The Second Sunday after Pentecost

If you want to know what the kingdom of God looks like, Matthew gives us a glimpse in the most ordinary place imaginable: a tax booth. Jesus walks up to someone everyone else has written off — a collaborator, a cheat, a man whose reputation is beyond repair — and instead of condemnation, Jesus offers an invitation. ‘Follow me.’

And before anyone can catch their breath, Jesus is at a dinner table surrounded by people polite society avoids.

The holy is happening in the wrong place with the wrong people,

and Jesus seems perfectly at home.

This is the scandal and the beauty of the gospel: God keeps showing up where we least expect it — in the lives we’ve dismissed, in the stories we’ve stopped believing in, even in the places we’ve decided are too broken to bother with. Matthew’s story asks us not just to admire Jesus’ mercy, but to imagine what it would mean if we lived that way too. It’s interesting how one’s perspective on another’s life and one’s judgment about them can be influenced by religion. That’s exactly what we see in the passage from Matthew’s Gospel.

They take great exception to Jesus’ inviting Matthew to follow him. Our standards nowadays for vetting those suitable for ministry are very different from the way Jesus operated.

What if Jesus had required psychological testing to select his disciples? I guess most of them wouldn’t have got very far. They lacked any theological training; had unruly temperaments; had very few social graces and even their sense of loyalty was questionable. They abandoned Jesus in his worst hour.

Now take, for example, Matthew, the tax collector or ‘sinner’ – he was a schemer – a double-dealer – he made out well out of the Roman occupation and put himself first. The Gospel today begins with the call of Matthew and the subsequent exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees on the appropriateness of eating with so-called sinners.

In Roman-controlled Palestine, tax collecting was considered traitorous because taxes supported the Roman occupation. It was also considered blasphemous because a portion of the money was used to build pagan temples. Too, the collector made a profit by charging whatever he wanted above what the Romans expected to collect from him.

Tax collectors like Matthew were despised and regarded as sinners. Yet Jesus called him; called all of them – broken examples of humanity – to become his disciples.

Why? Because Jesus looks beneath the surface and is not interested in stereo-types or qualifications or social acceptability. Jesus calls those whom the world sees as foolish or weak because he knows that from this foolishness and weakness will come an inner strength which will ultimately change the world.

Calling a guy like Matthew who was considered to be the worst of sinners and eating with the likes of them is an obvious example of God’s commitment to inclusivity and the possibility of recovery even from someone’s very sordid past.

How interesting that the second half of this narrative tells two huge healing events. What Jesus does here is to give both the woman who suffered with hemorrhages and the daughter of the synagogue leader their lives back and that is essentially what Jesus did for Matthew—to restore him to wholeness and to give him a second chance of living a life of meaning and grace.

My friends, we are called by Jesus for who we are and with all our warts and imperfections; our temperaments and misgivings because he sees our potential, often far more than we can. Jesus calls us to be his followers and to be faithful to him, but he wants us to be faithful to ourselves too – to be truly ourselves and discover the vocation he has for each one of us.

The Jesus who calls Matthew from his tax booth is the same Jesus who walks into a room where everyone has already declared the girl dead — and says, ‘She is not finished.’

This is the heartbeat of the gospel: no one is beyond calling, no story is beyond healing, no life is beyond hope. Jesus keeps pulling people back into community, back into dignity, back into life.

As we go into the week ahead, may we carry this truth with us: that mercy is stronger than judgment, that courage is stronger than fear, and that God is already at work in the places we’ve given up on. Go with eyes open to the Matthews at their tax booths, to the ones the world has pushed to the margins, and to the quiet rooms where someone is waiting for a hand to take theirs.

And may the God who calls, the Christ who heals,

and the Spirit who restores life walk with us every

step of the way.