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Reflection of the Week – 2 June 2026

The theme this year’s Reconciliation Week has been ‘All In’. Jesus would have understood the challenge.

Posted Jun 2, 2026 in Faith

A reflection for Pentecost 2

Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26 | Romans 4:13–25

Tomorrow, 3 June, marks Mabo Day, the anniversary of the 1992 High Court decision that overturned terra nullius and recognised what First Nations peoples had always known: that this land belonged to someone before colonisation.

The theme this year’s Reconciliation Week has been All In. Jesus would have understood the challenge.

When Jesus calls Matthew from the tax collector’s booth, he isn’t simply recruiting an accountant. He is crossing a line – social, moral and religious. Tax collectors were seen as collaborators, traitors to their own people, ritually unclean by association. To eat with them was to be contaminated by them, or so the Pharisees believed. But there is Jesus at the table, sharing food with tax collectors and sinners. He is all in.

And then, a few verses later, we read of two healings that belong together: a synagogue leader’s daughter – someone with status, someone who matters to the powerful – and a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years, unnamed, untouchable, cut off from worship and community. Jesus stops for both of them. He is not being selective based on social hierarchy. Instead, he reaches toward the margins and the centre in the same afternoon.

Paul writes to the Romans of a righteousness brought by faith – not earned, not brought about by ritual or legalism, but given to those who trust in the God who brings life from death and calls into existence what does not yet exist. Abraham’s hope, Paul says, was against all human reckoning. It was, precisely, an act of all in.

Reconciliation – with First Nations peoples, with those our systems have excluded, with the stranger at the gate – asks the same of us. Not good intentions from the sidelines, or occasional acts of charity, but our presence at the table, touch where touch has been withheld, and a willingness to let such encounters change us.

May we be all in.

– Clive Conway