The Name He Kept: Chesed, the Tax Booth, and the Line He Quotes Twice

The only person in the ancient world who insists on calling Matthew a tax collector is Matthew.

It is his book. Partway through it he has to list the twelve people closest to the teacher he is writing about, and it is the kind of passage a writer gets through quickly. Simon, also known as Peter. Andrew his brother. James son of Zebedee, and John his brother. Philip and Bartholomew. Thomas. And then: Matthew the tax collector.

Every other name on that list is a name. His is a name with a job attached, and it is the job nobody wanted to be seen with. Nobody made him do that. Mark tells the same story and calls the man Levi. Luke calls him Levi too. Neither of them puts the occupation in the apostle list.

Monday was the twenty-first of September, which on the calendar is Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. It has its own appointed readings and almost none of us heard them, because almost none of us were in a church on a Monday. Proverbs 3, Psalm 119, Second Timothy 3, Matthew 9. The thread through them is one plain question. Who handed you what you believe? Not is it true. Who gave it to you, what were they like, and what had they done before they got to you.

Sitting is the posture of the job

Matthew 9, verse 9. "As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him."

That is the entire call. Nine words of dialogue in English, two in Greek. Akolouthei moi. Follow me.

But look at the verb underneath the man. He is sitting.

The Greek for the booth is telonion, and it is a physical thing. A table by a road or a gate or a dock, where somebody employed by the occupying power takes a cut of everything that moves past. The man at that table is a neighbor who took the contract.

That is why the loathing for tax collectors in the gospels runs hotter than the loathing for Romans. A Roman is an outsider. He marched in with an army and he collects for an empire, and nobody expected better of him, so you can hate him without being surprised by him. The man at the booth is one of yours. He sat down at that table on purpose, and he is there every day where everyone can see him.

Sitting is the posture of that job. It is stationary work. The whole point is that you are there and the road comes to you. And then a man walks past and says two words, and the tax collector stands up.

The scandal is the table

The next thing that happens is dinner. "And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples."

Notice how fast that is. He gets up from one table and within a verse he is at another one, and he has brought his entire address book. These are his colleagues. This is the guild. Whatever we imagine repentance looks like, it did not involve Matthew going somewhere else and starting over among better people. The first thing he does is throw a dinner and invite everyone he already knows.

And that is what the Pharisees object to. Read the complaint carefully, because it is not about theology. "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Not why does he teach that. Not why does he forgive them. Why does he eat with them.

The scandal is the table.

The one verse he quotes twice

The answer Jesus gives has three sentences in it, and the middle one is the reason this is the reading for Matthew's day.

"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick." Then: "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'" Then: "For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."

The middle sentence is a quotation. It is Hosea 6:6, and Jesus is telling a room of religious professionals to go look it up, which is a little bit of a dig, since looking things up is their job.

Here is the checkable part, and it is why I think the church put this passage on this day. Matthew is the only gospel writer who quotes Hosea 6:6, and he does it twice. Once here, and again in chapter 12, when the disciples are picking grain on the sabbath and the objection comes back. Mark does not quote it. Luke does not quote it. Neither does John. One evangelist keeps returning to one verse, and that evangelist is the man who was sitting at the booth when somebody decided to eat with him anyway.

He is not quoting it as a scholar. He is quoting the line that got him in the room.

So the line Matthew keeps coming back to is closer to this. I want the loyalty, and I want it pointed at people you would rather not be loyal to. And he would know. Somebody aimed it at him while he was still sitting at the table taking money off his neighbors.

The quiet administrative way a name comes off a list

Here is where it lands now, and I want to do it carefully, because this is the reading where it would be easy to get cheap.

The Pharisees' objection was about who was at the table. Not what anyone believed, not what anyone argued. Who was eating. We have gotten very good at that objection. I do not mean in the loud way, the way you would see from across a room. I mean the quiet administrative way, where a name comes off a list and nobody announces it.

You know something about somebody, how they voted or what they posted or what they said at a funeral three years ago, and you do not confront them, and you do not fall out with them. You just stop initiating. The invitation that used to go out does not go out. If asked, you would say you have both been busy, and you would half believe it.

I want to be clear that this runs in every direction. It is not a diagnosis of one side of anything. Whoever you are and whatever you think, there is a category of person you have quietly stopped setting a place for, and the sorting happened without a decision you would recognize as one.

And here is what makes it hard rather than simple. Some of that sorting is right. There are people it is not safe to sit with, and some tables should not be set, and I am not going to tell somebody to have dinner with a person who has harmed them. That would be a misuse of this passage and it has been misused that way plenty.

The question is narrower and more uncomfortable. It is whether the specific person you are thinking about right now is in the unsafe category, or in the much larger category of people you have simply decided are not your kind, and whether you have ever once said that to yourself in those words.

Because Jesus ate with collaborators. Not metaphorical ones. Men who took money from their own neighbors on behalf of an occupying army, and who were doing it that morning.

I do this. I should say that plainly rather than leaving it in the second person. I am not somebody who cuts people off. I have never once written a person out. What I do is stop reaching, and let the distance do the work, and then describe the result as a thing that happened rather than a thing I did. It has the same outcome as a decision and none of the discomfort of making one. And the tell is that I can always produce a reason afterward. Never before.

Knowing from whom you learned it

The other two readings are doing something specific on this day.

Second Timothy 3 is the passage people quote for the line about all scripture being inspired by God and useful for teaching. That line is right there and it is worth having. But look at the verse just before it, which almost never gets quoted with it. "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it."

From whom. Paul does not say knowing that it is true. He says knowing the person it came through. Timothy learned it from his mother and his grandmother, and Paul names them earlier in the letter, which is not a thing ancient letters usually bother to do.

Put that next to the man whose day this is. The first gospel in your Bible came to you through a tax collector. The book was handled. It has fingerprints on it. Somebody with a history you would not have chosen wrote down the sentence about mercy, and he wrote it down twice, because it was the sentence that had been used on him.

Proverbs 3 is the other half of it. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. That verse has been embroidered onto more pillows than any other sentence in the Hebrew Bible, and I think the pillows have cost us the meaning. It is not an instruction to stop thinking. The word is about weight. You lean on a railing by putting part of yourself onto it, and until you do, you have no idea whether it holds. Of course you understand things. The question is what you are resting on at the point where the understanding runs out.

Matthew had an understanding. He had a very clear one, and it was working. He had a table and a contract and a revenue stream and a well-founded view of what his life was going to be. He did not lose an argument. He stood up.

Two things to try before Sunday

First. Name the table. Think of one person you have stopped setting a place for, where the reason is not safety. You do not have to call them. You do not have to fix it this week. Just move it out of the category of things that happened and into the category of things you chose, and say the actual reason to yourself in a plain sentence. That sentence is usually short and it is usually embarrassing, which is how you know you have found it.

Second. From whom. Think of the person you actually learned your faith from. Not the author you read. The person. A grandmother, a youth leader, somebody at a job who never made a speech about it. If they are alive, tell them. Not a long message. Tell them what you got and that you got it from them. I would guess they do not know. Almost nobody knows. The people who hand things on are usually the last to find out that anything was handed.

A signature, not an apology

One more thing about the list. Matthew the tax collector. His own book, his own name, his own hand, and he keeps the job on it.

I used to read that as humility, and I am not sure anymore. Humility would be leaving yourself off, or going by Levi like the other two writers do.

I think he keeps it because it is the evidence. He is the proof of the sentence he quotes twice. If the man who wrote this book had always been respectable, the line about mercy would be a nice idea. Because he was at the booth, it is a report.

So he does what a witness does at the bottom of a statement. He puts his name on the page, and right next to his name he writes where he was standing when he saw it.

Matthew the tax collector.

That is a signature, not an apology.