St Matthew

It is difficult to put into context just how odd it would have seemed for Jesus to sit down with tax collectors. Most of us have running jokes about HMRC or the IRS depending on which country we are in - but that misses the point. So do jokes about lawyers and estate agents - folks who have jobs which make easy humour - but the point of all of those things in our own lives is that whilst, at different points we might feel hard done by, really the modern day tax collector is only fulfilling a role which is asked of them by the majority of citizens, namely that everyone pays what they should towards the government and social welfare of the country. There are always wrangles about percentages and priorities but even when we disagree with the government we can see that the idea behind the taxes is to benefit those who live around us and ourselves.

Not so with the New Testament tax collectors. Imagine that you live in an occupied country and are subject to a brutal regime - imagine that that brutal and unforgiving regime which really does not give you very much at all then demands taxes and some of your neighbours collect those taxes for the leaders of the regime - at best you would see those people as collaborators and probably you would label them traitors. Those same people are given all sorts of powers to collect the tax and many of them abuse those powers, lining their own pockets by taking extra money from yours.

These are the people Jesus sits down with, the worst of the worst. Who is that in our society, like I say, we might like to joke about certain professions but most of us live in democratic societies, we are not under foreign and aggressive rule. Perhaps in our own society we should think about those who most frighten and undermine us - who would Jesus sit down with - the bankers who gambled the fortunes of the country, the terrorists who threaten us - does it make us angry to think that perhaps those are the people who Jesus would be eating with....then perhaps we get a taste of the anger which the people around Jesus felt when they witnessed his behaviour but at the same time we have to challenge our own assumptions and ask who we are called to sit down with. It is hard, because we recoil from people who we feel under threat from. We hate to think of Jesus whom we regard as holy with people who we regard as the opposite.

But the really good news is that Jesus is still holy, Jesus is still Jesus and God still loves even in the depths of human depravity. When Jesus called Matthew he was calling not a foreigner but a Jew who was selling out his own people, someone who the Jews found obnoxious - and yet he still calls him, Matthew still responds and presumably turns his life around like Zaccheus, the other, famous, tax collector. If Jesus can call these fairly despicable people to faith then he certainly can call all of us, but more importantly, we can call those whom we most try to avoid and forget in life, those who we most villify for their behaviour and profiteering. Jesus would condemn the sin but not the sinner - on the feat of St. Matthew we should remember that we are called to do the sam