He Saw a Man | The Calling of Matthew | Matthew 9:9

Author Rod Reasen II

In October 2003, the Cubs were five outs away from making the World Series when a foul ball drifted into the Wrigley seats and a fan named Steve Bartman reached for it. Moisés Alou, the Cubs’ left fielder, ran toward the stands looking to make a leaping catch that would have put the team one step closer to the elusive victory. Hands went up all along the row, the ball caromed off Bartman’s, and Alou missed the potential out. Ahead by three runs at the time, the Cubs watched the inning collapse and then the game. The fans blamed the next evening’s loss, and ultimately their World Series opportunity, on one man. Bartman left the stadium under cover that night and for years stayed in hiding, refusing every public interview. For Chicago fans, he was the face to hate.

Our story today is about another man whose very name in his region carried the same disdain. Let’s dig in.

“As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him.” Matthew 9:9 (ESV)

Matthew is called. Through eight chapters of this book, the author has written entirely in the third person, neither identifying himself nor leaning on his direct relationship with Jesus. Then, in an act of remarkable humility for the man holding the pen and owning the angle of the story, the first place he writes himself in is his lowest point, his occupation as a tax collector. We have all held jobs we were less than proud of, but this one carried a social weight we can hardly imagine. The relative ease with which we pay our taxes today, mostly through payroll, has removed the personal element these people felt, and even so, the disdain is still real; I have never once heard of a celebrated effort to pay these fees. The booths sitting in the marketplace were often sold or leased to enterprising businessmen, frequently drawn from the very people they taxed. In Matthew’s case, we do not know whether he owned the concession or worked it under another man’s contract, but we know the role: extracting fees at a profit from his own people. Despised, disdained, hated: even these words do not carry the full vigor of the energy hurled at this man.

And he had made his choice. By every appearance, he had made peace with it, because he was still sitting in the seat enjoying its spoils when the call came. That is what makes this a redemptive story. Matthew, or Levi as Mark and Luke name him, authored the first book of the New Testament, and in contrast to Paul’s remarkable pedigree, he tells us only the position he came from: unwanted. He had rejected his own people for a position of profit, and as the Bible notes, he was sitting in the actual booth where he would extract it.

Three things we can take from Matthew.

1. The Call. This man had earned only hatred from his own people, and while he was a mere reflection of an empire, his work and his position furthered its efforts. Jesus steps in, sees the man in his current active position, and issues His famous call: “Follow Me.” Notice the wording of the verse. We would have written: “Look at the tax collector.” Matthew writes it the way Jesus saw it: he saw a man.

2. The Response. “And he rose and followed him.” Luke 5:28 adds that he did it “leaving everything.” The Greek participle anastas comes from the same word family that gives the New Testament its word for resurrection, and the echo here is by no accident, for that is truly what is happening to this man. The old man, despised, rejected, and cursed, stays in the booth, and a new man rises with a new purpose.

3. The Elevation. Trace where the rising led. From the booth to the table of Christ. From the table to the Twelve, where Matthew lists himself in his own Gospel as “Matthew the tax collector.” From the Twelve to the book that now opens the New Testament across all of Christendom. Jesus later promised the Twelve that those who had left everything to follow Him would sit on twelve thrones (Matthew 19:28), and Matthew is the one who recorded the promise, which means the man walked away from a tax collector’s seat by faith, did it without a promise for a better one. Only later would he learn the news that the seat had been traded for a throne. Scripture’s last word over the Twelve is a wall in the eternal city with their names built into its foundations (Revelation 21:14).

Jim Elliot put the arithmetic of that exchange in his journal: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”1

So what is your position today? Moses was a murderer who could not speak, Gideon was the weakest among the weak, Amos was a simple herdsman, and Matthew was an outcast tax collector. The redemptive stories throughout Scripture leave no one hiding and give no one an excuse against the open call to follow. Matthew moved from rejected to chosen, and even Steve Bartman eventually came out of hiding.

The Chicago Cubs did finally make it back. Thirteen years after that October night, they won the 2016 World Series, their first championship in 108 years, and the following summer the organization did something unimaginable. In a tremendous display of repentance, they placed a championship ring on the hand of Steve Bartman, the man their own city had cast out to carry a failure that was never his to carry. The winners spent their victory on mercy, and the outcast’s name became part of the championship.

It is a faint echo of what happened at a booth in Capernaum, because the King did not wait thirteen years. He stopped in front of the seat. He saw a man where the whole town saw a title, and two words traded a tax collector’s booth for a place among the Twelve, a Gospel that opens the New Testament, and a name built into the foundations of the eternal city. Every one of us has sat in that booth. The only question left is whether you stay seated when He stops in front of it.

Reflect:

1. What label has the crowd, or your own record, attached to you that you have quietly accepted as final?
2. What would rising actually look like this week, and what would have to stay in the seat?

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Footnotes:

1. Jim Elliot, journal entry, October 28, 1949, published in Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1958).