There's a version of you that you keep apologizing for. The part with the record. The part that made the choice you'd take back if you could. The part you're quietly sure disqualifies you from the table where the good people sit. If you've been making a private arrangement with yourself — one day, after enough clean living, after I've earned it back, then I'll be allowed to belong — I want you to know that arrangement isn't in the text. Jesus never asked you to wait for it.
This week's reading is Matthew 9, and it might be the most overlooked-and-rearranging chapter in the gospels. The lectionary pairs it with Genesis 12 and Romans 4 — Abram called at seventy-five, Abraham believing while his body was "as good as dead" — and the more I sit with the three passages together, the clearer one thread becomes. So I want to walk through it with you.
A call that came before the change
The story is short. Almost too short for how much it carries. Jesus is walking along, sees a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and says, "Follow me." Matthew gets up and follows. That's the entire call. No interview. No probation period. No "clean yourself up first and then we'll talk."
But you have to understand who's in that booth, because Matthew tells us his job before he tells us anything else — and that's not an accident. A tax collector in the first century wasn't an accountant. He was a collaborator. Rome occupied the land, and they hired locals to squeeze their own neighbors for the empire's money — and to skim whatever extra they could on top. When people in Matthew's town looked at that booth, they didn't see a man with an unpopular job. They saw a traitor. Someone who'd sold out his own people for a cut. The kind of person you'd cross the street to avoid, and feel righteous for avoiding.
That's who Jesus looks at and says, "Follow me." And the very next scene, he's at dinner in Matthew's house, with Matthew's friends — which means a roomful of other tax collectors and the people Matthew calls sinners. The religious leaders standing outside the door are scandalized. They corner the disciples: "Why does your teacher eat with people like that?" And Jesus answers with a sentence that should rearrange how you see yourself:
"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners."
Sit in that for a second. The thing you think disqualifies you from the table — Jesus names it as the exact reason he came for you. You don't get called despite being the wrong person. In this story, being the wrong person is the whole point.
Abraham at seventy-five, and the order of operations
Now look at Genesis 12, because the lectionary is doing something deliberate by pairing it with Matthew. God speaks to a man named Abram and says, "Go from your country and your father's house to the land that I will show you." And Abram goes. We tell this like it's heroic — and it is — but notice the detail Genesis refuses to leave out: Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
Seventy-five. This isn't a young man with everything ahead of him answering an exciting call. This is a man well past the age where his culture expected anything new from him, being told that the most important chapter of his life hasn't started yet.
Paul, writing in Romans 4, presses on the same bruise even harder. He says Abraham believed God's promise of a child while his own body was already as good as dead — Paul's words, not mine — and Sarah's womb was barren. There was no evidence. There was no reasonable expectation. Paul says he believed "hoping against hope." And that — the believing before the proof — is what Paul says was "reckoned to him as righteousness."
Do you hear how that lands on top of Matthew? Abram wasn't called because he was qualified. He was called old, called childless, called with a dead-end body and an empty future, and the call itself is what made him the father of nations. The qualification came after the calling. It always does.
This is the line I keep coming back to, and I want you to hear it as flatly and plainly as I can say it: God doesn't call the qualified and then make them worthy. He calls the disqualified — and the calling is the qualification.
Two interruptions: the daughter and the woman who couldn't speak
There's a second move in Matthew 9 we'd be cheating you if we skipped, because it answers the question you're probably already asking: okay, but what about the people who are too far gone? Not just compromised — actually broken. Actually out of time.
Right in the middle of the chapter, two people interrupt Jesus, and Matthew stacks them on top of each other on purpose. First, a synagogue leader falls at Jesus' feet and says his daughter has just died — he's not asking for improvement, he's asking for resurrection. While Jesus is walking to that house, a woman who'd been bleeding for twelve years reaches through the crowd and touches the edge of his cloak. Twelve years of being unclean. Twelve years of being the woman you don't get near.
A man with power and a woman with none. A respected leader and an outcast nobody would name. A public, kneeling request and a silent, desperate reach from behind. And Jesus answers them both with the same word. He turns to the woman — he turns, he doesn't just keep walking — and says, "Take heart, daughter. Your faith has made you well." He calls her daughter. The untouchable woman gets a family name. And then he takes the dead girl by the hand, and she gets up.
The bleeding stops. The dead rise. And neither of them earned it. One of them couldn't even speak.
Whatever table you think you're not allowed at
So pull the two halves of this chapter together with me, because they're really one truth wearing two outfits. In the first half, the problem is that you're too compromised. And Jesus says: that's exactly who I came to call. In the second half, the problem is that you're too far gone. And Jesus says: take heart, daughter. Get up.
There is no version of "too much" in this chapter that Jesus doesn't walk straight toward. Not too compromised. Not too old. Not too unclean. Not too late. Not too dead. The calling, the reaching, the taking-by-the-hand — all of it happened before the change, not after. Grace is not the reward for getting your life together. Grace is the thing that gets your life together.
If you've been waiting until you're worthy to come to the table, I want to gently say it out loud: that day is not coming. And Jesus never asked you to wait for it. Whatever table you think you're not allowed at — go sit down. He's already saved you a seat.
Listen to the full episode of Monday to Sunday for the longer walk through Matthew 9, Genesis 12, and Romans 4 — and the one thing I'd ask you to do this week. New episodes Tuesdays.