the doctor come to cure us

‘It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,’ he said, ‘it’s the sick.’ Matthew 9:12

That’s a bit of the story from Jesus calling my namesake, Matthew, as one of his disciples, and an event that followed. Here’s the story:

9As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-office.

‘Follow me!’ he said to him. And he rose up and followed him.

10When he was at home, sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples. 11When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’

12Jesus heard them.

‘It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,’ he said, ‘it’s the sick. 13Go and learn what this saying means: “It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.” My job isn’t to call upright people, but sinners.’

14Then John’s disciples came to him with a question.

‘How come,’ they asked, ‘we and the Pharisees fast a good deal, but your disciples don’t fast at all?’

15‘Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,’ replied Jesus, ‘as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.

16‘No one’, he went on, ‘sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. 17People don’t put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the skins will split; then the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.’  (Matthew 9:9-17, The Bible For Everyone)

I’m reading a devotional for Lent this year, Lent for Everyone: Matthew, by the right reverend N.T. Wright. It’s been really encouraging, and I commend it to you as a lead up to Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Here’s a bit of his commentary on the story above.

Enjoy!

…we get attached to the traditional ways in which we have organized and run our lives. And though we all know that things could be better, we all hope that we can simply add the better bit on to the way we do things at the moment, so that we won’t have to change too much, if at all.

This is a challenge every generation has to face, but for Jesus and his contemporaries it was massive. They had lived for many centuries with a traditional way of life. They assumed, naturally enough, that if and when their God came back to rescue them he would support and vindicate that way. And Jesus was telling them that something new was happening. God was indeed doing what he’d always said, but the old machines they had been working with – the things they’d expected to happen – simply weren’t adequate for this new moment.

They were wanting God to put the world right, with themselves coming out on top as the ones who’d always been on his side. What they hadn’t realized was that God would do this for individuals, too, including individuals who up to then had not been on his side. Jesus used a picture for this: the doctor doesn’t go round visiting people who are fit and well, but people who are sick and poorly. In other words: he wasn’t just supporting the status quo. He was doing something much better, much more exciting, much more encouraging for people like us.

In particular, he was replacing an overall mood of sadness and longing with an overall mood of celebration and hope. They used to fast regularly, to remember the times long ago when their nation had suffered awful disasters. Jesus was coming to do something that would always be remembered with celebration – so fasting wasn’t appropriate! That was revolutionary. But it was appropriate.

We today fast during Lent, to remind ourselves of the sorrow and sin that still abounds in the world and in our own lives. But we do so as a people whose basic mode of life is celebration. God has brought the new world into being in and through Jesus. Don’t try to put the new cloth on the old coat, or the new wine into old bottles. God is making everything new, and he’s inviting us to the party.

A Prayer for Today

Thank you, gracious Lord, that you are the doctor who has come to cure us. Help us to celebrate your new life with gratitude and love.