NOTES for Mat 9:9-13
The Lord's words, ‘I came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance’, should not be understood to mean that Christ did not come to everyone, or that there is some unfortunate, vanishing species of righteous people to whom he did not come. No: these very words tell us, first and foremost, that the Lord came to every human being, for ‘there is no one who lives and does not sin’. Yet the Lord clearly contrasts certain people who may be called righteous with sinners such as Matthew the tax collector. How can we reconcile these apparently contradictory thoughts? ‘I came to call not the righteous…’ Does that mean righteousness somehow separates us from him, somehow deprives us of communion with him? But the meaning of the phrase is quite different. As long as you regard yourself as righteous, Christ has not come to you: that is what it means. Only through repentance can you come to him. You may be entirely righteous before other people and the Law, but what separates you from God is not this, but your awareness of it. There is something quite distinctive here. Be righteous, but do not see your own righteousness. This is paradoxical and impossible, yet it is what distinguishes the person who truly believes: such a person sees what is invisible and does not see what is visible. One may call this madness, as secular people do, but here it is a holy madness. And there is something else. The Law is, by and large, possible to fulfil, and righteousness before other people, especially in our fallen world, is hardly a miracle. But Christ brings something greater than the Law, something that can no longer be fulfilled without grace, for no one can fulfil Christ's commandments except the saints, whom God chooses so that grace may be manifested in them. And they understand that they themselves are sinful, but that the Lord simply chose to raise them up. This understanding—that righteousness is not a human attribute, but something born of the union between a human being and God—is what the phrase actually contains. To make it more understandable, and thereby narrow its range of meaning, let us put it this way: the Lord came to tell the righteous that without him they are sinners, and to tell sinners that with him they are righteous.