No. 02. “Matthew’s Job Interview”
Matthew’s Memories of Jesus* - No. 02. “Matthew’s Job Interview”
Matthew 9:9-13
Bothwell and Clachan, June 8, 2008*
INTRODUCTION
I want to dive right into the Bible and then travel all the way to Hawaii, return to the Bothwell Youth Group and then take one last look into the Baptistry.
Jesus Interviews Matthew: Matthew 9:9-13
Ralph Milton, a Canadian writer, comments on these verses from Matthew 9:9-13 in his ‘e-zine’ RUMORS. He writes: One of the continuing problems we have, reading the stories from the Bible, is that they were told and written for an audience that was (very) familiar with the laws and customs involved…I have problems with that, because it (creates) the idea that only those who have an education in biblical stuff can really understand what these stories mean. (But here today, we DO need to know, that) these verses involve a bunch of purity laws and Jesus’ attitude to them. Matthew, as a tax collector, was regarded as “unclean.” So were the bunch that Jesus was eating with...(In doing this) Jesus was plowing right upstream against (these) Jewish law(s) and customs. But it’s not just knowing about those customs, it’s also knowing how important they were to the Jewish people. The(y) (believed that the heart) of (their) faith was not (just) a matter of what you believed, but of what you did. Jesus’ attitude his and actions seemed (uncaring) and insulting. And let’s not assume that the Pharisees were a bunch of beady-eyed bigots. Some of them were. But others were sincere people struggling to live the way they thought God wanted them to live. What Jesus did (in giving Matthew a job interview and then attending his banquet) felt like a karate chop to the solar plexus."[1]
Jesus is Bigger than “Culture”
Why would that have been so against the culture of Jesus’ day? Well, first, Jesus paid attention to Matthew, who just happened to be a hated “tax-collector.” Now today some of you may have issues with how much you pay in tax or how it is calculated, but I do not think that you personally despise the actual worker who is just doing their job. Not so in Jesus day. To translate some of their attitude of extreme contempt into our day how would you feel if Jesus took time to invite a pimp or a drug dealer to be one of his disciples. Try to think of someone who is deliberately hurting or living off of people. And please don’t get too smug and say “Oh, Jesus loves everyone.” Yes, he does, but would you really like to have one of these dudes show up here on a Sunday morning and to immediately be made a Deacon and start serving you Communion?
In relating this story of his job interview with Jesus, Matthew shows that he was just like those four fishermen, Peter, Andrew James and John, who had also earlier responded immediately to a call to follow Jesus. He too left his profession behind and began a new life.
Maybe if he had left it at that it would have been OK…but then Matthew does the unthinkable. He hosted a “Tony Campolo” type dinner party for all of his so-called “sinful” friends, so that they might have a chance to follow Jesus. The place would have been filled with outcasts of Jewish society. Many of these would have also made their living in a less than rep-u-table manner. (Matthew 21:31, 32). But Matthew’s joy at being accepted by Jesus knew no bounds. He desperately wanted his constantly scorned friends to have a taste of Jesus’ acceptance. But what was so confusing to the “very” religious people who were watching was that they could not understand how, or why, Jesus could participate in a gathering of people who were so at odds with the revered Mosaic law. /Their criticism of Jesus implied that he was compromising his convictions and condoning the lifestyles of these people by eating with them.[2]/
“The Kingdom of God Is a Party”
Tony Campolo tells of a similar “Matthew” type party in his book “The Kingdom of God Is a Party.” Now I must warn you, this illustration is a bit long, so please put your trays into the upright position, and fasten your seatbelts as we jet off to exotic Hawaii.
Campolo writes: After landing that night in Honolulu I finally found a little place that was still open at 3 am. I went in, took a seat on one of the counter stools, and waited to be served. I didn’t even want to touch the dirty menu. I was afraid that if I did something gruesome would crawl out.
The fat guy behind the counter came over and asked, "What d'ya want?"
I said I wanted a cup of coffee and a donut.
He poured the coffee, wiped his grimy hand on his smudged apron, and then grabbed a donut off the shelf behind him. I really would have appreciated it if he had used a pair of tongs and placed my donut on some wax paper.
I sat there munching my donut and sipping the coffee. At 3:30 in the morning, the door of the diner suddenly swung open and, in marched eight or nine provocative and boisterous prostitutes.
It was a very small diner. They sat on either side of me. Feeling completely out of place, I was just about to make my getaway when I overheard the woman beside me say, "Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm going to be 39."
Her so-called "friend" responded in a nasty tone, "So what do you want from me? A birthday party?“
"Come on," said the woman sitting next to me. "Do you have to be so mean? I was just telling you, that's all. I've never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?"
When I heard that, I made a decision. After the women had left I called over the guy behind the counter, and I asked him, "The one right next to me, does she come here every night?"
"Yeah!" he said. "That's Agnes. Why d'ya wanta know?"
"Because I heard her say that tomorrow is her birthday. What do you think about us throwing a birthday party for her—right here—tomorrow night?"
A smile slowly crossed his chubby cheeks, and he answered with measured delight, "That's great! I like it!”
His wife came out of the back room all bright and smiley. She said, "That's wonderful! Agnes is one of those people who is really nice and kind, but nobody does anything nice and kind for her."
"Look," I told them, "if it's okay with you, I'll get back here tomorrow morning about 2:30 and decorate the place. I'll even get a birthday cake!"
"No way," said Harry (that was his name). "The birthday cake's my thing. I'll make the cake."
So at 2:30 the next morning, I was back at the diner. I had made a sign out of big pieces of cardboard that read, "Happy Birthday, Agnes!" I then decorated the diner from one end to the other. It looked great!
Harry’s wife, who did the cooking, got the word out on the street, because by 3:15 it seemed as if every prostitute in Honolulu was packed into the place. It was wall-to-wall prostitutes…and me!
Then at 3:30 on the dot, the door of the diner swung open, and in came Agnes and her friend. I had everybody ready, so when they came in we all screamed, "Happy birthday!"
I have never seen a person so flabbergasted…so stunned…so shaken. As she was led to one of the stools along the counter, we all sang. And as we came to the end of our singing with "Happy birthday, dear Agnes, Happy birthday to you," her eyes moistened. Then, when the birthday cake with all the candles on it was carried out, she lost it and just openly cried.
Harry had to blow out the candles.
When it came time to cut the cake, Agnes hesitantly asked if she could take it home to show her family. She knew they wouldn’t believe that someone would give her a party unless they saw the cake.
Harry shrugged and answered, "Sure! It's O.K. Take it, if you want to."
Then, looking at me, she said, "I live just down the street a couple of doors. I'll be right back. Honest!"
She got off the stool, picked up the cake, and walked slowly and proudly toward the door and left.
When the door closed, there was a stunned silence in the place. Not knowing what else to do, I said, "What do you say we pray?"
Looking back, it does seem very strange for a sociologist to have been leading a prayer meeting with a bunch of prostitutes in a diner in Honolulu at 3:30 in the morning. I prayed for Agnes and for her salvation. I prayed that her life would be changed, that God would be good to her.
When I finished, Harry leaned over the counter. He now had a trace of hostility in his voice, as he asked, "Hey! You didn’t say you were a preacher. Just what kind of church do you belong to?"
At that moment the right words came and I said, "I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 am." Harry waited a moment and then almost sneered as he answered, "There's no church like that. If there was, I'd join it!"
Campolo concludes: Wouldn't we all like to join a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 am? That's the kind of church Jesus came to create![3]
The Tension We Still Face
But isn’t that just the tension we often face? It existed back when Jesus was reaching out to Matthew and his friends; it’s a tension between choosing to just hang out with the so-called nice people or to share his good news with those who really needed to get to know him.
I have had a parent tell us that his kids would no longer be allowed to attend our youth group. We were not the short-haired, squeaky-clean, bible “thumpers” that he expected. He didn’t use all of those exact words, but you get the point. I said to Brenda, “If that is the kind of youth group he wants, he’s going to be disappointed.” As pastor of this church, I don’t want a youth group that only lets in the so-called good kids and leaves all the non-churched kids of our area to go to Hell.
So on a day in which we are celebrating a baptism by immersion, the question that we and that each generation must face is this: Are all of us training today to be bold missionaries? Or like that Dad are we even afraid that our kids will turn out to be just impressionable non-entities waiting to be gobbled up by the sinful “boogie-men” of the world?
Yet I don’t even believe that this parent’s type of attitude worked in the so-called good “ole” days. You see, many of the kids in North America who came through that type of system mistakenly thought that that was all that Christianity was about. In many of those churches a whole generation then just turned their backs and walked away from what they thought was Jesus’ Church.
We may have had the best of intentions back then, but many of us made Christianity into something that was too clean and too safe. It was like “Wonderbread.” It was a safe cultural “white picket fence.” It all boiled down to looks and not doing certain things and being squeaky clean. And it chose to leave behind all of that in-your-face, dirty, dangerous, type of “nitty-gritty” Mission. After all, wasn’t that type of thing supposed to be reserved for those professional Christians living and working overseas? Many churches closed when they lost that generation of young adults and potential leaders. And to this day many of our Baptist churches are missing men and women in their 50’s and 60’s.
Fewer in North America Believe in any God
Last weekend, a national media source here in Canada reported that 25% of Canadians no longer even believe that there is a “god.” One of the more conservative news sources tried to spin it the other way and was all excited to report that “75% of Canadians still believe in God!”
If so, where are they? Not too many of them are in churches across Canada today. Some of them may still have a warm, fuzzy memory of Grandma’s “god,” or a mistaken sentimental feeling of “wouldn’t it be nice if life were as simple as it was way back in her day.”
But fortunately contemporaries of that lost generation did choose to go in a more courageous direction for Jesus. They didn’t just “play” at playing church. Instead they volunteered for mission all over the world. Today, many of them are now retiring or even dying. Because of that, we again need a new generation that will grasp the baton, yes, as Matthew did here in the Bible, and prepare for real Mission, in a world in which even less people in North America know who Jesus really is.
The good news is that those missionaries did a wonderful job. Latin America, Africa and much of Asia has been reached in creative ways for Jesus. Many of those areas now send their missionaries here to us in what we formerly assumed were the so-called Christian nations.
What breaks the hearts of some of those missionaries is that while they have been off sharing the love of Jesus with the rest of the world, here in North America we have been going down the proverbial religious “toilet.” When these Christian workers come back home they feel like aliens. They can no longer relate to our North American culture. They see attitudes becoming less and less Christ-like. Yet many Christians are not even aware of these changes. We are like that mythical frog sitting in a pot on top of the stove; it is not even aware that it is being slowly boiled. “Just a little bit warmer, just a little bit warmer, oh it’s not so bad…”
But There is Hope
The believers back in Matthew’s day did not have the luxury of playing at being Christians. There was no advantage for anyone in that culture to follow Jesus. And within a generation, most of them would be martyrs; executed because their new found faith was incompatible with the jealous nation that ruled over them. The culture of their day proclaimed: “We have no god, but Caesar.” It was a “messy” business following Jesus in their society.
Today the good news is that during recent generations many of you have come to know and believe that it really is OK to get dirty while doing mission; that it was OK to send kids overseas on short term mission trips; and that it was even OK to go with them and show them that adult believers were also not afraid to get their hands dirty for Jesus. Some of you did the same within the trenches of this community, standing up for Christian standards, yet also reaching out through methods like evangelistic movies on the arena walls and going door to door to share your faith. Your faith became more than just that of a “secret agent” private thing and became open and up front. In that sense it even became anti-cultural or even un-Canadian because you were not ashamed of it and were willing to share it. By doing this you helped rescue your family members, friends and neighbours for the sake of Jesus and his Church. When people saw that you really believed all of that Sunday morning “stuff” from Monday to Saturday as well, even when it was costing you real money or popularity, they bought into it too. Being a “Messy” disciple was finally OK.
CONCLUSIONS
The question remains, are we content to stay close to where we are now? Where do we go next? If we follow Jesus and our hearts are truly devoted to his way then, yes, as Jesus says here in Matthew, we must demonstrate mercy to everyone. We may be repulsed by the lifestyles of certain individuals and groups, but the love of God should draw us near to them. We must recognize that Jesus could have been repulsed by our sins as well and could have left us to perish in them.[4] But if he would reach out to us while we were still trapped, who are we willing to reach out to?
At the end of Matthew’s gospel is Jesus’ command called “The Great Commission.” It tells us to preach and teach Jesus’ message and then to Baptize those who accept it. Today we have; but what about tomorrow?
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[1] “From Ralph Milton's RUMORS, a free Internet ‘e-zine’ for Christians with a sense of humor."
[2]Doug Redford, The Life and Ministry of Jesus : The Gospels (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Pub., 2007), 128.
[3] Tony Campolo, The Kingdom of God Is a Party (Word, 1990); used by permission from Thomas Nelson Publishing
[4]Doug Redford, The Life and Ministry of Jesus : The Gospels (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Pub., 2007), 130.