"I desire mercy, not sacrifice"

Psalm 50:7-15

7 “Hear, O my people, and I will speak,    O Israel, I will testify against you.    I am God, your God.

8 Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;  your burnt offerings are continually before me.

9 I will not accept a bull from your house    or goats from your folds.

10 For every wild animal of the forest is mine,    the cattle on a thousand hills.

11 I know all the birds of the air,    and all that moves in the field is mine.

12 “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,    for the world and all that is in it is mine.

13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls    or drink the blood of goats?

14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,    and pay your vows to the Most High.

15 Call on me in the day of trouble;    I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

Hosea 5:15-6:6

5:15 I will return again to my place  until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face.  In their distress they will beg my favor:

6:1 “Come, let us return to the Lord,   for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;    he has struck down, and he will bind us up.

2 After two days he will revive us;    on the third day he will raise us up,    that we may live before him.

3 Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;    his appearing is as sure as the dawn;he will come to us like the showers,    like the spring rains that water the earth.”

4 What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?    What shall I do with you, O Judah?Your love is like a morning cloud,    like the dew that goes away early.

5 Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;  I have killed them by the words of my mouth,    and my judgment goes forth as the light.

6 For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,    the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

18 While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. 20 Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, 21 for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” 22 Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. 23 When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, 24 he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. 25 But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. 26 And the report of this spread through all of that district.

“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Indeed, what does this mean?  You’d be forgiven for thinking to yourself, “Wait a second - doesn’t God desire sacrifice!?  What is Leviticus if not 27 chapters of sacrifices God desires us to make?  The Bible sure spends a lot of time specifying precisely how we should do what Jesus here seems to say God doesn’t really want us to do.  What’s up with that?  

We often assume that piety requires us to explain away the apparent tensions in Scripture, to make it speak with one unified voice, like a corporate board who has contentious disagreements behind closed doors but then puts out a public statement which makes it seems as if everyone was always on the same page.  But Scripture is more like that backroom conversation brought out into the open; it doesn’t hide the ongoing argument about who God is and what God wants from us and for us.

And this tension doesn’t exist only between the Old and New Testaments, but within the OT itself.    

In the portion of Psalm 50 we read, it is God who speaks, and there God seems to mock the very concept of sacrificial offerings.  “Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats” - as if to say, “I don’t get hungry, but if I did I wouldn’t need you to bring me anything; everything is mine.”  This hardly the only time in the OT when God rejects the offering - regards it as an insult - because their hearts are hardened.   The law serves almost as a distraction, a means of convincing yourself that you’re doing well even when you’re neglecting what really matters.  

We see this in Hosea, which is a kind of a back and forth conversation between God and the people. They have been brought low by God, even suffered at God’s hand, a punishment to bring them back to their senses.  They may have been offering their sacrifices as prescribed, but what God really wants is their faithfulness, loyalty, steadfast love. “Sacrifice” here serve as a shorthand for all forms of religious obligation, which - though commanded  - are meaningless, even contemptuous, if divorced from true religion.  You can keep yourself pure and undefiled and be no good to anyone.   

In the Gospel passage Jesus had dinner in a house alongside “sinners and tax collectors” - the most disreputable kinds of people.  The Pharisees, always standing by to catch Jesus in some indiscretion, witness this and ask Jesus’ disciples (but not him) why he eats with these folks, an accusation in the form of a question.  Strictly speaking the law doesn’t forbid eating with sleazy people, but conventional wisdom held that this was not a good idea, that it risked guilt by association, an unnecessary defilement.  A good law-abiding, God-fearing person, would actively avoid such situations rather than embracing them like Jesus does. 

In response Jesus says to them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” - quoting Hosea to them - although it’s not quite a verbatim citation.  (This may owe to the simple fact that the Hosea was written in Hebrew, Matthew wrote in Greek, and we’re reading English - there there’s a lot of versions involved here - but it could also be that Jesus deliberately shifts the meaning of the passage in a new direction.)  Like the people God condemns in the OT for obeying the law without loving God or their neighbors, Jesus implies that the Pharisees are more concerned with the outward appearance of purity than with helping people in need.  They think they’re righteous, but they’re making the same mistake God has been condemning for centuries.  

The obvious point is that we should avoid merely going through the motions, doing the things good religious people are supposed to do then patting ourselves on the back for having done our duty.  We can easily be like the pharisees, tithing our mint, dill, and cumin, meticulously attending to trivial matters, while neglecting the “weigher matters” of the law, like loving God and your neighbor.  Church can easily become a place we come to convince ourselves that we’re good people - even better than other people -  where we preoccupy ourselves with minutiae rather than getting about the business of serving others.  We can self-segregate for the sake of our personal holiness, avoiding the sinners, convinced that what God wants most is our purity.   

I grew up in a fairly relaxed, non-dogmatic Baptist church, but somehow I still knew that Baptists were known for various prohibitions: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t dance.  No one ever said, “Don’t ignore the person in need.”   And there were many other implicit of explicit rules about what Christians should and should not do.  Even where the contrast between following the law and grace, or between the OT and the NT, is drawn most sharply, it’s still easy to get the impression that Christianity is a religion of following rules, of avoiding defilement.   Many of us grew up in contexts where when we violated the rules it was made clear that God was not happy with us.  Even where - sometimes especially where - grace is preached there’s no shortage of judgment.  And nothing raises suspicions more than the company you keep.  

This had led many people who grew up in church, and maybe some folks here too, to conclude that religion with all its rules is the problem and what’s important is that we simply be nice to people.  In our day it’s easy to read this through some sort of conservative/liberal lens, and to conclude that Jesus sides with the liberals, to declare a partisan victory.  

I’ve got some sympathy there - I do enjoy pointing out that a certain kind of conservatism bears a striking resemblance to the pharisees - but then I also know that there are no more judgmental people in the world than a certain kind of liberal.  I bring this up because it’s the most obvious contemporary example of self-segregating, or imposing and enforcing purity tests, of guilt by association.   Where religion has faded, politics has filled the void, often bearing a striking resemblance to what it presumed to replace.  The goal of politics - or, more precisely, the goal of political performance - is not so much to make the world a better place but to display your superiority to and disdain for others.  

The tension that runs throughout Scripture and which Jesus addresses is the tension between personal purity and loving your neighbor,  between what we think makes us good and what actually makes us good, what we think pleases God and what actually pleases God.  Jesus said earlier in the Gospel that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, by which he means that he himself is the goal, the telos, of the law - that its objective was to produce in us the kind of righteousness that he alone fully realized.  And Jesus repeatedly demonstrated, as he does here, that true righteousness means not preserving the appearance of purity or avoiding guilt by association, that the sacrifice we must make is the sacrifice of ourselves in service to others.  Jesus even at times broke the law in order to be merciful to others, and there are times when even good rules must be broken.  

Rules and obligations are fairly passé.  Just be a good person isn’t the worst advice, but it’s not so great either.   On our own we don’t automatically know what is good, much less do we have the integrity to pursue it.  The right kind of rules and obligations point us in the right direction and compel us toward it.  At the same time, we can never really approach the goal, much less reach it, simply by following the rules.  But the problem that always emerges and which Scripture repeatedly addresses is that emphasis on the rules almost unavoidably turns our attention inward, makes religion about our personal project, rather than one which causes us to regard others and show compassion.  We start to worry that the wrong kind of people are going to derail that project - or at least make us afraid other will draw that conclusion.  

To be fair to the pharisees, they might very well have been thinking - correctly - that God is holy, that God is pure, and therefore, to be like God we must be as well.  There’s much to commend that idea, but Jesus reveals that, perhaps even more fundamentally, God is merciful, that God is the kind who would leave the 99 to go after the one who is lost, who would keep company with sinners exactly because they’re the ones who need God most.   And we if we really wish to be good, to please God, not only will we show mercy when the occasion arises, we’ll go looking for the people who need mercy most.