroom, as the Cod. Bezae and several versions have it. These persons were the companions of the bridegroom, who accompanied him to the house of his father-in-law when he went to bring the bride to his own home. The marriage-feast among the Jews lasted seven days; but the new married woman was considered to be a bride for thirty days. Marriage feasts were times of extraordinary festivity, and even of riot, among several people of the east. A.C.