Somewhere on the road out of Capharnaum there stood a small table with a ledger on it, and behind the table a man whose working life consisted of turning people into figures. Jesus walks along that road. He does not walk past that table.
And when Jesus passed on from there, he saw, sitting at the tax office, a man named Matthew. And he said to him, "Follow me." And rising up, he followed him. And it happened that, as he was sitting down to eat in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners arrived, and they sat down to eat with Jesus and his disciples. And the Pharisees, seeing this, said to his disciples, "Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" But Jesus, hearing this, said: "It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who have maladies. So go out and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the just, but sinners." (Mt 9:9-13)
Matthew is the only evangelist who tells this story about himself, and he tells it in three lines. Nothing about what he felt, nothing about the years before, not a word about what the decision cost him. Mark and Luke give the man a second name, Levi; Matthew writes down his own and then says no more. The silence is part of the testimony.
Everything in the scene is moving except him. Jesus is passing through, the road is full of people going somewhere, the carts and the fishermen and the farmers are all in transit. Matthew is sitting. His table stands at the roadside precisely so that the traffic has to stop in front of him: a position of power, and also a position of being stuck, fixed to the spot where the money comes in while a whole world goes by without him.
And notice what Jesus sees. Matthew's entire profession is the art of not seeing persons. A customs officer looks at a load, estimates a value, writes down a sum; the man carrying it is incidental to the transaction. Matthew has spent years reducing his neighbours to amounts. The Gospel says that Jesus saw a man, and that the man had a name.
That reversal has a history behind it. The Child of Bethlehem came into the world in the middle of a tax operation. An emperor wanted his subjects counted, a village filled with people travelling back to be registered, and the birth of God among us was entered, if it was entered at all, as one more line on a list. Christ began his earthly life as a number in somebody's register. It is no small thing that he now stops at a desk where people are turned into numbers, and calls the man behind it by name.
What follows is almost brutal in its brevity. Rising up, he followed him. The verb for rising is the one the New Testament uses for standing up out of sleep and out of death; at a customs table, on an ordinary working morning, something very like a resurrection takes place. And the scene moves at once to a table of another kind. Matthew's first act as a disciple is not a sermon but an invitation to dinner: he brings his colleagues, the whole disreputable guild of collectors, and the people the town had written off, and seats them next to Jesus. The counter where his neighbours used to pay has become a table where they eat. He has no doctrine yet. He has a house, and he opens it.
The objection, when it comes, is not addressed to Jesus. The Pharisees ask the disciples why their Teacher eats with tax collectors and sinners, the oldest technique there is: unsettling a man by working on the people around him. Jesus hears and answers in his own name, and his friends are spared an argument they could not have won. His reply is a diagnosis, and its sting lies in who it leaves out: those who are healthy have no need of a physician. He is not congratulating the healthy. He is noting, quietly, that people who have decided they are well never send for the doctor. The tragedy of the men at that door is not that they are shut out of the meal, but that they are certain they do not need it.
Then Jesus does something startling with men who have spent their lives studying the Scriptures. He gives them homework. Go out and learn what this means. The scholars are sent back to school, to a single line from the prophet Hosea, while the tax collector who has studied nothing has already stood up and followed. Knowing a text is not at all the same as having learned it.
And the line he sends them to learn is exactly the one that could never have been learned at Matthew's old table. I desire mercy, and not sacrifice. A sacrifice can be measured: so many animals, so much grain, an amount entered in a column and checked afterwards. Mercy cannot be counted. It has no unit and no receipt, and no one has ever proved they gave enough of it. Sitting in the house of a professional counter, Jesus says that what God wants is the one thing that will not go into a ledger.
Paul, writing to Ephesus, gives this feast its second half. He asks his readers to walk in a way worthy of the calling they have received, with humility and patience, bearing with one another in love, and then says that grace has been given to each of us according to the measure of the gift of Christ. One measure, and it is Christ's, not ours. Out of that single measure come wildly different people: some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, all of it for the building up of one body. Today the Church honours a man listed under two of those words at once, apostle and evangelist, who arrived with a competence nobody would have put on an application form. God did not delete Matthew's training. He converted it. The hand taught to record what people owed became the hand that wrote down what God gives.
This is the shape of the mission the Missionaries of Bethlehem have tried to keep. God comes small, poor and hidden, and he turns up in the places careful people have already crossed off their lists. He is not recruiting the qualified. He looks for a moment at a man who is stuck, says two words, and then sits down to eat in his house. Most of our own mission will look like that: not a programme, but a chair pulled up to a table where we were not expected to be welcome.
So there is something concrete to do with this Monday. Think of one person we have quietly reduced to a function: the number at the counter, the name on the invoice, the file, the neighbour we describe by their problem. Find a way today to use their name, and to give them three minutes we are not counting. It costs nothing, and it will never appear in any column.
The Gospel today ends on the word sinners, and it ends there on purpose. That is the address Jesus gave out for himself, and it is the one place where we can be sure of being at home when he passes.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Father, your Son was born while an empire was counting its subjects, and he has never once looked at us as a figure in a register. Come to the table where we sit stuck, call us by the name you gave us, and give us the courage to stand up with nothing prepared. Teach us the mercy you prefer to every sacrifice, the kind that cannot be measured, proved or filed away. Make our houses places where the people others have written off find a chair, and make us glad to be counted among those you came to call. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Where are we sitting stuck, and what would it cost us to stand up today if he passed by?
- Whom have we reduced to a number, a file or a problem, and when did we last use their name?
- What in our own training and history are we sure God cannot use, and what if he means to convert it rather than delete it?
