What Would Jesus Do?

+ In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Saint Matthew, whose feast we mark today, was about as unlikely a saint as anyone whom Jesus called to be one of his chosen twelve. And none of the Twelve was anything special, anyway. They were, for the most part, ordinary men, men from the countryside of Galilee, at a time when the leaders of the Jewish nation would have questioned whether it was possible for a common person or a Galilean to carry out all the provisions of the Jewish law. And yet Jesus chose twelve of them, twelve of these unlikely common men, and no one could miss the point. The number twelve had, after all, a special place in the history of the Jewish people: Jacob had twelve sons, and those twelve were the founders of the twelve tribes which made up the nation. So Jesus's twelve companions, his twelve unlikely men, were living symbols of a new Israel, a renewed kingdom gathering around him.

And one of those twelve was Matthew. We have to remember that the holy land was an occupied country in Jesus's time. It was a rebellious province under the control of a harsh Roman governor with a large military force at his command. Some people actively resisted the Roman occupation, most, probably, tried to just go on with their daily lives, and some actually cooperated with the Roman conquerors. We've seen enough occupied countries on TV and in the movies to know what folks usually think of people who collaborate with their conquerors: and Matthew was a collaborator.

Yet even among collaborators there were different levels of cooperation. The High Priest at the Temple in Jerusalem, after all, was a collaborator--indeed, he had to be, if he was going to be any kind of leader at all for the people. But if the High Priest was a relatively good collaborator, the worst of all collaborators were the men who collected taxes for the Roman conquerors. Even today, we don't very much like tax collectors, and in the Roman system, where the tax system was about as fair as a playground bully stealing milk money from kindergartners, tax collectors were absolutely hated. And Matthew was a tax collector as well as a collaborator.

So Jesus, by choosing Matthew, picks as one of the twelve princes of the new Israel an absolute bottom feeder, a quisling, a toady, a traitor to his nation whom anyone would look at with contempt. And then, to rub it in, Jesus goes off to eat dinner at this traitor's house, at a party full of other tax collectors and sinners.

This is the sort of behavior that's bound to attract attention, of course, and when it does, when the good, decent, law-abiding citizens ask Jesus what in the world he thinks he's doing, his spoken answer has two parts, one part about himself and one part about his questioners. For himself, he says that his job is to make sick people whole, to call sinners, not the righteous. Jesus is under no illusions about Matthew and the other people at his table: they are certainly sinners--but who else but a sinner needs to hear the message of repentance? There's no reason for God to send a Savior to the good, decent people.

If, indeed, the good, decent people are what they think they are. For Jesus says to them: "Go study your Bibles. Think about what God meant when he said through the prophet 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'" The good, decent, people, of course, offered all the right sacrifices: but, Jesus says, what God wants is mercy. These sinners and tax-collectors are his lost sheep, and you ought to have been trying to bring them back even before you saw what I was doing.

Finally, I think Jesus has a third point, not one he speaks, but one he acts out. Yes, he says, these people are sinners; yes, God in God's mercy desires that these sinners repent. And how are they to be called to repentance? Not by sermons, not by lectures, not by slick Madison Avenue campaigns against the issue of the month, but rather by going home with them, and sitting down at their tables, and sharing their outcast life.

So when Christians hear this story of St. Matthew, the question is, really, "What would Jesus do?" Jesus has called us here to this table, to this feast where he is himself the host: but with whom would Jesus, who ate with tax-collectors and sinners, eat today? Jesus has, by the sacrament of baptism, given us a share in his royal priesthood: but what utterly outcast sinners would he pick, today, to be, like Matthew, princes of a new Israel? And to whom, in Jesus's name, have we been called to show mercy, we who have known so much mercy ourselves?

--John Wm. Houghton