Some resources I've found especially helpful this week: John J. Pilch, Historical Cultural Context, Commentary and Spiritual Perspectives, Ordinary 10, 2005. Commentary, historical background, poems and readings. Center for Liturgy, St Louis University.
"In Jesus' time, a toll collector was a native who contracted with Rome to collect the allotted tolls but paid them personally to Rome in advance and hoped to collect enough to make a profit. Historical evidence indicates that the gamble rarely paid off. The rich and the educated, a minuscule minority in Jesus' day, routinely criticized toll collectors. The poor rarely had anything on which duties could be levied and would likely sympathize with rather than criticize those who, like themselves, were trying to eke out a subsistence. Jesus draws an analogy between his association with toll collectors and sinners and the association of healers with sick people. Knowledge of the history of medicine helps a modern reader appreciate the analogy. In antiquity, healers preferred not to treat sick people because if the sick person died the healer might be put to death as well." Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Proper 5, by Paul Nuechterlein & Friends. "Forgiveness, then, is not only an ethical or moral principle among many, but the foundation of peaceful human interaction for a species lacking instinctual brakes to endless violent reaction. It is the virtually infinite (seventy or seventy-seven times seven in Mt 18:22) antidote to ubiquitously mimetic reciprocation. It is not a moral virtue, because it doesn't moralize at all. It is beyond good and evil as those terms designate various prescriptions and proscriptions, rules and codes of behavior, by which people judge themselves and especially one another. But the beyond it points to is not necessarily located in some mysterious hereafter. Jesus declared to his accuser Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world, by which he meant the rid of principalities and powers, armies and revolutions, orders and overthrowers bringing still more violent orders in their wake, in sum, the world organized by mimetic violence, scapegoating, and sacrificial expulsions that we read about everyday in the popular and scholarly press. He told people the Kingdom was among them and within them, by which he is understood (see Hamerton-Kelly 1994, 106-8) as meaning a world of human relations no longer structured by resentments and reprisals that his words and deeds effectively deconstruct." Preaching Peace commentary, Proper 5, Jeff Krantz & Michael Hardin. "Not only did the tax collector collect money for the murderous oppressor, Rome, but he collected so much that he impoverished most of the populace. Time and again people were forced to either sell their land to a few wealthy landholders or sell themselves into slavery to pay these taxes. Of course, some of us may think that’s happening when we stop at the gas pumps, but who has mortgaged her house to fill the tank yet? (Please email us if you have!) But this is not yet the limit of Matthew’s rapacious behavior. Not only does he collect money used to pay the soldiers who murder his own people, not only does he impoverish them and send them into slavery, but he also enriches himself along the way, collecting more than Rome demands and keeping the difference for himself. Okay. Now, this is the sinner with whom Jesus goes to dine. This is the sinner to whom mercy is shown. This utterly ridiculous demonstration of mercy is that to which Jesus’ critics object, and to which our congregations will too. This is the meaning of "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."" Dylan's Lectionary Blog, Proper 5. Biblical Scholar Sarah Dylan Breuer looks at readings for the coming Sunday in the lectionary of the Episcopal Church. "What right does any one of us have to demand of anyone else a sacrifice, if we believe what we say about Jesus' sacrifice: that it was full, perfect, sufficient? What right do we have to talk about who's deserving if we really understand the unconditional and unreserved quality of Jesus' embrace of us? Jesus' sacrifice was once and for all, but his mercy is such that it will take all of us who claim to follow him a lifetime of wild, uncalculating extension of unilateral mercy to even hint at the fullness of Jesus' love. Mercy. As followers of Jesus, that's not a cry of despair, but a testimony of hope: we have seen the limitless mercy that is the most fundamental power in the universe, and we are empowered to extend it in the same wildly extravagant way that Jesus did in calling Matthew, toll collector and outcast, to join him as disciple, evangelist, and saint."