Jesus and the Nature of Inclusion

Matthew 9: 9-13, [14-17,] 18-26; Proper 5 Year A

Two sets of stories in Matthew’s Gospel (to whose narrative we return in this Ordinary Time after Pentecost) exemplify Jesus’ inclusive and transformative practice in this Gospel. Yet these have arguably been turned into clichés in ways that require some reflection and scrutiny, if indeed it’s Jesus and the Gospel we are interested in.

The framers of the lectionary have made this a bit more complex by adding to the original Roman Catholic version of the cycle, which is simply the story of Jesus calling Matthew and then at table with tax collectors and sinners (9:9-13). This by itself would be a more obvious way to preach on the themes and nature of Matthew as a whole; yet I suspect the RCL editors wanted to give more prominence in the lectionary as a whole to the twin stories of Jesus healing women (18-26), which are in all three Synoptic Gospels but in the Roman cycle only appear once, in the long version of Mark (Year B). This new lection is constructed by hopping over the saying about wineskins (which itself only appears once in the RCL, despite being in all three Synoptics), which for me could have done good service providing a link between these passages (as Matthew intended it seems, following Mark). The wineskins story suggests that Jesus’ practice is more than a sort of general moral exemplarism, but rather a new divine order.

The stories are each powerful, yet in my experience often assimilated into contemporary tropes that don’t do them justice, or provide us with the necessary food for thought.

In the episode of Matthew’s call and table-fellowship with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus was clearly remembered as associating with people regarded as disreputable and compromised by their compliance with Roman authority.

Two odd moves seem to be made in typical interpretation, however. First, this association with compromised but powerful (yes) people is often turned into presenting Jesus’ practice as focussed on the poor and marginalized. To be clear, Jesus is (also) focussed on these, but that is not what this particular story is about. Second, the Jesus who typically accepts the hospitality of the dubious in these stories somehow gets turned into a welcomer of or host to them, rather than the reverse. Each of these needs a bit more unpacking.

The tax collectors do seem often to have been despised—by people properly concerned for social justice. Tax collectors were well-off, collaborators, even traitors, with a reputation for greed and dishonesty. The Pharisees who make the complaint about Jesus eating with them are, as so often in the Gospels, not representatives of nasty nit-picking —this assumption comes from the layer of anti-Judaic thought we seem so often bring to these stories—but of generally appropriate standards of moral and social practice. The Pharisees were serious about religion and politics, and like so many today, they tended to assume that dissociation from those tainted with injustice was obvious and necessary. Jesus does not.

The interpretative issue is that Jesus actually seems to accept hospitality in these stories, rather than offering it. There are of course other stories—most obviously the miraculous feedings—where Jesus welcomes and cares for the poor. However in these traditions about dining with prosperous sinners, Jesus usually takes the more vulnerable position of guest, not host. I should note that this Matthew version is less clear than other similar stories about just who is eating with whom, in terms of hospitality; Matthew says they were in “the house,” where Mark and especially Luke have it more clearly as the tax collector’s residence. Some scholars do imagine a house of Jesus at Capernaum implied here, but this is a hard sell for me. We could however acknowledge this ambiguity as deliberate though, so that Matthew encourages us to imagine a sort of new space and community where these questions are less traditional or fixed. Yet many this Sunday will hear some version of “Jesus welcomes all”—which is true, but isn’t this story.

We need then to guard against generic messages of inclusivity or justice as worthy practices undertaken on behalf of others, but that don’t attend to the indications here of how Jesus’ practice is really described. This is not an example of exercising privilege through radical hospitality, but of relinquishing it. It suggests missional practice cannot be on our own terms, however “inclusive.” And of course it asks some probing questions about the tendency to label our inclusive communities of the like-minded, formed by dissociating from those whose power and ethics do not meet our standards, as themselves a form of justice.

In the second pair of stories, found interwoven in all three Synoptic Gospels, there is a different but related set of challenges. Jesus encounters two women whose lives are impacted by illness and death. They are also in situations where ritual purity—the state of readiness to worship in the Jerusalem Temple—is an issue.

In the case of the girl whose story bookends the episode, her dead body constitutes a threat, since contact with a corpse temporarily disqualified a person from worship, even though it might be absolutely necessary to perform family or charitable duty—a reminder that impurity is not the same as exclusion. Here in Matthew’s version this point is accentuated by the fact she is actually dead, unlike in Mark’s and Luke’s accounts.

The woman with the hemorrhage was also ritually compromised, because menstrual bleeding was a temporary (and again, typically accepted as normal or necessary) impediment to worship, which in this case underlines the suffering implied by her illness (interestingly Matthew removes reference to the economic hardship it had brought—see Mark 5:26) since the barrier had been made permanent.

Jesus heals and liberates both. Unfortunately however, the issue of impurity has sometimes been exaggerated in a problematic way. The bleeding woman was not a social outcast—the consequences of her hemorrhage were not socially profound— but her physical suffering was mirrored in a form of ritual exclusion.¹ The construction of a free, liberative, and welcoming person of Jesus, opposed to Jewish purity rules imagined as all about legalism, misogyny, and radical exclusion, is deeply wrong, and an ironic lesson that tells us less about purity in ancient Judaism and Christianity than about the continuing power of antisemitic tropes.

Jesus frees both of these women, not only from illness or death, but from exclusion from full participation in Jewish worship and its ritual demands. Neither here nor anywhere else does Jesus oppose himself to these laws, but from forces that distort their application.² Of course he is also presented as one in whom the presence of God was encountered in a way somehow like it was in the Temple.

Both stories then, or sets of stories, do raise important questions about inclusion, justice, and oppression; yet sometimes Christian preaching risks saying more about these issues unwittingly and negatively, by re-inscribing ideas about Judaism that need to be examined critically. Jesus does proclaim a reign of God in which all are included; but the ways in which inclusion works are more profound and more challenging than mere slogans are likely to encompass.

The wineskins saying helps, whether read or not. Jesus offers not merely a reversal of however we imagine things are versus how they ought to be, but new ways of being and of seeing. We can expected to be included, but we can also expect to be surprised.

1. See for instance Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Contraversions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

2. For this point more generally see Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021.