Matthew 9:11-13 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

And when the Pharisees saw it— See on Matthew 9:9. Instead of whole, we may read well. The Pharisees did not indeed direct their discourse to Jesus; but having spoken so loud as to let all the guests hear their censure, he could not avoid meekly puttingthem in mind, that it is sick people only who have need of a physician; to insinuate, that since the Pharisees thought themselves righteous persons, they had no need of his company: whereas the publicans, whom they called sinners, being sick, had the best title to it; and that as nobody ever blamed a physician for going into the company of the patients whose cure he had undertaken, so they could not blame him for conversing with sinners, since he did it to reclaim and convert them. "Murmur not, therefore, ye Scribes and Pharisees, that I eat and converse with publicans and sinners. My business is with such; and the end of my coming into the world was the salvation of these. I converse not with them to lull them in fatal security amid their vices, or to contract any taint from the contagion of their impurities; but as the physician visits the chamber of the sick, and is occupied amid the couches of the languishing and the distressed; so do I, as the great physician of the soul, seek out the sick and diseased in mind, and offer health and salvation to the children of men,—suffering under a malady the most mortal and inveterate, the malady of sin: and what physician, in cases of distress and danger, stands upon the niceties of form, or the exactness of punctilio? Why then do you marvel and murmur, that I, in the like extremities, act in the like manner?" It is to be noted, that this is a proverbial expression, they that be whole, &c. which has been known to some heathen philosophers, who have made use of it in return to similar reproaches: Supervacuus inter sanos medicus, says Quintilian. When Antisthenes was asked why he conversed with wicked men, his answer was, Και οι ιατροι μετα των νοσουντων εισι, "Physicians are conversant with the sick." Our Saviour moreover desired his adversaries seriously to consider the meaning of what God had declared by the prophet Hosea, Hosea 5:6. I will have mercy rather than sacrifice. "Where the one or the other must be omitted, let mercy, by all means,—let the work of compassion, beneficence, and love, be preferred to sacrifice; to instituted forms, and merelyexternal ordinances; which, though necessary in themselves, and highly useful as ordained of God, and as means to an important end, must yet never destroy that end, but give place and preference to it; for of all things mercy, acts of genuine benevolence, are most pleasing to the God of love; and of all acts, as being the most important and beneficent, the salvation of lost sinners from destruction and death: and this the great work for which I came into the world; this is the great end I have to accomplish: I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance; the repentance of righteous persons is not the object of my attention (for there are none such by nature), but the conversion of sinners." I come not to cure those who are whole, but those that are sick. Thus our Lord clearly proved a capital doctrine of true religion, which the teachers of those times, notwithstanding they boasted of their knowledge, seem to have lost the very idea of; namely, that ceremonial institutions should always give place to works of charity. See the note on ch. Matthew 12:7. Wetstein and Macknight.