An AI generated synopsis of Dan Roukema’s January 25 message
Matthew 9:9–13 and the Mercy of God
We’re going to look at the same story we read last week, but this time we’re going to home in on a single line from Jesus:
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Matthew 9:12)
It’s one of those sticky statements Jesus is known for. You hear it once, and it keeps unfolding meaning. It’s the kind of line you can hang an entire teaching on.
In fact, I think Jesus is doing something like giving us a mission statement here — not just for his ministry, but for how to read Scripture itself.
Later in the passage, Jesus says something remarkable:
“Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9:13, quoting Hosea 6:6)
By the end of this reflection, we should at least be on our way toward learning what that means. Not in one sitting — Jesus seems to be inviting us into a lifelong journey — but enough to see the direction.
Jesus and the “Serious” Readers of Scripture
Jesus says this in response to a confrontation. The Pharisees are upset that he is eating with tax collectors and sinners. In that culture, table fellowship wasn’t casual — it signaled acceptance, solidarity, belonging.
And the Scriptures seemed to support their concern:
“I do not sit with the deceitful,
nor do I associate with hypocrites…
I refuse to sit with the wicked.” (Psalm 26:4–5)
The logic made sense: protect the boundaries of the righteous community. Let people clean up first, repent first, demonstrate obedience — then they can come to the table.
Everyone is welcome.
They just have to get their lives together first.
The Pharisees were not villains. They were trying to take Scripture seriously. A commentator I love, Frederick Dale Bruner, actually calls them “the Serious” instead of “the Pharisees,” because it prevents us from caricaturing them and helps us see ourselves in them.
The real question they’re asking is not “Should we love sinners?”
It’s: How does transformation actually happen?
Their answer: through strict obedience to the law.
Jesus’ answer: through mercy and nearness.
Who Is Right: Jesus or Scripture?
That’s the tension underneath this whole scene.
Jesus doesn’t dismiss Scripture. He doesn’t downplay it. Instead, he offers a way of reading it:
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”
In other words: the purpose of God’s law is healing. Restoration. Making people well.
So if your way of applying Scripture keeps the wounded, the broken, and the sinful as far away as possible — something has gone wrong.
Jesus’ approach is not boundary-protection first, but mercy first.
And to persuade the “Serious,” he does what any good rabbi would do: he quotes Scripture.
“Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”
Mercy as the Interpretive Center
In Hosea’s day, people were scrupulously obeying the rituals of the law — sacrifices, worship, religious observance — but compassion and justice were absent.
And God says, essentially:
You’re missing the point.
Obedience that doesn’t produce mercy is worthless.
The goal of the law was never perfect rule-keeping.
The goal was to shape people into the likeness of a merciful God.
So when Jesus says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” he’s not rejecting obedience — he’s putting it in its proper place.
Mercy is the higher principle.
Obedience exists in service of mercy.
Not the other way around.
This is why Jesus can also say:
“The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath.”
The law is a tool for human flourishing — not a burden we exist to carry.
Reading the Bible with Mercy at the Center
So what does this mean for us today?
First, it means learning to read the Bible with mercy as the interpretive center.
Every command, every instruction, every moral teaching flows from the God who says: “I desire mercy.”
If we encounter a biblical command and cannot see how it expresses God’s mercy toward human life, then we haven’t yet understood it fully.
Jesus doesn’t treat Scripture as static words on a page, ripped out of history and mechanically applied. He looks for the Spirit behind the text — what God was doing in that culture, and how the Spirit was moving people one step closer toward love, justice, and restoration.
That’s what Jesus means when he says:
“I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.”
To fulfill means to bring something to its ultimate purpose — its telos. Jesus raises the law to life. He reveals what it was always meant to do: make us whole.
And interestingly, this doesn’t make the moral life easier — it makes it deeper. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus intensifies the commandments:
- Not just murder, but hatred.
- Not just adultery, but lust.
- Not just obedience, but transformation of the heart.
The letter of the law becomes the floor.
The Spirit of the law becomes the path upward.
Mercy and the Table of Transformation
Second, mercy leads us to become people who prioritize restoration.
Jesus compares himself to a doctor. Mercy moves toward the sick. Mercy welcomes people to the table.
But this table is not a table of tolerance.
It’s a table of transformation.
A doctor who visits the sick only to affirm their illness is not merciful. Jesus doesn’t leave people as they are — he heals them.
So the church is not called to offer mere belonging without change, or acceptance without healing. We are called to offer a community where lives are remade.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, puts it beautifully:
“To be a Christian is to be answerable — to have one’s life called into question and reshaped by the presence of another.”
The church is not a belief club.
It is a community of people who make themselves answerable to the life of Christ being formed in them.
Do You Want to Be Made Well?
That’s the question Jesus asks again and again in the Gospels.
Not: Are you right?
Not: Are you religious?
Not: Are you obedient?
But: Do you want to be made well?
God has been merciful to us. Continually. Patiently. Relentlessly.
To follow Jesus is to learn to read Scripture the way he does — through the lens of mercy — and then to let that mercy shape the way we live, love, and welcome others.
“Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy.”
Not just once.
But for a lifetime.
View the full sermon here.
The Table Church 