The Twelve: Matthew, the Outcast Who Threw the First Party for Jesus

Some men get a second chance because they deserve one. Matthew got his while he was still sitting at the dirty political desk that made him a social outcast.

Matthew was a tax collector. These local shakedown men in first-century Judea were not simply disliked. They were considered traitors, Jews who had been co-opted by Rome, were collecting money from their own people to fund a foreign occupation, and were widely assumed to pad their earnings along the way. To call someone a tax collector was to place them in the same category as the worst kind of sinner, someone respectable people avoided in public. That was Matthew's profession when Jesus walked up to his booth.

Jesus didn't approach him quietly or through an intermediary. He came directly to where Matthew was sitting, doing the job that made him an outcast, and said two words: "Follow me" (Matt 9:9). Scripture tells us what happened next in the same simple terms used for the fishermen who left their nets: Matthew got up and followed him. The comparison matters. Peter and Andrew left a humble trade. Matthew left a very profitable, settled political position, the kind of security most people spend their lives trying to build, and he walked away from it without hesitation the moment Jesus called his name.

What Matthew did immediately afterward tells you something important about the kind of man Jesus had just called. He didn't quietly disappear from his old life. He threw a dinner and invited his former colleagues and friends, the very tax collectors and people labeled "sinners" by respectable society, to come and meet Jesus at his own table (Matt 9:10). Matthew wanted the people he knew best, the ones everyone else had written off, to encounter the man who had just called him by name.

The religious leaders who saw this were appalled. They asked Jesus's disciples why their teacher would eat with people like that. Jesus answered them directly, in words that have echoed through the centuries since: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick... For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (Matt 9:12-13). That single statement reframes everything about who Jesus came for. Matthew wasn't an unfortunate exception to Jesus's ministry. He was exactly the kind of person Jesus came looking for.

Matthew's legacy doesn't end with his call. He went on to write one of the four Gospels, the only disciple among the Twelve to leave behind an extended written account bearing his own name. His Gospel is noticeably attentive to Jewish law and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, the kind of careful, document-minded attention you might expect from a man who had spent years working with records, contracts, and the details of Roman taxation. The skills that once made him useful to an occupying empire became, in God's hands, the skills that helped preserve and transmit the story of Jesus to every generation since.

If you've ever felt like the kind of person respectable faith doesn't have room for, the one whose past or profession or reputation seems to disqualify you before you've even tried, Matthew's story is worth holding onto. Jesus didn't call him after he cleaned up his life. He called him at his booth, in the middle of the work that made him an outcast, and Matthew's response was to get up immediately and then bring everyone he knew along with him.

That is still how the call tends to work. Jesus does not wait at a distance for people to become acceptable before he approaches them. He walks directly up to the booth and says the same two words he said to Matthew: follow me.