Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Contagious Holiness (Matthew 9:9-13)
Date: April 7, 2024
A story for you this morning. We typically define our world by what we can see. It may not always seem that way today because we spend so much time as a culture thinking about things we can’t see, but for most people in most situations, what we can see has a great deal to do with how we think about and interact with the world around us. Before the invention of the microscope, this was most definitely the case. In the 1860s, most people generally couldn’t imagine a world smaller than what their eyes could perceive. Then a French chemist and microbiologist named Louis Pasteur did some experiments that proved the existence of these tiny creatures called microorganisms that were apparently everywhere. Not only did some of these organisms do helpful things like allowing for the production of bread or cheese, but they were also responsible for less helpful things like spoiling food and making us sick. What scientists soon figured out was that passing these tiny organisms from person to person may be responsible for one person’s illness getting passed to another person.
This whole idea became known as germ theory, and this understanding of germs led to a whole world of changes. Still, though, beyond washing your hands and not coughing on other people, just how impactful germs can be hasn’t tended to be a terribly significant thought in the minds of most people. Just a shade over four years ago, though, the world learned a whole lot more about a kind of germ called a virus and just how bad they can be than we ever imagined we’d have to know.
The introduction of Covid to the world brought changes that we weren’t ready for or interested in as a population. Everywhere we went we were suddenly burdened with thinking about whether there were any germs around us, and how we could avoid catching them. I remember in April and May of that year when our services were fully online and information about how it spread was still developing, I would do all of our grocery shopping early on Sunday mornings before arriving to do the livestream. With a mask on, I kept a supply of paper towels that I used to pick up all the groceries I wanted off the shelves and put them in the cart.
In those early days, pharmaceutical companies around the world were racing to develop a vaccine for the virus. Whatever your particular feelings about the vaccine are today, the fact that they were able to develop and synthesize a vaccine using medical technology that they were fairly literally inventing as they went that could be rapidly mass-produced for a totally new virus that was wreaking havoc on the global population remains one of the most stunning scientific achievements of the modern age.
While we were learning more about viruses, then, we were also learning more about vaccines. We learned that vaccines work by giving the body a little bit of a virus. This is either a small enough amount that the body isn’t likely to get sickened by it, or an inactive version of the virus that looks just like the real thing, but won’t make you sick. The body’s antibodies, then, learn to recognize the virus so that if the real thing does come calling, it’ll be ready to fight it off more effectively.
Let’s make a bit of a spiritual jump together. Sin is like a spiritual virus in the world. It spreads everywhere it is exposed to the world and it always, ultimately kills its host. The only vaccine that has proven capable of doing anything particularly meaningful about it is God’s holiness. Literally every other attempt on our part to deal with sin has failed, often spectacularly. Well, when Jesus called His followers to be salt and light in the world, He was calling us to be the bearers of God’s sin-defeating holiness wherever we happen to be in the world. As we consider together this week what to do with the news that Jesus has risen from the dead, I’d like to talk for just a few minutes about this role we have as His Spirit-empowered followers to make a meaningful dent on the impact of sin in the world around us.
We’ll start here: When it comes to Christianity and Christians at a broad level, we have a lot of critics. But when it comes to Jesus Himself, critics generally disappear like roaches when the lights come on. Practically everybody likes Jesus. Even as the popularity of Christians in the culture continues to fade, Jesus’ appeal has remained fairly constant. In His day, while He was pretty fiercely opposed by the people in power, among the average folks, most everybody liked Jesus then too. He had a way about Him that set Him apart from everybody else. He was different. What’s more, this wasn’t just different, He was better than everybody else. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant sense. To say He was better wasn’t boastful, it was factual. Jesus was kinder than anybody else. He was more patient. He was more loving. He beamed with more joy. He was…better.
Incidentally, we have a word to describe something that is both different from and morally superior to the things around them. That word is holy. We don’t call someone who is just a really good person holy. You’ve been around folks who were really good people without thinking of them as holy. We also don’t call someone who is just different from the people around them holy. You’ve been around folks who were really different from the people around them and didn’t think of them as holy. You may have actually thought of them in somewhat unholy terms. No, it is when both of these elements are in place at the same time that we recognize someone or something as holy.
Well, as followers of Jesus, we believe holiness has a source, and that source isn’t us. We aren’t naturally holy. On our own we aren’t morally superior to anyone. On our own we really aren’t even all that different from anybody else. On our own, in fact, we’re just like everybody else: broken by sin. God, on the other hand, is holy. If we are holy at all, it is because we are reflecting His holiness. This has been the case for every single person who’s ever walked on the planet. Except one. Jesus didn’t simply reflect the holiness of God, He bore it. He was the source of it. And because He was the source of it, He could share it. In fact, He did share it. He shared it because He came to establish a kind of kingdom base camp for a divine rebellion against the powers of sin in this world. This rebellion is driven by the holiness of God. The world apart from God is very gray. It is flat and dreary. There is no real beauty in it. It is all death and no life. It is unrighteousness and injustice.
The holiness of God, though, looks very different from this. It is the opposite of the world at every point. It is fresh and different and joyful and alive and creative and interesting and right and true. It is the things that make God, God all balled up together. It is in every possible way the antidote to the soul poison of sin in our lives. Sin demands that we conform; holiness invites us to stand out and let the beautiful colors God made us to bear shine forth. Sin tolerates no individuals, no breaking from the pack; holiness calls us to be fully and uniquely who God made us to be. Sin causes us to fold inward on ourselves, reducing and isolating us so that we neither impact nor are impacted by anyone else. Holiness, driven by God’s character of generosity, always expands. It spreads from person to person, ever extending its impact. In this way, God’s holiness—Jesus’ holiness—is contagious.
As we read through the Gospel narratives, we see Jesus’ over and over again interacting with people who with very few exceptions leave the encounter closer to God than when they arrived. Over and over again we see Him setting people apart in one way or another. We see Him forgiving their sins rendering them more morally pure than when they first encountered Him. And then these people went on to infect others, expanding the kingdom of God, and driving back the forces of sin as they went. What’s more, if we are going to be consistent with His example and on board with His mission, we need to be as eager about spreading this good contagion as He was.
In order to help you see this a bit better, I want to take you to a passage of Scripture that not only puts this contagious holiness on display, but it also has something to say for our practice of it. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to Matthew 9. In chapter 9 here, Jesus returns home to the village of Capernaum after having been traveling a bit around the region of Galilee. Now Capernaum wasn’t Jesus’ birthplace (that was Bethlehem), and it wasn’t where He grew up (that was Nazareth), but Bethlehem was never really home for Him and the people of Nazareth had rejected Him (by trying to throw Him off a cliff), so Capernaum was where He established His home base of operations.
Matthew 9 opens with the story of Jesus’ dramatic healing of a paralyzed man. This healing also involved Jesus’ telling the man his sins were forgiven, prompting a bit of a theological tussle with the Pharisees who were present and watching to learn more about Him. When that was all wrapped up and Jesus left to head to the next place, on His way, something pretty significant happened. Pick this up with me in v. 9: “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office…” Okay that part wasn’t particularly dramatic, but let me give you some context before we get there. A big nation with a small class of super wealthy people who don’t like to work, concentrated in a far-off capital city requires a lot of taxes to sustain it. In order to collect these taxes a nation must employ thousands of tax collectors, each of whom are backed by the full authority of the state to get their job done. Well, in the Roman Empire, each of these tax collectors was required to collect a certain amount of taxes. Anything beyond that they could do with as they pleased.
The natural result of this was that the official tax collectors tended to be really wealthy guys. And being so wealthy, they didn’t really want to work any more than the people for whom they were collecting taxes. As a result, these guys would farm the work out to locals willing to endure the scorn of their fellow citizens in order to get rich themselves and enjoy the pleasures of luxury. In Judea where the Romans were hated with a particularly aggressive passion, the Jews who served as the subcontractors for the Roman tax collectors were afforded their own special cultural status that was pretty much as low as you could go. They were hated with a passion that sometimes even superseded that usually aimed at the Romans because at least they had the benefit of not being Jews to excuse the things they were doing. The Jews colluding with them knew better and did it anyway. They were considered so morally reprobate that the label “sinner” was too good for them. “Tax collector” became its own class of sinner. You can see this throughout the Gospels in the many appearances of the phrase “sinners and tax collectors.”
All of that is to say: as a tax collector, Matthew would have been afforded a permanent status of unclean and evil and traitor and a host of other negative adjectives. People would have gone to see him to pay their taxes and otherwise would have had nothing at all to do with him. He would have been considered a traitor to his race. So, when Jesus, the holy and righteous rabbi He was, walked by Matthew sitting there at his tax office, He very naturally said to him, “You filthy piece of trash! I can’t believe you would turn your back on your own people in favor of a lifestyle of temporary luxury provided by the forces of evil in this world. Rest assured, you’ll get your due when the time is right!” And the crowds around them cheered and clapped and heaped scorn upon this vile traitor. I’m just kidding. He didn’t do that at all. Look at the text: “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, ‘Follow me,’ and he got up and followed him.”
Here was a particularly concentrated dose of the symptoms of sin in the world. Greed and treachery and jealousy and covetousness and idolatry. And so, what does Jesus do? He injects His holiness into the heart of the virus and immediately it is washed away. Matthew gets completely infected by Jesus’ contagious holiness and leaves everything behind to follow Him. But there’s more. Luke records that after this happened, Matthew threw a huge party for all of his friends. Of course, someone like Matthew wouldn’t have had very reputable friends. His invite list would have been a Who’s Who roll call of the worst sinners in the community. And there in the midst of this social garbage dump was Jesus and the disciples. You see, the thing about something contagious is that you have to be around it in order to catch it. And, if you’re trying to spread a contagion, the more exposure you can get, the better. Matthew caught it, experienced the transformation God’s holiness causes in us, and immediately sought out all of His friends to get them exposed as well. When they were, guess what probably happened. They were transformed and went on to expose still others, spreading the antivirus, advancing the kingdom of God.
Well, given the message Jesus came to proclaim, and which those who had been impacted by His holiness went on to spread, it would seem to be a no brainer that everybody would want to jump on board with this. Where’s the line to get exposed to this life-changing, contagious holiness? Sign me up for that! Here’s the problem: What Jesus was doing was introducing a radically new way of thinking about God, and it was slow to catch. Now, a careful reading of the Old Testament through the lens of Christ shows that God hadn’t changed at all—indeed, He was pretty clear that the formation of Israel was all about creating a kingdom basecamp from which His contagious holiness could be spread throughout the world, driving back the forces of sin and darkness, and making life better for everybody. Rather, what Jesus was introducing was a new way of thinking about God as far as the people were concerned.
You see, over time, God’s people had come to think of themselves no longer as a sort of city on the hill, but as guardians of a sacred way of life over and against the death the world around them embraced. And, when you think about the way people have always been, and examine the experiences the people of Israel had, that they began thinking like this should come as no surprise at all. They had been burned more times than they cared to count and had learned to look at the world around them as the enemy. Now, if someone wanted to come and join them, that was great, but they had to jump through the appropriate hoops which grew increasingly narrow the closer to the truth you got. Yet here, Jesus was claiming to speak for God, and throwing open wide the doors to fellowship with Him that the people had done such a careful job of closing and locking. If He kept opening the doors like this, there was no telling who was going to get in, and then what would their nice, neat little community look like?
This mindset is put rather starkly on display in what comes next. Come back to the text with me here at v. 11. Matthew throws his party and Jesus and the disciples are there hanging out, having a great time, and infecting all the people around them. “When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ [Doesn’t He know they’re all evil, and that if He hangs around with them too long, they might start to drag Him down? Besides, letting their kind into the fellowship of God will cheapen it for the rest of us. We’ve got to protect His holiness in order to keep it unspoiled from the world.]’” Okay, so I just made up that last part, but they were probably thinking something along those lines. That’s how people have thought about God.
We are sorely tempted to think about God’s holiness as a treasure to be guarded instead of a cure to be spread. And again, if you think about it in the right way, it makes perfect sense that even Christians today would do this. The culture is changing around us. A generation ago, being part of a church was generally considered to be a social advantage. Sundays and Wednesdays were protected times. A baseline biblical literacy pervaded the culture. A basic understanding and acceptance of Christian values and virtues was assumed. You could say “Jesus” in public without people thinking you were cursing or else being offended by your microaggression. Today, that’s not the case. Today, the church—or at least the Evangelical church—is increasingly becoming an embattled minority. And what do embattled minorities tend to do when the world is against them? They go the way of the Amish. They hunker down in the bunker, close their ranks, and wait for the storm to pass. They protect their traditions and way of life at all costs and avoid even potentially harmful entanglements with outsiders. They forcefully expel any members of their group who get too cozy with the broader culture. This is exactly what the Jews were doing under the Romans, and it is what we far too often do in our culture today. Sure we still proclaim the good news to the godless, but we tend to do it from the safety and comfort of our bunkers. Again, there are lots of reasons for this, but the fact that we do it at all is the problem.
And as it turns out, Jesus had a response to this. Look at v. 12: “Now when he heard this, he said, ‘It is not those who are well who need a doctor, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” For I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.’” Literarily speaking, this is an inclusio, which is where one idea is repeated on either side of a central point. Its purpose is to make something more memorable. Given how well this has been remembered, I would say that it worked. In other words, what Jesus is sarcastically saying here is this: “Folks who are already straight with God don’t need Me. If you’re straight with God, you don’t need Me. I’m going after those who are all torn up with sin in order to make them well by exposing them to the transformational holiness of God. I came to draw them nearer to God. This is consistent with what My Father has always been doing. What My Father wants is not a bunch of religious exercises, but the expansion of His kingdom through acts of mercy toward those who are still broken by the sin-virus.”
So then, the question we need to answer in light of all of this is simple: Which way are we going to think about the holiness of God? Are we going to follow the lead of the Pharisees and many churches today (who, by the way, are endeavoring to work out their love for God, they’re just driven by some wrong ideas about Him)? Or, are we going to follow the example of Jesus and work our hardest to expose as many people to His holiness as we can?
Now, the answer to this may seem like it should be obvious, but let’s not jump too fast to any conclusions because our answer has implications that we may or may not be ready to embrace. For instance, what does it mean if we are going to follow the lead of the Pharisees? That we’re all evil? No. It will mean that we will likely have a really close church community. Outsiders will occasionally break in, but on the whole, we’ll stay a pretty consistent size. We’ll keep doing a lot of the same things over and over again each year and they’ll have about the same impact. We might develop a reputation in the community as being the place where everybody mostly has everything together…but where broken folks aren’t really welcome. It’ll be really comfortable for us. It’ll be safe and familiar. Most everybody in our church will talk about what a great place it is. But our real impact for the kingdom will be negligible. We’ll celebrate a few small successes in ways wildly out of proportion to their size. And we’ll see very little real life change happen. People won’t necessarily move away from Jesus, but they won’t really move in His direction either. We’ll keep ourselves fairly well inoculated from the sin-virus wreaking havoc around us, but that’ll be about the extent of our work.
Now, Jesus’ approach can easily be made to sound a great deal more exciting than the Pharisees’ approach, but let’s make no mistake: it’s a whole lot messier. It means getting out into the community and getting involved with folks who aren’t like us. We’ll encounter folks whose lives are messy. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that our lives aren’t messy too—they are—we just tend to have well-developed church filters so the messes don’t hang out where everybody can see them. These new folks may not have those, meaning we’ll probably see…and have to deal with…their messes. It means that folks may connect with us who have neither connection with nor understanding of our traditions and history. They won’t know how we do things, and they won’t really care all that much. It might mean we’ll have to change the way we do some things. Most of all, we’ll start doing fewer things in house and a lot more things out there because that’s where the people who need the healing and help of the Gospel are. They’re at the local schools. They’re on the ball fields. They’re in the woods. They’re at the store. They’re at work. They’re in our neighborhoods.
Not all that long ago we could rely on them coming to us, which allowed us to create really comfortable places for them to come. Now they don’t. Now, we have to go to them. But we can’t go to them in the way we used to go to them. Those aren’t going to work very well anymore. Home visits and cold calls are more likely to drive people away than draw them to connect. People today connect through shared mission and by experiencing the love of Christ in practical ways where they are.
We serve the God who seeks us with such a passion that He came to earth Himself in order to save us. When our culture was so thoroughly Christianized that most people came to church because they felt like they were supposed to, we forgot that in the Great Commission, Jesus assumed we would be going, not staying where we were and waiting for them to come to us. But for a tiny slice of history that happens to be when most of us have lived our lives, people have never naturally sought out the church. The church was out among them, spreading the contagious holiness of God intentionally. And from those efforts, they caught it and connected. That was and is the way of Jesus. Is this approach harder than the way of the Pharisees? Yes. But the results are far more in line with what He was doing than anything the Pharisees ever mustered whether those Pharisees were of the 1st century, or the 21st century.
Our world is deeply affected by the sin virus that Adam and Eve unleashed on humanity. The only cure is found in the contagious holiness of Jesus. If we want to be on board with what He came to do, we need to be spreading it too. Jesus’ holiness is contagious: spread it! And the only way to spread it is to get out where the sin-sick are because the healthy don’t need the cure. Jesus’ holiness is contagious: spread it! Spread it because the fate of the world depends on it. Jesus’ holiness is contagious: spread it!