Sunday’s Readings: 1st Sunday after Trinity

Hosea 5.15 – 6.6; Psalm 50.7-15; Romans 4.13-end; Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

HERE is a command from Jesus which I even have never actively tried to fulfil: “Go and learn what this implies, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I even have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I probably assumed — on condition that it was a command aimed toward some Pharisees — that it was not meant for many who are following Jesus.

But Jesus is quoting scripture to those Pharisees, and, being scripture, it have to be as applicable to all of us today because it was to them then. In Hosea 6.6, God expresses frustration together with his people, whom he longs to vindicate, but cannot. There is a possibility that the force of the Hebrew is “mercy, not only sacrifice”, “knowledge of God, not only burnt offerings”. But Andrew Macintosh, in his commentary, says no to that, and I shouldn’t have “more understanding than my teachers” (Psalm 119.99). As he notes, Matthew records Jesus quoting this prophecy a second time, within the context of a special interaction with the Pharisees (12.7). The fact of that repetition highlights the importance of Hosea’s words for Jesus.

So, Jesus takes Hosea’s prophetic utterance as a call to sinners fairly than righteous people (9.13), and as a message about guilt and innocence under the Law. His use of scripture is flexible and imaginative: establish the principle, then apply it — either where clear commands are known but are uncompassionate, or where negative judgement is applied inappropriately. One commentary on Matthew 9.13 adds one other intriguing factor into the combination, by identifying the phrase “Go and learn” as a “rabbinic expression”. Perhaps Jesus is reminding the Pharisees of their very own avowed principles, which their attitude here is at odds with.

Back to the command: “Go and learn what this implies.” It tells us that Jesus knew the prophecy of Hosea, though he quotes him less often than Isaiah. Although Jesus could write (John 8.8), he would probably have learned the words of holy texts by listening to them. Lacking the resources of commentaries, or the web, he relied as a substitute on a retentive memory. Is he fascinated about what the meaning was for Hosea, when he uttered those words seven centuries earlier? Unlikely. After all, Hosea is as distant from Jesus’s time because the Black Death is from ours. In any case, the concept that what a text “really” means needs to be established by historical evaluation and research is alien to the world through which Christianity arose.

These words of Hosea were preceded by a warning: “I even have hewn them by the prophets, I even have killed them by the words of my mouth, and my judgement goes forth as the sunshine.” We are being reminded that God’s word is powerful. Even when such a “word” has been separated from its context, as here, it may possibly tackle a latest lifetime of its own.

Hosea’s prophetic “word” about “mercy, not sacrifice” denounces the self-indulgent dissipation that usually attended cultic sacrifices. This contrast — between temperate ethics and dissolute cult — is present in early Christianity, too, for Ambrose of Milan warned Augustine’s mother about such dangers. Perhaps there’s all the time a risk, on the extremes of spiritual practice: ultra-control on the one hand (radical Puritanism), and dangerous licence on the opposite (cults and movements led by charismatic individuals: too quite a few to say).

Matthew 9.13, as a teaching from Jesus, suggests that compassion should come before strict adherence to the Law. But what if our understanding of Jesus’s compassion has been given a latest emphasis by the three forgiveness parables of Luke 15? Their emphasis will not be similar to in Matthew 9.13. On the subsequent occasion, Matthew’s Jesus quotes Hosea 6.6 to defend his disciples against the charge of breaking the law. But here, God’s desire for “mercy”, and rejection of “sacrifice”, are warning against outer observances which don’t have any corresponding inner disposition.

Yet still I hesitate to take Matthew 9.13 in this manner. The contrast, “outward observance: bad” versus “inner disposition: good”, is just too often inaccurately presented as a basic difference between Christianity and Judaism. Jewish people in scripture and history are only as sensitive to that contrast between inner religious disposition and outer religious practice because the Christians who got here after them. And Christians, then and now, are as capable as any New Testament Judaean, or modern Jew, of practising the one while neglecting the opposite. Jesus’s command is for us, too.