Emma Miles writes:

(Matthew 9 from verse 9)

I love to imagine this scene. A bunch of misfits sitting around a feast in the house of a local enemy, an enemy who has just responded to the call to follow Jesus and that just like that here they are, all dining together. A mixed bag of people of all different backgrounds with no clue what they are doing. Some there just knew that they had to follow Jesus.

The emotion around the table would be fiery at times…

Broken people hanging out with Jesus.

And when questioned by the religious sect about these sinners and why He eats with them… Jesus simply says; ‘they are sick and need a doctor’ Like, ‘They are sick, and they know they are sick’.

Jesus adds that He didn’t come to call the righteous. (self-righteous, the good people, those who think they already have God’s approval)

He came to call sinners to repentance.

We only visit a doctor when we know there is something wrong with us.

The doctor is there to diagnose and prescribe.

And Jesus, the doctor, the great physician, gives us an MRI that sees deep into our soul, scanning the past and present, the pain, the trauma, the failure and the mistakes and He knows just what we need.

His prescription for us is mercy.

The qualification for such mercy is to admit that we are sick and that we need Him.

Relying on our own righteousness is actually what disqualifies us. He works with our humble confession of failure and His mercy is the medicine that is rubbed into our wounds and poured into our weary and troubled souls.

We read similarly in Luke 18 in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. In the temple as part of his worship to God the Pharisee thanks God that he isn’t like the tax collector and starts to list all the religious duties that he does so well. This stands in stark contrast to the tax collector who is aware of his own sinfulness and with his head down, cries out ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner’. Jesus concludes the parable by saying the one who went home justified, or the one who received mercy, was the tax collector.

Jesus doesn’t divide us into categories of good and bad, righteous and unrighteousness. The truth is we are all sinners. Brian Zahnd says the question

is, are we proud sinners or humble sinners? If we are proud sinners, we concoct ways to justify ourselves, in our own eyes, by favourably comparing ourselves to those we deem worse than us but if we are humble sinners, we throw ourselves entirely on the mercy of God.

Whilst struggling to find words to pray one day these words jumped off the page of my new prayer book and into my heart …

You Oh Christ see my humanity.

You remember that I am made of dust.

You are aquatinted with all my ways.

You died to set me free from recklessness.

And clothed me in your righteousness.

I do not stand condemned but loved.

Then it said….

I do not understand why I do what I do.

And I am frightened to admit that I am not always good.

And here in lies the problem. Even though we know that God is merciful, and we have to be fully reliant on His mercy… we fall time and again in to thinking He is measuring our goodness….

Like He is saying to us ‘ok now you’ve had a fair bit of mercy now, it’s time to fix up’.

And we hide, we condemn ourselves and we forget mercy….

But our prescription of mercy is on repeat. It’s infinite.

One mystic philosopher said this: Two things in life are infinite, the stupidity of man and the mercy of God.

So, if mercy is so readily available and if mercy is the currency of our good God and the medicine for our sickness. Why do we struggle? Why do we move into self-sufficiency and pride and comparison? Why is it sometimes so hard to be honest to admit that we are not always good? If the requirement is not perfection, but humility, then we should be able to run to the throne of grace and mercy, standing bodily and confessing our sin so that the oil of healing can be applied to our wounds.

The passage I began with ends with Jesus telling the Pharisees to go and learn the meaning of Hosea 6.6 ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’.

God is perfect in mercy… and every new day reminds us of his mercy; miracles of mercy are everywhere ...but often mercy comes from secondary sources in

the ordinary places and everyday stuff. God is perfect in mercy, and we are to imitate God.

There are many ways in which Christian’s mess this up. You know the ones… who point out people's sin, shouting out judgement, blaming and shaming….

But God is not like that, God is like Jesus, sitting at a rowdy table with those who know they need him and sending away the accusers.

Jesus is merciful.

Jesus invites us to recognise that we are not always good.

God invites us to orientate our lives under the waterfall of mercy for the purpose of healing.

He doesn’t get exhausted with how many times we mess up; He doesn’t think, ‘Oh, you should have it all together by now’.

He simply invites you to come as you are, honest and humble and receive the medicinal mercy of the great physician.

Emma Miles CCBN Multiply Community Development Leader