As an escape from all the dreadful news these days, this spring I have been revisiting some of my favorite 19th century novels, among them Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It is one of the funniest books ever written, and it also has some profoundly true things to say about American life and culture.
If you have read the novel, you will remember the scene in chapter 31 when Huckleberry begins to feel guilty about helping the runaway slave Jim escape into freedom. Everything in his Missouri upbringing has told Huck that slaves are property, and even though he loves Jim his conscience tells him that in freeing his friend he is robbing Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, of valuable property.
Huck decides to write a letter to Miss Watson telling her where she can locate Jim. But then his feelings for Jim—gratitude for the way Jim has served as his substitute father—begin to gnaw at him. Here is how Mark Twain describes the climactic moment, where Huck makes a decisive choice between law and love:
It was a close place. I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
The late Henry Nash Smith, a great Mark Twain scholar, once called this incident an example of “A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience”. He argued that Huck’s dilemma demonstrates the fatal flaw in a society that can reconcile itself to the sin of slaveholding. The conscience—the internalized voice of society—tells Huck that freeing a slave is wrong. The heart—the center of reliable human emotions—tells him that his love for Jim transcends his obligation to Jim’s owner. In dramatizing this conflict between deformed conscience and sound heart, Mark Twain is voicing a truth that we also find in our Gospel this morning.
Today’s Gospel (Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26) gives us not one but three stories to think about, a kind of one-stop-shopping of Bible lore. In the first, Jesus calls the tax collector Matthew to follow him and then accepts his hospitality. In the second and third (called by scholars a “Markan sandwich because of the way it surrounds one story with the two halves of another one) Jesus restores a young girl to life while healing a woman suffering from a twelve-year hemorrhage. In its own way, each of these stories tells us how the heart can be right when society is wrong.
In Mark Twain’s America, slavery was the law and emancipation a crime. In Jesus’s day, consorting with collaborators, touching dead bodies, and being in the proximity of menstrual blood made one unclean. In all these cases, the rules turn out to be wrong and breaking them is the only way to do the right thing.
Let’s take each Gospel story in turn.
To understand the first story—the call of Matthew and Jesus’s accepting his hospitality—it helps to know that in Jesus’s day tax collectors were Jews who were serving the Roman Empire by extorting huge sums from the local populace. They were more like gangsters running a protection racket or, perhaps a better analogy, like concentration camp collaborators. They were not amiable IRS agents. The Roman Empire impoverished Palestinian Jews through taxes and the confiscation of food. Those who collected the taxes were understandably reviled.
Jesus’s willingness to dine with a man the Jews saw as a traitorous collaborator was not an endorsement of their behavior. But it was intended to be a signal that no one—not thieves, lepers, prostitutes, or even tax collectors—was beyond the reach of God’s mercy and forgiveness. After all, says Jesus, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
The second story tells of a leader of the synagogue whose daughter has just died. He asks that Jesus “come and lay your hand on her, and she will live”. Jesus makes his way to the leader’s house, takes the girl by the hand, and she gets up alive. The crowd responds to Jesus’s actions in these first two stories by criticizing him (“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”) and then by laughing when he says “The girl is not dead but sleeping.”
As with tax collectors, so with dead bodies there is a purity problem. Jewish law only allowed those who regularly dealt with death to touch or handle corpses. By taking the hand of a dead girl, Jesus puts himself at risk of ritual uncleanliness. This may not seem like a big deal to us, but the Bible comes from a pre-modern culture that did not understand hygiene as you and I do. Dead bodies were fraught with danger.
And that is why the third story—that of the woman with the hemorrhage—has a similar focus on uncleanliness. This woman is also considered unclean, and that is perhaps why she approaches Jesus from behind and only touches the fringe of his garment: she does not want to contaminate Jesus even by reputation. It is a sign of Jesus’s inclusive love that he turns to her and says, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”
The legalistic bystanders who criticize Jesus’s actions are so intent on making a moral checklist that they have not even seen the people whom Jesus touches. These people—the tax collector, the synagogue leader, the bleeding woman—are desperate. They are suffering and they have nowhere else to turn. The Jesus they look to does not disappoint them. He realizes that mercy is more important than purity. He is a living embodiment of God’s faithfulness.
And that brings us back to Huckleberry Finn and his dilemma. Huck has a sound heart and a deformed conscience. He knows the right thing in his heart even though the world tells him that it is wrong. Like the three characters in today’s Gospel, Jim is desperate, and he can only turn to the boy Huck for help. And Huck himself is desperate, because he is caught between what his sound heart knows and his deformed conscience nags at him.
You and I are often in a similar predicament. Like Huck, we may be connected to someone who is desperate. Or, more to the point, we may be at our wits’ end, like Matthew or the woman or the leader ourselves. There are times in life when everything seems to go wrong and we feel that we have nowhere to turn. These moments come for everyone regardless of outward circumstances, and today’s Gospel stories are here to assure us that we are not, finally, alone, that there is one whose faithfulness embraces us even when we feel ourselves beyond it.
Sometimes it is hard to believe that the promise is for you, that you yourself are included in the group with whom Jesus will dine. We can think ourselves beyond the pale of God’s mercy. The point of this Gospel is not only that Jesus touches the three people in the story. The point is that God also reaches out to touch you, no matter who you are or what you think you have done. When Jesus says “I desire mercy not sacrifice” he is not kidding. This whole Christian enterprise is about acceptance, forgiveness, and love.
It is in moments like these that we need to hold on to God’s mercy and exert a bit of our own. Huck wrote his letter, thought better of it, and tore it up, thinking that his doing so was sending him to Hell. It turns out, of course, that this act of love, mercy, and justice sent him in precisely the other direction. What letter—about others or yourself--do you need to tear up and let go? What bad idea about your life do you need to say goodbye to? Earth will be heaven when we all learn to live as if God’s mercy towards us is real and act as though we believe it. The woman who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment reached out in faith and was saved. The same healing is on offer for each of us here, now, and today. Amen.
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