Fourth Sunday after Pentecost ~ June 8, 2008

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we continue our journey through Matthew and see the calling of Matthew, the tax collector, as a disciple of Jesus. In our text there are two concepts I would like to explore 1) Tax collectors & sinners and 2) Table-fellowship, or why was it important to see Jesus eating at Matthew’s home with “sinners”?

First – Tax collectors and sinners, what does Matthew mean by using these terms? Let’s look at tax collectors. We all have an idea in our mind about tax collectors, at least the form we have in the United States of the IRS. We don’t often think of them as corrupt, but just not people we think good thoughts about. In the time of Jesus a tax-collector was a little different. The job of tax collector was to gather funds related to trade and commerce. They would collect taxes on items bought and sold, and even for traveling on Roman roads (like a toll booth). Rome knew that they could train people and send them out so they set up an out-sourcing system that would go to the highest bidder. If a person wanted this job they would have to bid on it and it would go to the one who had the highest bid. Already we see where some trouble would come in – people, to win the job, would have to bid high and would go into debt. And people would want to get out of debt as quickly as possible so it opened the temptation to over tax to get out of debt quicker. We don’t know if Matthew acted this way but we can guess that Zacchaeus did from his action of paying back people and more. You can see why people didn’t like tax-collectors.

Sinners, both Matthew and the Pharisees say Jesus at with “tax-collectors and sinners.” What does “sinner” mean? In this context I believe that this is looking at outward, visible actions that were seen by the public as breaking the law of man and God. Things like cheating other, adultery, murder, etc. And at the time of Jesus the “small-town” grape-vine worked well, so if someone did something bad, the whole community knew about it and often the person was treated differently.