Feast of St. Matthew: Where Mercy Meets What Seems Irredeemable
TranscriptioN
Good morning again, my friends. It is good to see you this morning. It's great to be with you on this feast day of St. Matthew. I'm so glad that you're here.
If you're new or visiting, sometimes we have a—well, we have a season called Ordinary Time, and we wear green, and it's a long time. And so whenever a feast day shows up on a Sunday, I love to take it and see what the Lord might give us out of whatever saint it is that day that we celebrate.
I was really grateful for the life and example of St. Matthew this morning as we celebrate what Jesus did in calling this person to follow him. He is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, of those who followed Jesus for his three years of ministry before Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. And Matthew is this really polarizing character in the story, because he introduces real complexity to what is otherwise a pretty tidy religious system in Jesus's day. Jesus confronts the Pharisees with a parable as they're talking about, you know, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” He gives them some parables.
One is about not putting new wine in an old wineskin, right? The old wineskin was useful as it helped the wine develop, but now that the wine's been fermented, if you put new wine into that old wineskin that's already been expanded, it'll break. It's not useful anymore. He tells them a parable about crying at a wedding, and there's—you know—tears are at a funeral.
Tears of sorrow are very appropriate in a funeral as you grieve what's lost. It points to the things you deeply care about, but it would be sort of in misalignment with what's happening in the joy of a wedding to have tears of sorrow, perhaps. But for the sake of argument, in Jesus's case, it would be. His point in these parables is not that you can find an exception, but that something new is happening.
He's telling them a story alongside what's happening. Something new is taking place, and Matthew is a stress test on the theological system of those that he's talking to. Can their theology contain Matthew? What do you do with this sinner, this tax collector? And so Jesus is—Matthew becomes—a stress test.
Can this hold Matthew? And all of us expand our theology over time. It's not a bad thing at all. I was remembering back a long time ago, at least over a decade and a half ago. I was in college, and my Greek professor—somebody in the class had asked about a famous pastor and their version, interpretation of a text—and my professor used to do these funny power stances where he put his leg up on the desk like this, you know, and lean forward and he goes, “Ah, yes, that pastor. If he's ever right, it's always for the wrong reasons.” I remember that moment, and I thought, oh wow, because that pastor that he's talking about had a lot of influence on me when I was a young Christian as a teenager. And I realized that as time went on, he was absolutely right. The things that I had learned didn't stand up to the complexities that I was running into as I learned more about the world around me, as I learned more about God's Word, and about the nature of humanity.
I would say that in those years, I went through a bit of a deconstruction process myself to ask, you know, what is the system I hold? Can it hold the weight of human suffering that I'm understanding to be around me? Can it hold the weight of academic rigor? Can it hold up women as equal image-bearers of God as men? Can it offer me something from the Bible that's better than just legalistic behavior change? And can it do more than blame psychosomatic problems on sin as some blanket category? Can my theology bear the weight of those things? And back then, the answer was no. The old wineskin was failing. And so, you know, I went through my own deconstruction-reconstruction process as I was thinking through this in community, in a church.
And, you know, what do we do when we are confronted with the complexity of the world around us? How do we look at the theological system that we've constructed and ask, can it bear the weight of what I'm experiencing right now? Today's feast, St. Matthew, I would invite us to think about as an invitation to engage with complexity, to name complexity, and to lean on Jesus, who is there with you in the complexity, because he's able to hold space for the brokenness around us more than we can. And he leads us in offering mercy that we didn't even know we needed. And so today's feast day is a great invitation to explore complexity, holding hands with Jesus as he's present with us.
St. Matthew is going to frustrate some people to no end. He's going to frustrate their system, the things that they care deeply about. But if they would walk with Jesus for what they don't yet understand, they would see in St. Matthew something beautiful as Jesus is doing something new.
And so, as we look at St. Matthew, this tax collector, let me pray for us:
“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord, give us understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and faithfulness that may finally embrace you. Amen.”
Jesus's ministry today is in Capernaum. It's in Galilee, which is like the northern part of Israel, to the west of the Sea of Galilee. He's in Capernaum, and he's among the Jews there, and he's already called some fishermen to come and follow him. Fishermen are unimpressive, but they're not controversial. They're not a threat to anyone's system. They're just not like the dream team that you'd want to pick if you were trying to be an influencer. But he picks some fishermen to follow him, and now he calls Matthew in chapter 9 to come follow him in his Galilean ministry. And Matthew—or Levi is his other name—he is going to be potentially offensive.
Imagine if you are Simon the Zealot, who is a patriot for the Jews, and you are all about getting rid of Roman authority, and now Jesus says, “I'm gonna bring somebody who collects taxes for Rome into my entourage.” You are not going to meet that well, potentially. So in Capernaum, tax collectors would be responsible for collecting a variety of taxes that Herod Antipas was going to levy on the region, and they had to meet their quotas to pay somebody above them who needed to meet their quotas.
And as a tax collector on the bottom of the totem pole, it would have been really common to extort money. Why is that? Because not only did you have to collect what was owed, but think about the cost of your labor, your travel—and you need to—and you want to have a certain lifestyle. And so if you charge extra fees for your work, that is totally legal to do in this culture. And so it is very common for tax collectors to extort other people, because it is legal and part of the system.
It's expected. It is not virtuous or good, but this is why tax collectors and sinners get lumped into the same boat. So even if you're one of the good ones, you are still amongst this unclean group of tax collectors and sinners. You, by definition, are disobedient to God's law, and nobody wants to be around you.
You're the bad guy. And so the Pharisees were encouraging distance from these kinds of people, and Matthew, the tax collector, is our test case. They don't want anything to do with him or his friends.
Their posture is to stay ritually clean. Let's preserve what we have. We want God to bless us. Let's keep the law. A lot of those things aren't bad, right? But it's the disposition of isolation from the sinners that Jesus is going to challenge. Jesus's challenge—if I were to summarize it in like a quote—it would be: What if someone could change? What if? What if we see them in need of healing rather than in need of being shunned or dehumanized? What if? So the problem is one of disposition and understanding the grace of God.
And that's not even an option that they had entertained for themselves. No—instead, they wanted to be isolated and keep pure and clean, away from these people who are violating God's law. And so Matthew, you can imagine, has developed probably a complex of sorts.
You know, he's believed narratives about himself that others have told him. So I would imagine there's a level of self-hatred that he feels, because others have given him narratives that he has now believed. And when Jesus calls, he follows, because he wants to see what's going to happen.
I wonder if there might have been some hope in his heart that he would be free of the self-hatred that he was experiencing, or wondering if there were better narratives for his life than just, You'll never amount to anything more than this. You're not welcome here. All these sorts of things.
And so something new is happening. And in longing for something better, he takes the next step, which is to walk with Jesus wherever Jesus is going to take him. So Matthew then hosts a dinner.
And we have this imagery of reclining. They're sort of like lying down, sitting next to each other, having dinner. And imagining this scenario, you know, Jesus honors Matthew by coming to his house and having dinner with Matthew's friends, which, as you would expect, are these sinners and tax collectors.
This group of shunned individuals, socially. And I wonder if Jesus's other disciples felt really awkward at this point. They're in there having dinner with these people.
And again, I can imagine Simon the Zealot going, These people don't love Judaism. Why would I ever sit down and have dinner with these people? And these fishermen are like, Oh, I remember that guy. He was the guy who's collecting extra taxes when I hauled in that load last Thursday.
And so now they're sitting down having dinner, being reintroduced to one another as human beings and, you know, fellow followers of Jesus—potentially, people who are going to consist of the kingdom of God. And so Jesus hears this pejorative question from the Pharisees: Why is it that your teacher—you know, that's pejorative right there—your teacher's over there eating with tax collectors and sinners?
And instead of getting insecure and defensive, feeling some kind of way and responding out of his insecurity, notice the clarity in Jesus's vision. Jesus doesn't change. His ethics don't change. He knows exactly why he is among the sinners and the tax collectors, and he is so unanxious about this accusation. He says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” And so there's something beautiful in that tension here.
We read in the New Testament passage in 2nd Timothy: there are all kinds of classes of people who are going to be disobedient to what God has intended for creation, and welcoming into staying that way is not good for them, and it's not part of the kingdom of God. But Jesus recognizes that people are sick, and he doesn't long for them to stay that way. It's a big welcome, and it's an invitation to something new.
And so, but at the same time, his disposition and posture is one of welcome and invitation. And so he sees what is broken, he sees what's sick, and he doesn't turn his back to them. And that's what's different in the Pharisees.
So there's a difference between judgment and condemnation, and people get this wrong all the time at a popular level. When our English translations quote Jesus saying, “Do not judge,” that's not what that word means. It means do not condemn, which is a totally different thing.
And a better translation would be for Jesus to say, “Don't condemn.” So when I go to the doctor, I want the doctor to make a judgment about what is ailing me. I want them to rightly discern the problem and name it accurately so that we can fix it. I can go get the right medication.
So Jesus calls these people sick, not to condemn them, not to turn his back and say, You're out, you're on your own, I'm only gonna be with these people. But he invites them to a deeper life than they can personally imagine for themselves. And that's the generous invitation. By judging them, what he's actually inviting them into is to rid themselves of self-condemnation and the false narratives that other people have put on them. There's a grace in his judgment, because others have heaped condemnation on their shoulders, and that often turns into self-condemnation.
And so you're welcoming people in, creating the context for naming what's broken accurately, and staying in relationship with others and with Jesus so that he can heal what's sick and broken. We're not the ones who heal people, right? We're not the ones who are responsible for their healing. That's what Jesus does.
And so we have to be careful that we're not standing in the way of what Jesus wants to do in somebody, and so we need to stay in relationship as far as is possible and healthy and good. And the reality is none of us are perfect, but being able to name things accurately and with the compassion of Jesus so that the outcome is that Jesus heals somebody—that takes a lot of time and trust and care and very secure relationships and community to get to that point. But what's important here, though, is that while the Pharisees are building this intricate house to bring people into to adorn the beauty of God, Jesus is creating a front porch to invite his awkward neighbors over.
And that's really important. This is a great paradigm for ministry. I was thinking back to the height of COVID, when our son was a newborn. We used to sit on our front porch all the time, and as our neighbors were passing by, we were longing for friendships, and we would invite them to hang out on our lawn, get to know them, let our son crawl around in the grass. Now only a handful of those neighbors actually made it inside the door, and even less of those made it to our kitchen table. But without the front porch, nobody would have made it to dinner with us.
And so the Pharisees had set the most beautiful table. They'd spent no time on building a front porch. And God calls us as a church to think well about both.
So I want to encourage us—and this is something I'm doing as well—pray about those places of the spiritual house. We think a lot about what happens here with our volunteering and our strategy and things, but how do we create the front porch where people not just see us, but where they get to know us, where they begin to trust that Jesus is good because they've had an encounter with us? And then as they do that, they have a longing to come in and sit and have dinner in the house with us.
And so if the Eucharist celebration together in this and being involved intimately in community is the banquet that's before them that's going to feed their souls as they come to learn and name their brokenness in community and learn to anticipate God's grace here, then what are the steps that we need to take to help people get there? I don't have an answer, but I've started with baseball. And so for each of us it's a different place, right? Like where is it that we're rubbing shoulders? I had somebody in the snack shack yesterday ask me about the Trinity. I don't know what it is for you, but how are we creating front porches?
There is a guiding principle here in Jesus's ministry, which brings clarity to how we prioritize God's Word with the complexities of society and our own stories. We heard a lot about obeying God's Word, listening to God's Word, those who are disobedient to it, and the question becomes, what is the guiding principle? In Proverbs it was the fear of the Lord being the beginning of wisdom. And here in the gospel texts it seems to be mercy that is the guiding principle for applying God's law to the complexity around us. God didn't give Israel a covenant in order to just make sacrifices.
That's not why. He gave the covenant so that Israel would come to know the loving-kindness of God in covenant relationship to him as their king. And then in knowing the goodness of God's rule and reign as king, other nations around them would see the goodness of their God and their relationship to him, and then they might long to be a society that is under the rule and reign of God with this compelling picture of God's love and his faithfulness.
And that's why Jesus in this passage quotes Hosea 6:6 where he says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” It's a critique of the priorities of the Pharisees. Not that they're applying what their law is wrong, but they're misprioritizing what is first and foremost, which is the covenant faithfulness of God.
And so Jesus is like one of the Old Testament prophets here, calling out people for following these externals of the law while neglecting the guiding principles of justice and mercy and the mercy of God. So there are people who cannot come to the table. Like there is some element of that.
We heard it in the New Testament, and I'll give just one example from a long time ago. I had been working at a church. I met a guy at Starbucks. We got into a conversation. He wanted to come visit our church. I knew he was part of another religion that was not good, but I said, “You are welcome to come and visit.”
He would visit every time and bring pamphlets so that at the end of the service you could talk to all of our people to get them to join a cult. So we had to have a conversation, right? This is, you know, one example of someone who is not welcome to the table. We need to keep him on the front porch.
There are persons who, for a variety of reasons, are unsafe in a community, right? Whether this is abuse or something else. So we have to be wise, right? Not all people get the same level of vulnerability and trust. That's not wise. So it's okay for some to stay on the front porch.
I think that's really different than the person who has developed unhelpful addictions to cope with the harm they've experienced, or people who are at some place of deconstruction or questioning for reasons, you know, that vary person to person. Jesus was unanxious about this kind of person, about St. Matthew. He was clear, though, about what was broken, and he was kind in his invitation to healing and wholeness, which, by the way, Matthew wanted. Matthew longed for this, and he was unwavering in his mission to call people into what God has made them to be. And so Matthew is a stress test on the capacity of the Pharisees' system to knowing the mercy of God, and Jesus is essentially giving them a new container to hold it in.
So St. Matthew would live the rest of his life following Jesus. After the resurrection, he goes far and wide. There are multiple traditions. One tradition says he went to Africa and was martyred there. Another tradition says that he went to Persia, where he was stabbed to death.
There's a lot of different historical traditions around what happened to him, but at least one of them is that he wrote down the gospel of Matthew so that we could have the good news of Jesus and what it means to follow him. And he wanted the Jews to understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of their scriptures. So if you look at the genealogy in chapter one, or if you see the over 50 quotations in the gospel of Matthew, all of these are pointing the Jews back to their scriptures to show them that Jesus is the fulfillment of it. And this is the gift that Matthew gave to us as one of the eyewitnesses of Jesus's life and teaching.
So Matthew went from having no vision for his life, from others speaking condemnation over him, to being able to tell the story of Jesus that we are still telling today in the 21st century. And this is our invitation as well. As we tell the story of Jesus, we are reminded that he is among the sinners and the tax collectors, and he has found us, and he invites us to a different kind of life.
And as we learn to grow in faith, hope, and love together, let's pray that we could be a people who embody the welcome of Jesus as well, so that we can see the kingdom of God grow around us. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.
