“…Matthew the tax collector...”
—Matt. 10:3
If someone were to tell you that they were working for the CRA or IRS, you would probably shrug it off like it was nothing, he (or she) may as well be a mailman or a city counselor for all you care. But Matthew, the disciple of Jesus, was not treated with such apathy. Matthew was a Jewish tax collector, and to be a Jewish tax collector for Rome in the first century was an act of both dishonour and treason. In Judea, to be a tax collector meant that you were collecting tax from a subjugated people, and if that tax collector was Jewish, then that Jew was considered a traitor to his own people. Tax collectors were not honest people, they would collect tax for the Roman Empire, as was required of them, but they would typically collect a little more to add to their own coffers. And if there was a problem with a person’s payment, they would usually have their own gang of thugs beat people up for their money. If you were a Jew in first-century Judea, you would not only fear the tax collector, you would hate him. That is our Matthew. We do not know whether he was a corrupt tax collector. We do not know if he had his own gang of thugs. We do not know if he had his own list of people that he had the Romans spy on. It is all within the realm of possibility given the profession, so we cannot deny any of that. But what we do know with certainty is that he was considered a traitor by his own people for working with the pagans and extorting money from the people of God. This would have meant that he would have been ostracized, cast out, considered a pagan by his own people, and deserving of God’s judgment. Whatever the Roman Empire was paying him, whatever lured him into the lucrative business of tax collecting for Rome, it would not have been enough to keep him happy. We know this well enough today: luxury does not equal happiness. On the contrary, it can often be the cause of great sorrow.
As a result of his profession, whether he chose this for himself or it was forced upon him, Matthew would have felt alone, unwanted, isolated, and rejected. His family would have abandoned him, for otherwise they would have received the same fate. He would not have had a single friend unless it was a Roman official, lest another Jew be ostracized as well. The temple was off limits to him, for how can there be community for one committing treason against his own? And he was barred from participating in any Jewish events, which would have been difficult for one being born a Jew. But then came the promised Messiah.
If the common Jew wanted nothing to do with Matthew, if they would not even speak a word to him unless required to by Roman authority, why should the Messiah speak to him? And if He did, surely, they would have been words of judgment given his betrayal. Not only was he betraying his own Jewish people, but the promised Jewish king. But surprisingly, those were not the words that came out of Jesus’ mouth. Instead, he said the words “Follow me” (Matt. 9:9). Jesus had offered Matthew a chance to leave everything behind and start anew, and that is exactly what Matthew did, “and Matthew got up and followed him” (v. 9). The Messiah recruiting a tax collector to be his disciple? If Jesus wanted to make a good impression on the religious authorities of His day, recruiting a tax collector would have accomplished the opposite of that. We might now understand how, from a fallen human perspective, the religious authorities looked upon Jesus with disdain. Here was this self-proclaimed teacher of the Law of God associating himself with sinners! When, instead, he should have been with the pompous Pharisees and Sadducees. That would have been the logical choice, according to them. If the Messiah had truly come, he would have chosen the most learned, the most skilled, the most esteemed, and yet the Messiah did none of that. This was not the Messiah that the religious elites were waiting for. This was not the militant Messiah that the Jewish nationalists were waiting for. In their fallenness, the Jews had concocted a distorted image of the Messiah. But this Jesus was the Messiah that they needed, they just didn’t know it, and He was exactly the Messiah that their ancestors had waited for.
The fact that Matthew was chosen as one of the twelve, and the fact that Matthew would go on to write, as inspired by the Spirit of God, the Gospel according to Matthew, reveals the gracious and merciful heart of the Saviour, who has come for the sick, the spiritually dead, to make them alive and well again. For the self-righteous, Jesus had scathing words, but for the repentant sinner, he had words of grace and life. And Matthew would not have been blind to this fact, for when he later lists the twelve, out of the four gospel records we have today, he is the only one to refer to himself as a “tax collector” (Matt. 10:3), nowhere else do we see the name “Matthew” associated with “tax collector.” (The other gospel accounts refer to him as “Levi”, in reference to his old sinful life). What this reveals is the resulting humility on Matthew’s part after having been shown the unmerited favour of God through the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, the Saviour of the world, Jesus Christ. Matthew’s story, just as it can be for us, is a story of God’s grace.