Jesus, it’s like this. Some of us have to pollute ourselves by signing up with the less than honorable if there’s anyway we can have anything in this world. If not, we get trampled on as ones who have no strength, influence, even a voice to cry out. So here’s the question: what do you give that changes all that? How can following you make life good in some way?

Good question. Very good question. The world almost seems structured to either kill or be killed. Some get it all just by taking it all. Others only get strangled in a chokehold until they drop. Remember, Jesus was carefully watched from this perspective in his own day. And it wasn’t just a small group that kept a scope on him.

Some worshipped him while some decried him. Some believed him even as others rejected all he had to say. Some praised him and many passively ignored him. But wherever Jesus was, a crowd was either very near or not far away.

Questioned Power

They watched him constantly. There was no getting away from it. On the one hand, they knew an oppressive regime led by narcistic and paranoid leaders, the kind that would strip away rights for their own sick requirements. On the other, they had no recourse for even their own leaders controlled with laws that kept them under religious thumbs. The crowds, diverse in background, status, even political persuasion, looked to see if Jesus had it in his power to offer them something better.

Exchange of Power

If so, he went about it in a strange way. He picked as his deputies the most unqualified ever to lead a spiritual movement, and Matthew had to be one of the most tarnished. This Jew, despite his heritage and religious tradition, profited by cooperating with the Romans in collecting toll taxes on any trade moving through the region. Not only did these tax collectors rob their own people of fair opportunity in commerce, but they helped line the hated Palestinian tetrarch pockets. And if they demanded more money than the authorities required, that was just extra for themselves. As long as you had no loyalty to your tribe or moral conscience to impede the practice, you could make a very good living for yourself. Knowing the likes of his kind, Jesus stopped into Matthew’s office directly saying, “Come, be my disciple.” To anyone’s amazement, Matthew got up and followed.

You’d expect from here on out there would be a holy procession. Those anticipating it were disappointed. Instead, Matthew has a Jesus-party to which he invites his “fellow tax collectors and many other notorious sinners.” (We’ll leave the specifics of “notorious” to your own imagination.) That did it for the religious leaders. Eat with scum, then you must be scum. Birds of a feather sin together. Discredit this hero, and the crowds will go home.

Not so fast. If you have a problem with holier-than-thou attitudes, stop reading now. Jesus retorted, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do.” Then he throws their own holy texts back at them. “Learn the meaning of this Scripture: ‘I want you to be merciful; I don’t want your sacrifices.’”

Back up a minute. While Jesus didn’t call out Matthew and his friends for their failures, he does tell these religious leaders what their problem was. In their exclusive attitudes of with whom to socialize, that is, only of their own kind, he denigrated their rituals by which they held their prideful self-esteem. What’s more, it was beneath them to offer what God would offer any who come and repent, any who leave one life for another, any who would like Matthew walk away from the good life to a better life. “For I have come to call sinners,” Jesus says, “not those who think they are already good enough.” His call lay in a life of acceptance by forgiveness in the God-love of who you are now for what you will become in disciple-life.

Empty Power

Desperation though can sometimes change even hardened minds. And changed thinking can make all the difference. A leader of the local synagogue, no less, came to Jesus begging for a saving miracle for his little daughter. Possibly he was so desperate because she was his only child. Having sons would have made her loss less significant. He pleads, “My daughter has just died, but you can bring her back to life again if you just come and lay your hand upon her.” With crowds surrounding him, Jesus agrees to go.

But somehow within that crowd was another female, this one much older, and for the most part, knowing a living death. For twelve years she suffered with a “hemorrhage,” a menstrual period that would not end. Likely covered and heavily veiled, she sneaked up behind him and “touched the fringe of his robe, for she thought, ‘If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.’”

On one hand, you would think she didn’t have much to lose at this point. But she did. By her very presence there, she had made virtually an entire crowd, and specifically Jesus, unclean. Every Jew knew that the law of Leviticus was strict in delineating how a woman was made ceremonially unclean with each menstrual period. Not only that, but anyone touching her or that which she touched, even if one sat on a bed where she had been, would be infected by her uncleanliness. If a person touched her bed, one had to bathe, wash clothes, be considered defiled until evening. Washing and bathing were no easy tasks given that water often had to be carried, so this in effect isolated her for several days. Then she had to wait another seven days.

Finally considered ceremonially clean, she had to present herself to the priest with two offerings, one a sin offering and another a burnt offering. “In this way, the priest will make atonement for her before the Lord for her menstrual discharge.” Bad enough she was socially isolated for likely two weeks at a time, but also there was implication that she was sinful for having a period. Under such circumstances, women were subjected to lives lonely and dependent on the rigors of the law. There was no way to protest but to endure.

This was her danger. Should any in the crowd press against him, they may also press upon her. Would her need for deliverance from this illness matter to the crowd as much as what she had done to them? Her healing could mean her death if Jesus called her out.

Instead, this Jesus who knew but did not seem to care about ritual cleanliness, turns around and calls her, “Daughter.” He affirms her efforts and desire to be made whole by saying, “Be encouraged. Your faith has made you well.” She was healed.

Power Reversal

Jesus makes a connection between a synagogue leader’s daughter and the value of her young life with this woman who for years may have thought she would be better off dead than to live with this blood flow that drained her of the chance to have a life with any fullness. “Daughter,” he says, and all females, young girls and mature women, are touched in that place which distinguishes them as feminine. It is by faith that women are raised up, healed of whatever life gives, and receive a reversal of power that is only of God.

Later, among those who laugh at Jesus’ claim that the official’s little girl is not dead but asleep, he uses the power of God by taking her hand to restore her to life as well. In one day, Jesus bestowed a God-power on two females who could have been written off and forgotten by all around her.

Power Transferred

Power transferred is power that reverses, raises, and restores the powerless. We’ve seen it here for a despised man, a little girl, and a sick woman. It’s power known in healing that comes in more than a physical sense. It is the kind of power that redeems and restores any who in life will leave and follow Jesus. It is power just by his touch raising precious life when others see no hope. And it is power found in just fringes of faith which bring release from oppression.

The crowd carried the story.

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

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