A welcome with no exclusions

George Allin-Roberts, ordinand (Westcott House)

7th June 2026 |Trinity 1

Hosea 5:15-6:6 | Psalm 50:7-15 | Romans 4:13-25 | Matthew 9:9-13; 9:18-26

As humans, I find we’re very good at trying to categorise almost anything. A random selection of any books soon becomes categorised by topic, author, or indeed in these parts, by size. And very helpfully too, if we couldn’t organise our documents, books, music, laws… life would be much more difficult to manage.

And it’s something we learn from our earliest years. My nieces and nephews have always loved the ‘That’s not my’ series as children. I am sure some of you have come across them to, things like…

“That’s not my dog, its tail is too fluffy”, or “That’s not my rabbit, its ears are too floppy”.

These are good fun as children, and great for getting them to engage with the world, but a danger arises when we as adults don’t move beyond this and only engage with people based on which category we think they fit into.  

Our Gospel today is about just that, a collage of people who have been categorised as being outside of God’s love.

A tax collector, a woman ill with haemorrhages, a girl who has died.

One by one, they encounter Jesus, his kingdom is revealed, and all are welcomed with love.

First, we meet the Apostle Matthew, a character of immediate suspicion. Tax collectors were not collecting for schools and hospitals but the armies of the occupying Roman force, and their profit came from whatever they could extort on top of the existing payment.

Matthew then, had the wrong sort of job for the wrong kind of people. But he is welcomed, and Jesus breaks bread with him at dinner.

This clearly confused the poor Pharisee’s; they’ve studied scripture and worked very hard to categorise what can make them godly people; and tax collectors are not godly like them.

But they are met with a cutting irony from Jesus. To the experts of law and scripture Jesus retorts with scripture himself “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”.

And they will have surely known the second half of that phrase as we heard from Hosea 6:6 this morning: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings”

Hosea speaks of healed wounds, restored lives, a spring rain which nourishes the Earth. A God who meets us in encounter, in acknowledgement in all our imperfectness, with rituals which guide us to that encounter, not exclude us from it.

For the Pharisees wished to serve God, and protect worship of God from the unrighteous, but had fallen into cordoning off people too different from them, too challenging to their strict standards.

Jesus reveals a kingdom where all are welcomed on their intention, not their achievement.

It is here we must not risk falling into the trap ourselves of placing people into boxes of godly or ungodly. A long, and tragically violent, history of antisemitism finds its roots in viewing the Pharisees not as fellow Jewish brothers of Jesus, debating how best to serve God, but an unfaithful other.

It is a view dismissed by our reading from Paul’s letter to the Roman’s, we are also to share in the promise of Abraham, not instead of adherents of the law.

And it is a view dismissed by our continuing Gospel reading.

Jesus rebukes and teaches the Pharisee’s at the dinner table, and then follows a leader of the synagogue, compelled by his faith. He is not bound by what category of religious teacher this man falls into, but an abundance of mercy and compassion.

Of course, before he reaches this man’s daughter, he is stopped by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. Another example of someone categorised and excluded from social and religious life.

From the context of this account in Mark’s gospel, the woman’s social and financial isolation, we can presume this was a gynaecological illness. This would have prevented her by custom from marriage, physical intimacy, and much worship under purity law.

The healing miracle offers more than the removal of pain then, but a foretaste of Christ’s kingdom where there is no exclusion from the full participation of all people in God’s worship.

And once again, Jesus offers a clever caveat that he is welcoming each individual as they are, not by the group they do or don’t belong to.

It would have been common in the Graeco-Roman world the gospels were shared in, to understand the ideal body as a normative masculine one, where fluids were balanced and contained, and consequently, those who menstruated could only fall short of this.

But we should not then see Jesus as reinforcing this, in some false idea that ceasing the flow of blood of the woman brought her closer to a normative masculine ideal.

For in healing the woman, Jesus is physically touched by her, his body becomes porous. In the Markan account, his power literally ‘flows out’ from him.

He enables the woman to re-engage in the societal norms of the day, but in doing so transgresses those very categories of gender.

It is this we celebrate at the Eucharist, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Man, whose blood flows out to give us eternal life.

Which brings us to the final character of our story, the little girl who lay dead before the crowd. Jesus is dismissed, for surely, she is beyond any help now, but the ultimate glory of the kingdom is revealed, death is no barrier to God, whose life reaches all.

An eternal life which transcends background and religious practice, disrupts our ideas of gender and social order, pours out grace into the world beyond what we can imagine.

A life in which we are called to follow Jesus as nothing more than the people God created us to be. A life in which the less each person is oppressed by the norms of others, the more they fulfil God’s image, the more of God’s kingdom on earth is revealed.