Matthew - the Unlikely Disciple

I want to read you an accident report that was filed with the Workmen’s Compensation Board.

I am a bricklayer by trade. One day I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 500 pounds of bricks left over. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel using a pulley which was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor.

Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. I then went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 500 lbs. of bricks. Please refer to block #11 of the accident report which states that my weight is 155 lbs.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a high rate of speed up the side of the building.

In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel of bricks coming down. This explains my fractured skull and collarbone. After sustaining these injuries, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley.

Fortunately, by this time, I regained my presence of mind and was able to hold on tightly to the rope in spite of my pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground with severe force, and the bottom burst out. Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the empty barrel now weighed approximately 50 pounds.

I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for my two fractured ankles and lacerations of my legs and lower body. The encounter with the empty barrel did slow me down enough to lessen my injuries when I landed on the pile of bricks, and only three of my vertebrae were fractured.

I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there in pain on the pile of bricks, I lost my presence of mind and let go of the rope. The empty barrel fell six stories and broke two of my ribs.

Have you ever had a day like that? Unfortunately, maybe you have had a life like that. You’ve been pounded, beaten up, and kicked around. Victimized. Life has chewed you up and spit you out.

Perhaps you’ve come from a broken home, or a dysfunctional family. Maybe you blundered into a bad marriage, or gotten involved in an abusive relationship. Or maybe you have gotten shafted in terms of your career; a victims of downsizing or layoffs.

You know all about shattered hopes and broken dreams. Somewhere along the way, all your idealism and enthusiasm has been sucked out of you. You know firsthand that life ain’t fair.

But life goes on. So you’ve resigned yourself to do whatever it takes to survive. Maybe that’s meant building a shell of armor around yourself so you can’t get hurt again. Or adopting a set of survival strategies for living in a broken world.

If you feel anything like that today, there’s a man in the Bible you might identify with. His given name was Levi, but we know him better as Matthew.

Matthew was a survivor. He lived in a broken world. He grew up in enemy-occupied territory. Matthew was a Jew, and his homeland, Judea, had been overrun by the Romans. He saw the occupation troops every day. They were a constant reminder that he was on the short end of the power game.

Living under the Romans brought you face to face with the fact that there were winners and losers in life. And Matthew knew that he and the Jews were losers. He knew what it felt like to be treated like a POW in your own home town.

People tend to cope in different ways with a crisis situation like that. Some people just try to ignore the whole mess and hope it will go away. Some people are fighters. They take up arms and join the resistance movement. And still other people figure “Look, if you can’t beat ‘em, you may as well join ‘em.” Apparently that was the survival strategy that Matthew chose. But it cost him a lot.

I’m sure that not many of you know the name Aldrich Ames. Aldrich Ames was a career intelligence officer for the CIA. Now you or I wouldn’t know anything about him except for the fact that one day, Aldrich Ames decided to start working for the Russians.

Starting in the early 1980’s, he began to turn over some of America’s most valuable secrets to the Russians. And the Russians paid him well. He was able to buy an expensive home, an expensive car, and take expensive vacations.

It didn’t seem to matter to him that his collaboration with the enemy was an act of treason and among other things, cost several American agents overseas their lives. His own survival and comfort was all that Aldrich Ames cared about.

For whatever reason, Matthew figured that his life would be better if he started working for the Romans. So he turned his back on his country and became a publican.

A publican was a tax collector, so called because he dealt with the public money. Now tax collectors in any age are never going to win any popularity contests, but publicans in first century Judea were especially hated. They were regarded as traitors; men who had made a deal with the devil.

The Romans didn’t want to go to the trouble of collecting their taxes directly. So what they did was to auction out tax-collecting licenses to the highest bidder. If you were awarded the tax-collection license for the town of Capernaum, let’s say, that gave you the right to collect all the taxes in that area. You had to turn over a certain amount of revenue to Rome at the end of the year, but anything you could collect over and above that would be your profit.

As you can imagine, this was a system ripe for abuse. All the more so since there were no officially published tax rates, and a bewildering array of taxes.

There was a ground tax - 1/10th of all the grain in your field and 1/5th of all the fruit in your vineyard. There was an income tax. There was a poll tax - a tax on everyone 12 - 65 years of age, just for being alive. There was sales tax, and duty on exports and imports. There were tolls on all the roads and bridges. There was even a toll to get into a city, or a harbor, or a marketplace. There was a tax on pack animals and on the wheels and axles of carts.

The people of Judea were literally at the mercy of the publicans, who swindled the people for all they were worth. It’s no wonder that they were despised. They were traitors and they were crooks.

So while being a publican made you rich, it also made you an outcast. You were barred from the Temple in Jerusalem, and from all the synagogues of the land. You were excommunicated. The Jews regarded you as worse than a pagan. If a Pharisee saw you coming, he would cross the street to avoid having even your shadow fall upon him. When the Pharisees prayed in the Temple, they prayed “Thank God that I’m not a publican.”

But a publican is what Matthew chose to be. It was his strategy for survival. Sure he was part of a corrupt system. Sure he was in bed with the enemy. Sure he had trouble looking people in the eye. But at least he had money. At least he was a survivor.

And that’s where he was, sitting at his tax table—which symbolized all that he was, and all that he had amounted to—when Jesus walked into his life in Luke 5:27.

Jesus had just two words to say to Matthew the tax collector: “Follow Me.”

Jesus didn’t say, “Depart from me.” He didn’t say “Curse you” or “Damn you, Matthew, for what you have done with your life, and what you’re doing to other people.” He didn’t say “You’re going to burn in hell for being a publican.”

No, he just said “Follow me.”

What gives Jesus the right to walk up to someone like Matthew and say “Drop everything and follow me”? I’ll tell you what gives Him the right. He’s the Son of God. He has the right to call us like that. And following Him is the only way out of the dead end street that our own survival strategies bring us to.

Jesus said, in Mark 8:34:

Mark 8:34 If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?

We read in Luke 5 that Matthew got up from his tax table, shut his tax collecting books, closed his cash box, and walked away from it all. He became a follower of Jesus.

Now I’m sure that if you were to have asked any of the citizens of Capernaum to make up a list of the ten people least likely to become followers of Jesus, Matthew’s name would have been on all of those lists.

Why is it that some of the most unlikely people become followers of Jesus? I’ll tell you why: It’s because they are the ones who know that they need Jesus the most. Look at some of the people who followed Jesus in the NT:

- Matthew and Zacchaeus, both tax collectors

- the woman at the well, an adulteress who was an outcast in her town.

- Mary Magdalene, who had been demon-possessed

- blind beggars and people with leprosy

And the list goes on and on. The people who followed Jesus were not the well-to-do, the respectable middle class. They were people from the bottom rung of the social ladder - people who had been kicked around by life and who were hanging on by their fingernails, just trying to survive.

If that’s you today, Jesus is calling you.

Now notice the first thing that Matthew did after he began to follow Jesus. He threw a party.

Luke 5:29 Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them.

There are two important things about this party…

1. It was at Matthew’s house. Matthew invited Jesus to his house. His relationship with Jesus wasn’t just something for out there in public. He took Jesus home with him. But that always leads to complications. If you want to keep life simple, don’t take Jesus home with you.

I want you to visualize this scene. Matthew is just putting the final touches on the decorations for the party he’s having in Jesus’ honor. The balloons are up, the streamers are hung.

Just then the doorbell rings. Matthew answers it. Who is standing there but the guest of honor himself! And his disciples are with him.

Matthew says “Welcome Master!” and shows him into the entryway. Jesus looks around with a smile on his face. The disciples, who smell faintly of fish, crowd in behind him. Their eyes are wide with wonder, because they have never been in such a gorgeous home before, and they’ve heard lots of stories about this one.

Jesus says, “My what a lovely home this is, Matthew. How tastefully decorated! You certainly have some beautiful works of art here. Why look at this painting in the entryway. Haven’t I seen this somewhere before?”

And Matthew coughs nervously and stammers, “Well, yes Master, you may have seen that one before. It used to belong to Mattaniah, the synagogue ruler. He was a little behind on his taxes, so I arranged to buy it from him on favorable terms.”

“And how about this lovely vase?” Jesus asks. “Where did this come from?”

“Oh, that vase.” Matthew winces. “I picked that up when I foreclosed on the widow Naomi’s house. She was a few month’s behind on her taxes.”

Jesus looks Matthew in the eye and says gently, “I guess you’re going to have to do a little housecleaning aren’t you, Matthew?”

Do you get the picture? When you invite Jesus into your home, as Matthew did, you’re opening your whole life up to His examination. Jesus is going to uncover things you might rather he didn’t .

And some people are not willing to let him do that. They want Jesus to be their Savior, but they want to hold him at arm’s length. Not let him get too close. Not let him into those secret rooms that are off limits to everybody. But Matthew brought Jesus home. And I imagine he did some redecorating after Jesus was there.

2. Matthew invited all his friends to his party. Luke says it was a “great banquet”, so there must have been a lot of people there. Now although Matthew wasn’t the most popular man in town, that didn’t mean that he didn’t have friends.

And he was so excited about becoming a follower of Jesus, that he wanted his friends to know him too. By the way, that’s a good sign of whether or not you’re spiritually alive—do you want to introduce your friends to Jesus?

But because of who Matthew was, his friends were, shall we say, “interesting characters”. We know that there were other tax collectors at the banquet, because Luke tells us so. But I imagine that the guest list also included some hit men, some numbers runners, some drug pushers, some prostitutes. People in organized crime. You get the idea?

I don’t think this was a party where they were drinking non-alcoholic punch.

These people were part of the “counter-culture”. The Pharisees had a term for them. They called them “sinners”. And they asked the question, “Why does Jesus want to hang out with people like that?”

And Jesus had an answer for them. It’s in verse 31:

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

The Gospel is for people who know they need it. If you want to become a follower of Jesus Christ, sooner of later you’re going to have to come to the place in your life where you are willing to acknowledge that you are a sinner.

That spiritually and religiously, you are dead broke. That you don’t have a leg to stand on before God. That there is nothing righteous or noble or good about you in God’s eyes.

Now that message does not play well in this age of self-esteem, and positive self-image. But it’s true nevertheless. The first part of the good news is actually bad news. You’re spiritually bankrupt. But the good news is: you don’t have to stay that way.

We don’t read anything specific about Matthew’s life as a disciple. We don’t know of anything that he did or he said. But we do know that he had a tremendous influence for Jesus Christ.

When he left his tax table to follow the Master, he left everything behind except one thing: his pen. One thing about publicans was that they were educated. They could read and write. And God used that ability in Matthew.

As he followed him around Judea, Matthew began to record a journal of the teachings and the doings of the Lord Jesus. He may have written it in Aramaic and he may have composed it in a kind of shorthand. Evidently, other people made copies of Matthew’s journal, and began passing it around.

Eventually, both Luke and Mark used Matthew’s journal as one of their sources when they sat down to write their Gospels. Ultimately, Matthew got around to re-writing his own journal and expanding it, this time in Greek. And that is how we got the Gospel of Matthew.

When you read the book of Matthew, you’re reading a piece of literature that was inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is God’s Word. But you can sense little bits and pieces of Matthew’s own personality coming through.

For example, it has a very methodical arrangement—not surprising for someone who was used to working with figures. And, more than any of the other Gospels, Matthew talks about money. And when he talks about money, he uses big denominations.

But the most amazing thing about the Gospel of Matthew is that, although it was written by a man who was once considered by the Jews to be a traitor, it ended up being the most patriotically Jewish book of the NT.

The theme of the Gospel of Matthew is that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. He is the fulfillment of all the OT prophecies to Israel. There are 128 occasions where Matthew either quotes or refers to an OT passage. Eleven times he uses the phrase “…that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet.”

I find it exciting that a man who was once just a cog in the wheel of a crooked system could become a herald of the King of Kings. A man who was regarded as one of the lowest of the low could become a faithful servant of the Lord of Lords.

Never underestimate what Jesus can do when he gets hold of a person’s life. And never forget that He can do it to the most unlikely people.