sick and needed healing, how can He be the healer of the rest? If
being a sinful man, as we all are, He made such a claim, what becomes
of the reverence which is paid to Him as a great religious Teacher,
and where has His 'sweet reasonableness' vanished?

Jesus passes from explanation of His personal relation to the
publicans to adduce the broad principle which should shape the
Pharisees' relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had said
long ago that God delighted more in 'mercy' than in 'sacrifice.'
Kindly helpfulness to men is better worship than exact performance
of any ritual. Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him,
and imitation is the perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaks
as all the prophets had spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke the
mechanical formalism which in every age stiffens religion into
ceremonies and neglects love towards God, expressed in mercy to men.
He lays bare the secret of His own life, and He thereby lays on His
followers the obligation of making it the moving impulse of theirs.

The great general truth is followed, as it has been preceded, by a
plain statement of Jesus' own conception of His mission in the
world. 'I came,' says He, hinting at the fact that He was before He
was born, and that His Incarnation was His voluntary act. True, He
was sent, and we speak of His mission, but also He 'came,' and we
speak of His advent. 'To repentance' is omitted by the best editors
as being brought over from Luke, where it is genuine. But it is a
correct gloss on the simple word 'call,' though 'repentance' is but
a small part of that to which He summons. He calls us to repent; He
calls us to Himself; He calls us to self-surrender; He calls us to
Eternal Life; He calls us to a better feast than Matthew had spread.
But we must recognise that we are sinners, or we shall never realise