Who Belongs at the Kingdom Table

“Who Belongs at the Kingdom Table?”

Mercy Over Sacrifice

Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26  ·  Hosea 5:15–6:6

Proper 5  ·  June 7, 2026  ·  Revised Edition (8–10 minutes)

Series 1: The Kingdom Announced  ·  Week 2 of 5

INTRODUCTION

I want to begin this morning with a dinner party. The good news is that you all are invited.

You’re a first-century Jew living in Capernaum. You’ve been following this rabbi named Jesus — you’ve watched him heal people, heard him preach, and something about him has gotten under your skin in the best possible way. And then one afternoon, Jesus walks past a tax collector’s booth, looks the man sitting behind it straight in the eye, and says two words:

“Follow me.”

Now you need to understand something about tax collectors. They weren’t simply unpopular. They worked for Rome. They charged whatever they wanted, pocketed the difference, and enriched themselves at the expense of their own neighbors. They were considered traitors.

And Jesus looks at this man and says, follow me. Then — as if that weren’t enough — Matthew throws a party. A big one. And the guest list is every person polite religious society had written off: tax collectors, sinners, the kind of company you crossed the street to avoid.

Jesus is right there at the table. Eating. Drinking. Perfectly at home.

The Pharisees, watching from outside, ask the disciples a question dripping with incredulity:

“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

It is one of the most important questions in the entire Gospel of Matthew. And Jesus’ answer tells us everything we need to know about the Kingdom of God.

Let us share in the Scripture focus this morning:

Children of God listen to the Word of God.

Matthew 9:9–13 “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.””

Matthew 9:18–26 “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.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Lord God, your Word is in our hearing today. We ask that you will write your Word onto our hearts and set our hearts fire with the love of Christ Jesus. In his name, Amen.

PART ONE: The Physician Goes Where the Illness Is

Jesus answers the Pharisees with a medical analogy and a prophetic quotation. First, the analogy:

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do.”

Simple. Direct. The physician goes where the illness is. The Kingdom of God goes to the people who need it. You don’t build a hospital in the neighborhood where everyone is already healthy.

Then he quotes Hosea:

Matthew 9:13  —  “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not burnt offerings.”

That phrase — “Go and learn what this means” — is a classic rabbinic formula. It’s the first-century equivalent of saying, you clearly haven’t understood this text, so go back and do your homework.

So let’s go to Hosea. Because the context is everything.

Hosea is preaching to a people who are performing all the right rituals — sacrifices, offerings, feast days, the whole liturgical calendar. The worship services look great.

[Pause for knowing laughter.]

But their actual treatment of one another — their justice, their honesty, their care for the vulnerable — is catastrophic. And God delivers one of the most direct verdicts in the Old Testament:

Hosea 6:6  —  “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

The Hebrew word translated steadfast love is hesed — one of the great words of the Old Testament. Covenant loyalty. Faithful, persistent, undeserved kindness. The word the Old Testament uses most often to describe the character of God himself.

God is saying: I want your religion to produce hesed. I want your worship to generate mercy. I want what happens in here to flow outward into transformed relationships with the people around you.

The Pharisees had built a sophisticated system of religious performance. But the system had produced in them a reflex of exclusion rather than welcome. And Jesus says: that is not what the Kingdom of God looks like.

The Kingdom of God looks like a physician who goes to the sick. It looks like a rabbi who sits down at a tax collector’s table. It looks like hesed — stubborn, mercy-shaped love that reflects the character of God himself.

PART TWO: The Interruptions That Reveal the Kingdom

Matthew does something brilliant here. Right in the middle of this conversation, he inserts two healing stories. A synagogue leader named Jairus comes to Jesus in desperation — his daughter has just died. And while Jesus is on his way, a woman reaches out and touches the fringe of his cloak.

This woman has been hemorrhaging for twelve years. Under the purity codes of the day, she was ritually unclean — excluded from worship, unable to touch others without making them unclean. Twelve years of being told, by the very religious system meant to be the vehicle of God’s grace, that she was on the outside.

She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t announce herself. She just… reaches.

[Pause.]

And Jesus stops. In the middle of an urgent errand, he stops, turns, and says to this woman who has been invisible for twelve years:

“Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”

In one word, Jesus restores everything the system had taken from her. Not just physical healing — though that too. Belonging. Identity. A name in the family. Daughter.

Then he continues to Jairus’s house, where everyone is already mourning, and he takes the girl by the hand and she rises.

These healings are not interruptions to the sermon. They are the sermon. The Kingdom of God arrives in people’s actual bodies, their actual lives, their actual twelve-years-of-suffering stories. This is Kingdom theology with skin on.

PART THREE: The Question the Text Is Asking Us

Now the passage turns toward us. And I want to be honest, because the text requires your pastor to be honest.

It would be very comfortable to hear this sermon and conclude that we are the tax collectors and sinners, gratefully welcomed to the table, and the Pharisees are those people over there. But Jesus didn’t send the Pharisees away. He said, “Go and learn what this means.” Attend a Bible Study. A place where people come up to the Pastor and ask, when will the Bible studies start. That is an invitation, not a dismissal.

The danger the Pharisees fell into is available to every church in every century — allowing our religious life to produce exclusion rather than welcome, performance rather than mercy, guarding the door rather than setting the table.

Who have we decided doesn’t belong at this table?

The person with the complicated past? The person whose politics make us nervous? The person who doesn’t know how church works and accidentally sits in somebody’s unofficial regular seat?

[Pause for laughter, then let it settle.]

The Kingdom of God is not a reward for the already-righteous. It is a rescue operation for the sick. It is a table set by a host who has a very different guest list than we might expect. And it is characterized, above all else, by hesed — that stubborn, mercy-shaped love that looks like God and, by his grace, is becoming visible in us.

CONCLUSION

The theologian Miroslav Volf offers an image I have never been able to forget. He writes about the physical act of embrace — and suggests it has four movements: you open your arms, creating space, making yourself vulnerable. The other person enters. You close your arms — not to trap, but to hold. And then you open your arms again, releasing, allowing the other to remain themselves. Welcomed, and freed.

Volf says this is the shape of God’s love for us. And it is the shape of Kingdom community.

It is what Jesus does at Matthew’s table. What he does on the road to Jairus’s house. What he does on a cross — arms open wide, making space for the whole broken human family.

The Kingdom of God is not a gated community. It is an open table. And the people who keep getting surprised by who shows up — that’s us. The righteous, the sinners, the sick, the seeking. The ones who reach out in desperation and touch the fringe of his garment, and discover that he has already turned around and is looking right at them.

The Kingdom of God has a seating policy.

And the policy is: come.

Every single one of you.

Come.

Amen.

SOURCES CITED

1.  Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), pp. 140–147. Volf’s four-movement theology of embrace — opening, waiting, closing, opening again — is one of the most powerful theological images in twentieth-century systematic theology, developed against the backdrop of the Balkan wars.

All scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.