Scripture Reflections

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.
 
The call of Matthew—as recounted by Matthew in his gospel—has almost no detail. Something happened that day, something that changed Matthew’s whole life, and yet he doesn’t tell us anything about it other than the fact that he was a tax-collector, Jesus called him, and he left everything to follow Jesus. What stirred in his heart in that moment? What new hope changed the whole course of his life?
 
I wonder how many years had gone by since he accepted a post that was both lucrative and despised. I wonder how he justified it to himself. I wonder about the callousness that grew from being both rich and hated, treated like an outcast and yet with too much power for anyone to ignore. It is easy to imagine that his heart was hard, the guilt buried deep, the defensive walls high.
 
It is in this speculative wondering about Matthew that I see a bit of myself. I too have places where it is easy to cauterize my heart, because examining the places of pain and guilt is too threatening. We all have things that we don’t want to admit out loud because it seems too painful. Sometimes it is our sin, sometimes it is the way we have been hurt by others, sometimes it is simply that God hasn’t given us the life we hoped for.
 
I wonder if Matthew didn’t include the details of his story so that we all could see ourselves in him. As long as he kept his testimony terse and generic, we can imagine being in his place. Shut off, hurting, angry, defensive—perhaps not because we chose a profession that was despised, but for some other reason.
 
My sense is that he wants us to see ourselves in his story so that we might realize that even in the hardened places of the heart, it is possible to hear the voice of Jesus. Matthew lets us see that Jesus’ voice can break through our defensiveness, our pain, our sin. He speaks, and his voice brings transformation. If, like Matthew, you have “fenced off” an area of your heart that is too painful to acknowledge, Matthew’s testimony demonstrates that this does not have to be the end of the story. The voice of Jesus can bring healing; it can transform us.
 
Steven+