"Welcome?"
- Dr. Todd R. Wright
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
The jokesters are completely wrong – Matthew is not recounting a trick. But they are also a little bit right – the gospel writer does have something up his sleeve.
Isaiah 56:1-8
August 16, 2026
Dr. Todd R. Wright
The wounds were still fresh.
Wounds? What wounds? Whose wounds?
Isaiah speaks to a collection of bruised and broken people – three groups in particular:
Those returning from long years of exile in Babylon found their Holy City destroyed:
Jerusalem’s walls had been reduced to rubble;
the Temple plundered and demolished;
the population a mere shadow, a ghost, of its former vibrant multitude;
and the spirit of those who remained was defeated and it infected all who gathered there.
In short, the place, and its people were deeply wounded.
When they had been led into exile, generations ago, their captors took the best and the brightest and pressed them into service to the Empire.
You remember the story of Daniel, right?
It says that he and his friends were placed in the care of Ashpenaz, the palace master.
For three years they were taught the literature and language of their captors.
At the end of their indoctrination, they were stationed in the king’s court.
It was just as Isaiah had prophesied to King Hezekiah earlier:
“Days are coming when all that is in your house … shall be carried off to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. Some of your own sons … shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”
The Hebrew word used for eunuchs is ‘saris’, “which historically denoted a physically emasculated man serving in sensitive royal duties like guarding harems.”
“Over time in the ancient Near East, saris also broadened into a general administrative title meaning ‘government official’ or ‘court minister,’ regardless of actual physical castration.
So we don’t know whether some of the returnees had been mutilated or whether that became a taunt, a bitter expression of their reputation as collaborators – people who had served the enemy and gotten good food and cushy accommodations while others starved.
Either way, they were deeply wounded.
Long ago, when Moses was leading the escape from Egypt, they came to the border of Moab and Ammon, to cousins and kin. They asked for free passage through. They hoped for a little hospitality, as was standard in nomadic societies. But they did not welcome them. That stung!
So much so, that in Deuteronomy it says, “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted … because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt …”
Generations have passed, but they are still deeply wounded.
Pain can be like that. It can linger. But it can also be a persistent messenger, an alarm clock that wakes us to something we would have slept through, even a gift!
In an interview, Dr. Paul Brand, who once operated a ground-breaking leper hospital – the only one in the continental United States, mused:
“We doctors experience a rude awakening after medical school. After studying the marvel of the human body, suddenly I was thrust into a position much like the complaint desk of a department store. Not once did a person visit my office to express appreciation for a beautifully functioning kidney or ling. They came to complain that something was not working properly. Only later did I realize that the very things they complained about were their greatest allies. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, [pain] forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning.
I thank God for pain!” Brand declared with utter sincerity.
Hold onto that thought – can our pain, our wounds, be transformed into a blessing from God?
Our passage follows tight on the heels of good news to the returning exiles! The prophet gives them a message from God. It comes out in a gush, in phrases that people have repeated ever since:
“Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!”
“For as the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return until they have watered the earth, … so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty!”
And “For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills shall bust into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands!”
But then, in our passage, God goes from preaching to meddling!
Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase makes this plain. Listen:
God says, “My setting-things-right is about to go into action. How blessed are you who enter into these things, you men and women who embrace them. Who keep Sabbath and don’t defile it, who watch your step and don’t do anything evil.”
Fine, so far, but then this:
“Make sure no outsider who now follows God ever has occasion to say, ‘God put me in second class. I don’t really belong.’
Make sure no physically mutilated person is ever made to think, ‘I’m damaged goods. I don’t really belong.’”
As if keeping the Sabbath and doing good is to welcome those who had been excluded!
As if eunuchs and foreigners who keep the faith are welcome too!
As if exile has changed the rules and knocked down the old walls!
As if the return to Jerusalem was a fresh start!
God has heard every cry of those in pain:
Those who followed their kings into unfaithfulness and destruction.
Those who saw their lives turned upside down.
Those forced to leave behind everything they held dear.
Those who had to make their way in a foreign land … and those left behind.
Those who saw their children swallowed up by their oppressors … and marked forever.
Those who felt betrayed by their own family.
Those who wondered if God had forgotten them.
Those who tried to make a fresh start, in what felt like a godforsaken land.
All those whose wounds were still fresh … and longed for healing.
God has heard every cry … and to address the wounds, God says, “Extend a welcome.”
Not just to those like you, who share the same story, same grievances, same pain, as you.
But those you have kept at arms-length,
those who you may still bear grudges against,
those who need the community you can provide!
If this were the end of a novel, we’d be left wondering whether a welcome was ever offered.
But it is part of the ongoing story of God’s people – so we know that we have a mixed history.
Sometimes we have been so grateful to God that we’ve been generous in our welcome.
Sometimes we refused, nursing one wound or another, all while wounding others.
God has laid out the faithful path. We get to choose. Amen
Photo by George Dagerotip
See Isaiah 39:6-7
See Deuteronomy 23:3-4
From Soul Survivor, by Philip Yancey, pages 71-72
See Isaiah 55: 1, 10-11, and 12
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