(Matt: 9:9-13)
The Calling of Matthew: Jesus passes a tax-farmer at his table, says “follow me” and the tax-farmer follows Him. Perfect. And at the end of the day, Matthew hosts a big dinner at his house for all his tax-farmer friends and other ne’er-do-wells.
(Tax farmers are people who buy the right from the Government to collect taxes on the Government’s behalf; to cover their costs, they are allowed to collect whatever they can over and above the actual taxes they have to pass back to the Government. And no, they aren’t very popular, least of all when the Government is a foreign power occupying your country. Think “milking a cow until it runs dry” and you will understand the term tax farmer.)
Of course, the Pharisees gate-crash Matthew’s party and ask Jesus’ disciples why He eats with tax-farmers and sinners. Jesus shuts them up with a simple saying and an instruction to read scripture more carefully.
But perhaps we should too. (Read scripture more carefully, that is.)
Verse 10 in the NIV says “While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples.”
But here’s the Greek:
Καὶ ἐγένετο αὐτοῦ ἀνακειμένου ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ, καὶ ἰδοὺ πολλοὶ τελῶναι καὶ ἁμαρτωλοὶ ἐλθόντες συνανέκειντο τῷ Ἰησοῦ καὶ τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ.
Spot the name Matthew. It isn’t there. (If you guessed μαθηταῖς, good work on transliteration but no cigar: μαθηταῖς is disciples.)
The only place Matthew is mentioned is in verse 9, sitting at his table and then getting up and following Jesus.
So visualise this: Jesus tells Matthew to follow Him, and Matthew follows. Imagine his surprise when Jesus leads him to his (Matthew’s) house for dinner, and invites lots of other people in, who are followed in by a bunch of nosey Pharisees.
And of course, that isn’t what happened. Here is my literal translation of verse 10:
And it happened, Him reclining in the house, and behold many tax-farmers and sinners [if you must; I prefer “those not doing so well”] coming reclined with Him and His disciples.
“To eat” is understood as part of “reclining”. The real question is “the house”: which house is that?
And the answer is “Jesus’ house,” of course.
If your immediate response is “but Jesus didn’t have a house”, my question is “why on earth would you think that?” (The answer is, of course, because you have been told that Jesus didn’t have a house. Funnily enough, no one ever quite says He was a homeless man living on a park bench, but that is the implication of not having a house; either that, or endless sofa surfing.)
We don’t know if He owned this house, or rented it, but it is what Rabbis did; they had a house where they lived and which had enough space for their immediate disciples to gather to them or even live with them. Even if we didn’t know that is what Rabbis did (and in Orthodox or Hassidic communities in places like New York City, still do), the gospels are full of references to Jesus’ house and home being in Capernaum. I have written on this at greater length in the Seeing the Kingdom book, which will be available soon(ish), so I won’t repeat everything I wrote there. All I will say now is “read carefully and always note context”, and you may well see it for yourself.
But that isn’t the main point of this post, just a necessary building block if we are to understand what is going on with the Pharisees. Despite what you may have heard, their problem is not so much the fact the Jesus hangs out with, and eats with ‘sinners’ – which is bad enough in their eyes – but rather when they come to His house, hoping to be welcomed and accorded a place of honour as wise men in their own right, come to share enlightened discourse and debate with the Rabbi, they find instead that this Rabbi’s house is full of people who would never in a million years be invited into the house of any other Rabbi; which also means they (the Pharisees) can’t get a place to recline and have to stand around watching.
And when they ask the disciples what is going on here, it is Jesus who replies. The question He is answering is the one I have alluded to above: why on earth does a Rabbi surround himself with riff-raff instead of welcoming potential religious allies, all of them men of good standing and acknowledged righteousness.
“Why do I fill my house with ‘these people’? Easy!”
“It is not necessary for the strong to have a doctor, but those having (or suffering) evil (ἀλλὰ οἱ κακῶς ἔχοντες).
“But go away and learn what this is: ‘Mercy I wish, and not sacrifice.’ For I didn’t come to call the righteous but the wretched.”
We translate this as Mercy because that is the most usual translation for Ἔλεος (along with ‘pity’ and ‘compassion’.) But Hosea 6:6 (which is the passage Jesus quotes) in Hebrew is even stronger: “For lovingkindness (khesed, חֶ֥סֶד) is my desire and not sacrifice.”
The Pharisees are missing the whole point of what they are observing, because for them their religion is about status and recognition. Spending time as the disciple of a well-regarded Rabbi – which Jesus still was, albeit an awkward and worrying one – was a stepping stone to becoming a Rabbi oneself, at some point in the future.
Jesus is saying “that isn’t the game we are playing here: people come to Me because they are wretched and they know I have – and am – the answer. So yes: I fill my house with people who need God’s practical lovingkindness, rather than those who want to debate cases and conditions from the Law.” And, of course, He is also making disciples who will learn to do what He does, ready to fulfil a specific commission; not use their time with Him as a springboard to their own self promotion.
This certainly is a helpful picture to keep in mind as we learn to follow Jesus (do we think we are strong or are we maybe in need? All about me, or all about Him?) And it maybe even more relevant as we obey His commission and make disciples. Are we just recycling the righteous, or are we creating a space that those “having evil” feel welcomed into and able to learn and change?
Seeing the Kingdom 