Jesus and the Wrong People

This is #2 in the continuing series Finding Jesus in Real Lives.

See Matthew 9: 9-13

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

May 10, 2026

“Jesus and the Wrong People”

Matthew 9: 9-13 - The Message

Passing along, Jesus saw a man at his work collecting taxes. His name was Matthew. Jesus said, “Come along with me.” Matthew stood up and followed him.

10-11 Later when Jesus was eating supper at Matthew’s house with his close followers, a lot of disreputable characters came and joined them. When the Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company, they had a fit, and lit into Jesus’ followers. “What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and misfits?”

12-13 Jesus, overhearing, shot back, “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? Go figure out what this Scripture means: ‘I’m after mercy, not religion.’ I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

Last week we began our journey through the Gospel of Matthew – to find Jesus in real lives.  We stopped at the story in chapter 8 about a Roman centurion who pleaded with Jesus to heal someone he cared about.  While the crowd might not approve of helping a man who represented Rome, Jesus praised his faith, signaling to his followers not to let entrenched hostility define the future.  Then, as today, his basic question is:  How do we resist injustice without becoming consumed by hatred?

Today in chapter 9 we come to what feels like one breathless story after another – where Jesus can’t get a break.  First, some friends carry a paralyzed man lying on a cot to Jesus (in Mark they lower him through the roof).  He heals the man with forgiveness, which immediately sets the religious leaders on edge.  Blasphemy – how dare he do what only God can do.  

This is the first instance of opposition to Jesus by religious leaders in the Gospel of Matthew.  They keep it quiet among themselves.  But they can’t hold their tongues when Jesus then walks up to a tax collector named Matthew and invites him to follow him.  

First he helps a Roman centurion.  That’s bad enough.   Now he’s calling a tax collector to be his disciple?  A man whose job helps fund the very system oppressing them?!

And even worse, soon after, Jesus eats dinner at Matthew’s house surrounded by a crowd of other so-called “sinners.”  They ask, “Why does your teacher eat with people like that?”  Notice, they ask the disciples, not Jesus.

He answers:  “I’m after mercy, not religion.  I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

Just then a respected synagogue ruler named Jairus interrupted him, begging for his daughter.  Jesus agrees to go help, but before he can even get to the house, a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years reaches out anonymously and touches his cloak.  She steps away. But Jesus refuses to let her disappear into the crowd. He stops her and says, “daughter.” She is healed.

They finally reach Jairus’ little girl.  Jesus takes her hand and raises her up.  And yet almost immediately two blind men begin shouting to him, pleading for mercy.  He’s barely finished with them before another man is brought to him seeking healing.  

It might appear this chapter is a collection of miracle stories stitched together but it’s painting a portrait of Jesus and the kingdom he is creating on earth, as it is in heaven.  

Outsiders discovered in Jesus someone who would not overlook them, avoid them, or condemn them.  Someone proclaiming a world where no one was beyond the reach of love.  And compassion mattered more than gatekeeping.  Even Roman centurions and tax collectors.

As he said:  “I’m after mercy, not religion.  I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”  

Yuri Kochiyama may be someone have never heard of before.  She was born to Japanese immigrant parents in California in 1921.  She wrote in her memoir, “I was very much an ‘all-American’ girl.  Girls Scouts.  I taught arts and crafts and tennis at the YWCA, first aide at the Red Cross, and Sunday School at my local Presbyterian Church.  

The day in 1941 that Pearl Harbor was bombed changed all of our lives.  Before the war, I saw America with American eyes.  What happened to us after Pearl Harbor made me see the world with entirely new ones - Japanese American eyes.”  

Almost overnight, they became objects of suspicion and fear.  Her father was a successful fish merchant and because he was a community leader, he was arrested by the FBI.  While detained, he became seriously ill and died not long after.  

Yuri, her mother, and two brothers were imprisoned at the Santa Anita racetrack outside Los Angeles for several months.  They lived behind barbed wire in converted horse stalls still reeking of manure.  18,000 families went through Santa Anita.

Yuri’s family was eventually sent to an internment camp in Arkansas where they lived more than two years, like 120,000 other Japanese Americans in camps across the country.  Years later she would talk about the humiliation of being reduced to the category of enemy.  Threat.  From All American Girl to  Outsider.

After the war she married an American soldier of Japanese descent who had fought in Europe while his own family lived behind barbed wire in the United States.

She often spoke about how Christianity shaped her early sense of service, compassion, and human dignity.  But after the trauma of internment, her worldview changed.  Not abandoned, but expanded. 

They moved to Harlem and during the civil rights movement she heard her own story in the experiences of Black families facing housing discrimination, police violence, and unequal schools.  

She heard it in the stories of Puerto Rican activists and political prisoners treated as threats instead of human beings.  She heard it in the struggles of people around the world trying to free themselves from colonial rule.

The more she listened, the more she felt compelled to help.  She opened their apartment to activists.  She sat with grieving families and listened to people others ignored.  Most of all, she showed up.  People described her as being anywhere and everywhere it mattered.

She also fought for justice for her own community, staying in the fight until Japanese Americans won reparations decades after internment.  For the woman with a “tiny frame and a volcanic spirit,” it was all interconnected.

Yuri was deeply influenced by Malcolm X and was by his side when he was assassinated in 1965.  While others ran out of the room at the sound of gunfire, she ran to his side.  There was a photograph in LIFE magazine of her cradling Malcolm’s head as he died.  

Throughout her life, Yuri Kochiyama kept moving toward people the world labeled dangerous or disposable, very much the spirit of the stories in Matthew chapter 9 that she likely once taught in Sunday School.  

Stories where Jesus keeps stopping for people others avoid.  Or blame.  Or reduce to sinner, problem, and foreigner.  Once people become categories, religion can become more preoccupied with maintaining purity and order than mercy.

But by healing them, Jesus is also restoring stigmatized and morally suspect people to communal life and belonging.  For example:  

• He calls out to the bleeding woman, calling her “daughter,” refusing to let disappear into the crowd.  She becomes family.
• The paralyzed man is not an object of pity or debate.  Jesus calls him “son.”  
• He names a man who collected taxes for Rome “disciple” and eats with outsiders at his table. They become friends.

This is not just inclusion but a dangerous reordering toward the “wrong people.”  Because somehow mercy itself became threatening.

I don’t get it.  Why is that a problem?  Until I do it too.

It can be easier to love humanity in the abstract than actual human beings who frustrate us, frighten us, exhaust us, disappoint us, or challenge us.

These days, breathless and exhausted by one frightening headline after another, we can stop seeing people and just see problems.  People I’ve judged before I know them.  

What might this say about discipleship in our day?  Certainly, it means protecting vulnerable people labeled dangerous.  And as Jesus did over and over, remaining interruptible to people in need.

But discipleship might also mean:

• not allowing outrage media to define entire groups of people, 
• abandoning dehumanizing language for anyone, 
• and refusing to give up too quickly on people who are difficult.

And, as Yuri once said, she was not driven by fearlessness or bravery, but by the simple conviction that showing up for people is always the right thing to do.

And that’s exactly where we find Jesus in real lives.  “I’m after mercy,” he said, “not religion.  I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

Now, this is not the denigration of religion.  Jesus is not rejecting community or spiritual practice.  He calls religion back to its deepest purpose:  love.

Including the simple stuff.  Showing up so that none of us feel like outsiders.  For example:

• it means, when you enter the sanctuary or fellowship hall, before looking for your friends, look for people standing alone.  Someone you don’t yet know.
• It means noticing who you haven’t seen in a while and actually reaching out.
• It means asking someone who needs prayer, “Can I bring you a casserole too?” 
• It means spending more time and energy on things like feeding and housing and welcoming people than anything else.

That’s religion because that’s mercy.