Hosea 5.15 – 6.6; Psalm 50.7-15; Romans 4.13-end; Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

HERE is a command from Jesus which I have never actively tried to fulfil: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I probably assumed — given that it was a command aimed at some Pharisees — that it was not meant for those who are following Jesus.

But Jesus is quoting scripture to those Pharisees, and, being scripture, it must be as applicable to all of us today as it was to them then. In Hosea 6.6, God expresses frustration with his people, whom he longs to vindicate, but cannot. There is a possibility that the force of the Hebrew is “mercy, not just sacrifice”, “knowledge of God, not just burnt offerings”. But Andrew Macintosh, in his commentary, says no to that, and I do not have “more understanding than my teachers” (Psalm 119.99). As he notes, Matthew records Jesus quoting this prophecy a second time, in the context of a different interaction with the Pharisees (12.7). The fact of that repetition highlights the significance of Hosea’s words for Jesus.

So, Jesus takes Hosea’s prophetic utterance as a call to sinners rather than righteous people (9.13), and as a message about guilt and innocence under the Law. His use of scripture is flexible and imaginative: establish the principle, then apply it — either where clear commands are known but are uncompassionate, or where negative judgement is applied inappropriately. One commentary on Matthew 9.13 adds another intriguing factor into the mix, by identifying the phrase “Go and learn” as a “rabbinic expression”. Perhaps Jesus is reminding the Pharisees of their own avowed principles, which their attitude here is at odds with.

Back to the command: “Go and learn what this means.” It tells us that Jesus knew the prophecy of Hosea, though he quotes him less often than Isaiah. Although Jesus could write (John 8.8), he would probably have learned the words of holy texts by listening to them. Lacking the resources of commentaries, or the internet, he relied instead on a retentive memory. Is he interested in what the meaning was for Hosea, when he uttered those words seven centuries earlier? Unlikely. After all, Hosea is as distant from Jesus’s time as the Black Death is from ours. In any case, the idea that what a text “really” means should be established by historical analysis and research is alien to the world in which Christianity arose.

These words of Hosea were preceded by a warning: “I have hewn them by the prophets, I have killed them by the words of my mouth, and my judgement goes forth as the light.” We are being reminded that God’s word is powerful. Even when such a “word” has been separated from its context, as here, it can take on a new life of its own.

Hosea’s prophetic “word” about “mercy, not sacrifice” denounces the self-indulgent dissipation that often attended cultic sacrifices. This contrast — between temperate ethics and dissolute cult — is found in early Christianity, too, for Ambrose of Milan warned Augustine’s mother about such dangers. Perhaps there is always a risk, at the extremes of religious practice: ultra-control on the one hand (radical Puritanism), and dangerous licence on the other (cults and movements led by charismatic individuals: too numerous to mention).

Matthew 9.13, as a teaching from Jesus, suggests that compassion should come before strict adherence to the Law. But what if our understanding of Jesus’s compassion has been given a new emphasis by the three forgiveness parables of Luke 15? Their emphasis may not be the same as in Matthew 9.13. On the next occasion, Matthew’s Jesus quotes Hosea 6.6 to defend his disciples against the charge of breaking the law. But here, God’s desire for “mercy”, and rejection of “sacrifice”, are warning against outer observances which have no corresponding inner disposition.

Yet still I hesitate to take Matthew 9.13 in this way. The contrast, “outward observance: bad” versus “inner disposition: good”, is too often inaccurately presented as a basic difference between Christianity and Judaism. Jewish people in scripture and history are just as sensitive to that contrast between inner religious disposition and outer religious practice as the Christians who came after them. And Christians, then and now, are as capable as any New Testament Judaean, or modern Jew, of practising the one while neglecting the other. Jesus’s command is for us, too.