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In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

            “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Go and learn what this means. Actually, you don’t have to go anywhere. Just open your Bible. You can even stay in the Gospel according to Matthew. Jesus cites this verse from Hosea twice. I don’t know if it’s His favorite verse, but He uses it at least twice. Here in Chapter 9, the Pharisees are complaining to His disciples that He is eating with sinners and tax collectors. Jesus says that those who are healthy and strong don’t need a physician, but those who are sick do. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” I have not to come to call the righteous, but sinners.

            In Chapter 12, the Pharisees are complaining to Jesus about His disciples, who are eating heads of grain off the wheat on the Sabbath day. Jesus asks if they’ve never read what David did when he was escaping from Saul, how he went into the temple and ate the bread which it was not lawful for him to eat. It was only for the priests. He said, if you knew what this meant, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the guiltless. Something greater than the temple is here. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Apparently they didn’t go learn it in the space of those three chapters.

            What are they supposed to learn? What do they have wrong? They have elevated commands of God, or their own interpretations of them, to a principle by which they judge whether people are doing the right things, or whether they have salvation. They think the principle of not eating with tax collectors and sinners is the main thing. Or that the command about who should eat bread in the temple is the main thing. Or that the rules about what and how much could be done on the Sabbath is the main thing. But they are missing the entire point.

            Of course, it’s not just Pharisees, or Sadducees, or chief priests, or scribes who need to learn what this means. We need to learn what this means. A lot of people need to learn what this means! If we don’t do it, we have a very strong tendency to do it. People will do this when they are attacking Christian faith or the Bible, but they will also do it when they are trying to defend the Bible or Christianity. So someone will say, you Christians are against homosexual relationships because of Leviticus 18, but in Leviticus 19, God says not to wear clothing with two kinds of thread, or sow your field with two kinds of seed. In Leviticus 11, it says you can’t eat certain kinds of animals. See, it’s all ridiculous. And then someone on the other side will say something like, Well, in Romans 1, Paul says that God gave the idolaters over to their own sinful desires, and women and men exchanged natural relations with the opposite sex for unnatural ones with the same sex. But both of those citations, in themselves, miss the point, because neither of them asks why, and they do not see the forest for the trees. Where and why is the forest? Jesus says that in the beginning, God made them male and female, and for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they will be one flesh. But this is about more than what Jesus says. And this is about far more than one or two or four passages. This is about Jesus Himself. In other words, why do we—why must we—say that marriage belongs to one man and one woman? Because the relationship between a husband and a wife is a picture of—is fulfilled in—Jesus, the Bridegroom, and His Bride, the Church. Anything else distorts, or destroys, that picture. It’s not about the abstract principle; it’s about the Man, Jesus, and what He does.

            We love making Jesus into abstract principles! It’s all about love. Just love each other. That’s all. But we do not naturally know what love is. This is how we know what love is, John says: that God sent His Son into the world so that we might live through Him (1 John 4:9). Otherwise, we’re just making stuff up and calling it love. Or we might take this passage from Hosea, which Jesus cites twice, and make it an abstract principle: God doesn’t want me to sacrifice anything; He just wants mercy. And then we make up what we think mercy is, and do that. It’s the same thing as making the bread in the temple the principle, or the Sabbath. But something greater than the temple is here, and He is Lord of the Sabbath. Or we might make welcoming sinners and tax collectors into our principle. But that, too, misses the point. It is not about welcoming sinners and tax collectors and everyone’s happy together. It is about Jesus calling sinners and tax collectors and saying, “Follow Me.” Christianity is not about learning some commandments or principles and putting them into practice. The Bible is not a list of instructions, or good ideas; it is not “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” This book is the story of God in Jesus Christ, and if you miss that, you don’t actually have the Scriptures. If Jesus is not the Son of God in flesh who was crucified and rose from the dead, and who is alive among us, speaking His Word, then the Bible is not important. Jesus Himself in Luke 24 says to His disciples that all of Moses, all of the prophets, all the psalms—everything is about Him and fulfilled in Him. The testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy (Revelation 19:10). In John 5, Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. But they are the ones testifying concerning Me. And you do not want to come to Me so that you might have life” (5:39-40). In other words, only if Jesus is the life can the words of the Scriptures be life-giving.

            To be clear, Jesus who was crucified is alive and He is present among us speaking His Words. Because they are His prophets and His apostles, they speak the living words of God, and His Words are living and active because He is living and active. Jesus is the Word of God spoken into the world, just as He is the love of God, the peace of God, the mercy of God. If you don’t have Jesus, you don’t actually have the Scriptures, no matter how high a view you have of them.

            So go and learn what this means: I do not desire sacrifice, but mercy. But God does desire sacrifice. There are sacrifices everywhere in the Scriptures. So does one word of God contradict another word of God? The same God who speaks through the prophet Hosea commanded the sacrifices. This is actually a common way to speak in Hebrew. Jesus does it. He says, “Do not think I came to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). But the angels who proclaim His birth say that peace has now come upon the earth. He is the prince of peace. So He is saying something like, “I did not come only to bring peace, but also a sword.” And, likewise, “I desire not only sacrifice, but also and even more, mercy.” And not abstractly, but in Him: it is in Him that people find the peace of God, and there is division when some do not have that peace. The sacrifices are fulfilled, along with the temple, the priesthood, the laws, the prophets, and the Sabbath, in Him, the single sacrifice for all sins forever, who brings the mercy of God to sinners. The Good Physician calls the weak and sick so that He may heal them. He calls sinners to forgive them. He calls not only the sinners, but the righteous—it’s just that the righteous have no need of Him.

            There are no abstract Christian principles; there is only the concrete person of Christ, who is Mercy, who is Love, who is the Truth, who is the one in whom all the Scriptures find their fulfillment. Come and follow Me, He says, to Matthew, to all sinners, and tax collectors, and adulterers, and greedy, and covetous, and idolaters, and I will make you whole and healthy and righteous in Myself. Eat and drink of My body and My blood, and I will cleanse you of all your sin and unrighteousness. That call is universal, inclusive, and open to all; but the call is exclusive and specific because it is only in Him—for your good, and for the good of the whole world, who need to know where life and salvation and peace are found. He calls you: you, come and follow Me. And you will learn what all of this means.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

– Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 6/5/26