Go and Learn
Sermon by the Rev. Hannah Wilder preached on June 7, 2026 at St. Paul’s, Year A, Proper 5.
There is a phrase in today’s gospel that appears so quickly we could easily miss it.
A leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus in the midst of a crowd. His daughter has died. He is desperate. He kneels before Jesus and begs him, “Come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Matthew tells us simply, “Jesus got up and followed him.”
Followed him.
We are used to Jesus being the one who says, “Follow me.” In fact, that is how today’s gospel begins. Jesus sees Matthew sitting at a tax booth and says, “Follow me.” Matthew gets up and follows. But then the story shifts. A grieving father asks Jesus to come, and suddenly Jesus becomes the one who follows.
That little detail caught my attention this week. Jesus invites people into relationship, discipleship, and transformation, but Jesus also follows people into the places where they hurt. He follows a grieving father into the house where his daughter lies dead. He follows suffering into its deepest places. And because Jesus follows suffering, another person finds him along the way.
A woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years reaches out and touches the fringe of his cloak. Twelve years of pain. Twelve years of isolation. Twelve years of being told she was unclean. Twelve years of living on the margins. Somehow, in the midst of all the movement and commotion, she reaches out. Jesus stops. He sees her. He speaks to her. “Take heart, daughter.” And her suffering is transformed.
It is remarkable that these two stories are woven together. A dead girl and a bleeding woman. Two unnamed women. Two people whose suffering would have placed them in complicated, even taboo, spaces within their society. And Jesus goes directly there. Not around it. Not away from it. Directly into it. Because mercy always moves toward suffering.
Which brings us back to the beginning of the gospel. The whole conversation started because Jesus called Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector. To us, that may sound like a boring government job. To first-century Jews, it was something very different. Tax collectors worked for the Roman Empire. They often became wealthy by charging their own people more than Rome required. They were viewed as collaborators, traitors, sinners.
So when Jesus calls Matthew and then sits down to eat with tax collectors and sinners, the religious leaders ask what seems like a reasonable question: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Why would a holy man associate with people like that?
Jesus responds with words that come directly from today’s reading in Hosea: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Then he adds something fascinating: “Go and learn what this means.”
Go and learn. Not sit and think. Not debate. Not write a paper. Go and learn. Experience it. Practice it. Live it. Discover what mercy feels like. Mercy is not primarily an idea. Mercy is a way of being in the world.
That brings us to Hosea. I find today’s reading extraordinary. The prophet is speaking to a people trying to make sense of suffering. Why have terrible things happened? Why has the nation fallen apart? Why does it feel like God has abandoned us? Those are ancient questions, but they are also very modern ones.
Hosea responds with a series of powerful metaphors. God’s presence is like the dawn, as sure as the sunrise. God comes like the rains that water the earth, like the winter rains and spring rains that bring abundance and life. These are beautiful images of a God who remains faithful, who restores, revives, and heals.
But then Hosea turns toward the people and uses a different set of images. “Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early.” The contrast is striking. God is like the sunrise. The people are like mist. God is like life-giving rain. The people are like dew that disappears when the heat comes.
In other words, God remains steadfast. People often do not.
When things get difficult, our compassion can evaporate. Our convictions can disappear. Our commitments can fade. It is easy to practice mercy when everything is comfortable. It is much harder when someone has hurt us, when someone disagrees with us, when someone makes us uncomfortable, or when someone’s suffering feels inconvenient. That is when mercy becomes difficult.
Perhaps that is exactly why Jesus chooses Matthew. Mercy is easy in theory. Matthew is practice. Mercy is easy when we are talking about people we already love. Mercy becomes real when we are talking about people we would rather avoid.
Jesus says, “Go and learn.” Go learn mercy. Learn it by practicing it. Learn it by receiving it. Learn it by discovering that God has shown it to you.
Because the truth is that every one of us has needed mercy. Every one of us has been the hemorrhaging woman. Every one of us has been the grieving father. Every one of us has been Matthew sitting at the tax booth. Every one of us has had moments when we needed someone to follow us into our suffering rather than avoid it.
And every one of us has experienced times when God has done exactly that. God has followed us into grief, fear, uncertainty, illness, loneliness, and shame. God has not remained at a safe distance. God has entered the story. God has followed us there.
When we follow Jesus, we begin doing what Jesus does. We start following people into their suffering. We stop asking whether someone deserves compassion. We stop asking whether they are righteous enough. We stop asking whether they belong. Instead, we become people who move toward pain with mercy, people who stay present when things get hard, people who do not evaporate like the morning mist, but remain like the rain and the sunrise—steady signs of God’s presence in the world.
The world has plenty of sacrifice. It has plenty of judgment. It has plenty of gatekeepers. What it desperately needs is mercy: people who show up, people who stay, people who listen, people who accompany, people who restore, people who remind one another that healing is possible.
The promise running through all of today’s readings is that restoration is always God’s desire. Not destruction, but restoration. Not exclusion, but restoration. Not abandonment, but restoration. The God who raised Jesus from the dead, as Paul tells us in Romans, is still bringing life out of places that seem lifeless, still calling into existence things that do not yet exist, still reviving what feels beyond hope, still restoring what seems lost.
Jesus invites us to participate in that work. He invites us to become agents of mercy, agents of restoration, agents of God’s steadfast love in the world.
So perhaps the question for us this week is simple: Where is Jesus asking us to follow? Whose suffering are we being invited to enter? Where are we tempted to disappear like the morning dew? And how might God be calling us instead to become like the rain that nourishes the earth?
For Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
May we go and learn. May we go and practice. And may we become people through whom God’s restoring mercy flows into the world.