The Case Of The Turned Around Tax Man

February 15, 1987

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Scripture: “As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew, sitting at the tax table, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him.” Matthew 9:9

JUST LIKE THAT! Can you imagine? JUST LIKE THAT! Almost as fast as you can snap your fingers. When he began the day he had a job.... When he ended the day he had a vocation. When he took his coffee break in the morning, he was a bureaucrat.... By noontime he was a believer. One minute he was working for the government.... The next minute he was working for God.... JUST LIKE THAT!

Can you believe it? Could it possibly have been that simple, that rapid a change? What do you think? Is this the way this business of spiritual decision happens in people’s lives? Well, let’s look at it. What’s the word to describe Matthew’s turnaround? Astonishing, dramatic, startling?.... All of these—

From tax man to God’s man, from keeper of the books to keeper of the Faith, from digits to discipleship, from figures to follower, from Matthew the accountant to Matthew the Apostle....faster than overnight.... JUST LIKE THAT!

It does sound too neat, doesn’t it, at first, too... well, contrived to be believable. Couldn’t have happened that way.... Life’s more complicated, we say. The incentive, at least from the Record, seems too meager to warrant such a complete turnaround in such a brief period of time. He didn’t even go home to kiss his wife goodbye, or his dog, or his hamster, or whatever.... He didn’t even go pick up his raincoat over the water cooler. “Follow me”... and he rose and followed him.... JUST LIKE THAT.

Strange? Or is it? Maybe it isn’t so strange. Maybe when it comes to the big decisions of life, the life-molding decisions, the life determining decisions, the decisions that last for a lifetime, the decisions that MAKE us whatever we’re going to be... maybe it does happen this way... JUST LIKE THAT.

I submit, argue with me if you don’t agree, it’s not the big choices, usually, it’s the little choices that take the time and fuss.

Do we take our vacation this year in the summer or in the spring? Do we go to North Carolina or New Smyrna? Do we invite the Smiths or the Greens? Or maybe closer home----Do I wear this dress to the party or that one? Do I splurge and eat out tonight, or can I stomach the Café one more time? Do I try to get Johnson or Atchley for O.T. Survey

Those are the kind of choices that invite internal debate.... And we weigh the pros and cons, we ask our spouse or roommate what they think, we consult the horoscope, THE REALLY CRUCIAL CHOICES OF LIFE... the ones where the consequences of choosing linger---- Do I love her enough to marry her? Do I really want to do this for the rest of my life? Do I believe this enough to die for it?...

The really crucial choices of life aren’t decided by a coin toss, or a Ouija board, or the advice of a friend. They come out of something deeper, something almost inexorable. THERE COMES A MOMENT, maybe after a long build-up, maybe after a lot of preliminaries have taken place... but

THERE COMES A MOMENT when, with choices like these, you either move out or you don’t, you either say, “Yes, by God, I will do it, or it’s GONE. THERE COMES A MOMENT when something happens down in the gut, and every bit of you votes with a kind of willful spontaneity and an explosion of conviction that simply refuses to admit any other possibility of alterative. Isn’t that the way it is? YOU KNOW AT THAT MOMENT WHAT YOU MUST DO.

Matthew had come to such a moment. The New Testament word for it is “Kairos”, the propitious moment, the opportune moment, the right moment, the fullness of time, FOR HIM. All his life up to that moment had been pointing to that moment. All that had preceded had been anticipatory. HERE WAS CULMINATION.

Can you picture the setting? There’s not much to go on, unfortunately, just a barebones

outline and imagination. The Bible often does that to us. Don’t you wish the story were 10 verses long instead of just ONE?

Some scholars suggest, you know, that this one verse may represent Matthew’s own personal signature, in a sense, the author’s self-identifying mark. He didn’t sign his name anywhere, but he did stick in this story, this incident in which he was personally involved, so people in the know would know. It’s a verse that appears only in Matthew. No other Gospel tells it. It may be, say these scholars, that Matthew, years later, when he came to put together his version of the story of Jesus, using Mark as a source, plus some others, composing a kind of First Century Church membership training manual, that at this point, he inserted into the narrative the kernel of his own autobiographical experience... shorn of detail, devoid of elaboration, but just enough to say, THIS IS THE ESSENCE OF WHAT HAPPENED TO BE. This is how it was.

Sure there’s more, BUT THIS IS THE HEART OF IT. Here is the incredible power of this MAN. I know what I’m talking about, because I was there when it happened.

See it in your mind’s eye.... The tax office was probably nothing more than a toll booth... up around Capernaum, just inside the border of Galilee. Some of you have been there. It was situated along the highway that snaked southwestward from Syria to the Medit. That was the most important road of the region, sort of the I-4 of the Fertile Crescent. Everybody who traveled passed along it, soldiers, merchants, tourists... they all went past the tax office.

Matthew manned the booth. He collected the tax and kept the record. There was a tax

on everything. The Romans didn’t miss a trick. Remember Henny Youngman’s old one liner about the man who was filling out his income tax form? He said, “Don’t tell me you can’t get wounded by a blank.”

Well, back then it was even worse....if you ate, if you played, if you traveled, if you coughed, you paid a tax. Just 2 lines on the old Roman tax form, very simple: “How much do you have? SEND IT IN... There really is nothing new under the sun.

And the Romans let the Jews themselves do the dirty work. That made it even more galling. They appointed local men, local citizens to receive the tax money, rewarding them by letting them extort for themselves whatever extra they could wring out of the people beyond the government’s due.

And some cleaned up. Zacchaeus was one. You could make an enormous profit. Whatever you took in above the set amount was yours. No wonder the tax men were so despised. They were traitors to their own people, Quislings, to use a World War II term, Scalawags, to use a Southern Reconstruction one.

We’re down to speculation now. Maybe Jesus met Matthew when he went to pay his mother’s tax. That would be plausible. Maybe they had a chance to talk together. Maybe more than once.

Maybe several times. SOMETHING CLICKED. It must have. He must have seen something in this tax man that didn’t fit the stereotype. JESUS NEVER WAS BIG ON STEREOTYPES ANYWAY. He saw promise in this man, a potential beneath the veneer.... a hint of integrity, perhaps, an earnestness, a rare scrupulousness, an honesty, an openness, who knows something that made him know here was a man not yet living up to what he could be. That kind of person always drew Jesus like a magnet. He liked him.

And Matthew saw something special in Jesus. Probably it grew over a period of time.... probably it gnawed away at him....a purity that shamed his own tawdriness, an idealism that dwarfed his own limited goals... a generosity that challenged his greed, a vision that stretched his imagination, a consistency that called into question his own vacillation, a basic goodness that far outshone anything he’d ever experienced before.... a nobility of grace that reached down and called out the best that was in him until he knew something had to give.

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG IT TOOK....maybe it was like a slowly arriving dawn, nudging him toward greater self-realization, gently pushing him to see what he was, and what he might come to be.

I don’t know how long it took.... I DO think I understand how Matthew must have felt as he saw his life moving toward a decision.... He could sense it coming. JESUS WAS A GENIUS AT BRINGING PEOPLE TO THAT POINT. Someone has said, “Love’s most creative gift consists not of what we give others, but what we ask them to give of themselves.” I like that. Can there be a greater gift? It’s the pinnacle of creativity, maybe the pinnacle of love. NO ONE WHO EVER LIVED USED THAT GIFT MORE CREATIVELY THAN JESUS.

In life after life across the New Testament we see the fruit of it... In Simon Peter.... “Thou art the rock”... and because he called him that, he became that. In the woman taken in adultery... “Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more.” In blind Bartimaeus, In Saul of Tarsus....over and over. They were what they became because Jesus called it out of them.

AND HERE WITH MATTHEW. “Follow me”... and he knew in his bones at that moment what he must do. How did Emily Dickinson put it: “We never know how high we are Till we are asked to rise. And then if we are true to plan Our statures touch the skies.”

Exactly! It was Matthew’s moment to rise, now or never, his own personal “Kairos”. HE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE HE WAS GOING. He didn’t know what it would lead to. He couldn’t be sure he wasn’t making the biggest blunder of his life. WHO EVER DOES AT THE MOMENT OF KAIROS? You don’t know before you commit...ever, in life.

That’s not how it works. You commit, and THEN you know. It’s that way in marriage—ask anybody who’s ever been there. It’s that way in vocation. It’s that way in a relationship with God, in every big decision...Your commitment always precedes your understand. That’s precisely the nature of FAITH in the Christian sense. YOU DON’T KNOW, BUT YOU GO ANYWAY. You vote with your feet, stepping out into the unknown, with only the pledge of his faithfulness as foundation.

For Matthew, at that moment, it was enough. He gulped, took one last, split-second look around him, then rose and followed him. JUST LIKE THAT. And from that moment on, nothing was ever the same again. Robert Frost speaks of the same kind of experience in his haunting poem THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. I don’t know if he was thinking about Matthew when he wrote it, but he could havebeen. Remember?

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth....

Then took the other.....

He goes on then to say—

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

and that has made all the difference.

Well, yellow wood, tax table, classroom, office desk, kitchen counter, laboratory...maybe even Sunday morning worship service. It could happen anywhere. And it could happen any time. Do you think Matthew ever regretted his decision? Was there ever a time, later, somewhere along the line, when he thought back over what had happened and wished he were back at the tax table with the chance to choose again?

Do you suppose the night of the Crucifixion, that black, terrible Friday, when everything had collapsed around them, he might have entertained the notion that it had all been a horrible mistake?

I don’t know. Those are certainly very human thoughts. You know what strikes me, though---and I invite you to read it for yourself---what strikes me most forcibly is that there is not one shred of evidence in the New Testament account that any person who ever made a commitment to give Jesus Christ even a chance in his life or her life ever ultimately regretted having done so.

Indeed, the evidence to the contrary is simply overwhelming. For three centuries, people

who believed in him faced scorn, ridicule, torture, exile, loss of property, loss of employment, and loss of life itself BUT WOULD NOT ABANDON THE DISCIPLESHIP THAT HAD A LOCKHOLD IN THEIR HEARTS. That’s what the evidence shows.

“I have been his slave for 86 years”, said old Bishop Polycarp when the flames of martyrdom were licking away at his brittle, frail body and they were pleading with him to recant his faith and save his life...... “I have been his slave for 86 years. He has never deserted me. And I am not about to desert him now, just before I leave the world to be with him in eternity.” That’s way beyond me. BUT THAT’S THE EARLY CHURCH PATTERN.

Matthew may have had some doubts along the way. I’m sure they all did. Nobody stays on a peak of spiritual exhilaration without going through some dips and valleys.

BUT HERE’S THE BOTTOM LINE. Matthew himself, like nearly every one of the others, and maybe all, met death violently, defending the faith. Legend says by fire or sword, one or the other... whichever, that tells us something about his staying power. He died as he lived, still bearing witness to the One who saw something in him, made him dissatisfied with the old way of doing things, and lured him to be a part of a bold, challenging adventure.

Now, may I say this to you as exhortation? We’re almost done, but not quite. Exhortation has a hallowed place in the heritage of Methodist homiletics. Preachers are programmed to do this, and you just have to understand and be patient with them. 3 things, almost without elaboration.... almost.

Exhortation Number ONE: WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR BIG DECISIONS, DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE UNORTHODOX. I don’t feel nearly as sorry for the world’s eccentric people, the misfits, the oddballs, the square pegs in a round hole as I do for those who are so tradition bound that they’re dead and don’t know it.

Did you see Crocodile Dundee?[1] Go see it. Wasn’t it wonderful when that girl—what was her name---kissed that rich, dull fiancée goodbye and raced off barefooted in hot pursuit of Dundee to yell at him across the subway station to tell him that she loved and wanted to be with him forever. Terrific!

Wasn’t it wonderful when Mother Teresa took that Nobel Peace Prize money, all $200,000 of it, and gave every dime away to the poorest of the poor, in the name of Him who has everything but became poor for our sakes? Wasn’t it just like her to do that, and wasn’t it beautiful?

I’m not knocking financial security, or tradition, or orthodoxy, but you can have all that in overflowing abundance and still be destitute in the heart.

J.B. Phillips has a brilliant translation of Paul’s warning to the Church at Rome. The King James Version in Romans 12 says, “Be ye not conformed to this world. ”Phillips translates it, almost as if Paul were speaking to us, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold.” There are plenty of grasping people around.... BUT THERE’S A HIGHER WAY OF LIFE Seeing others grow, helping others develop, knowing you’re doing something for the betterment of humankind, THE ROMANCE AND FULFILLMENT OF SELF DENIAL FOR GOD’S SAKE....That’s worth a lot of jewelry and paid-up insurance premiums.

Matthew found it out and his “stature touched the skies.” Don’t be afraid to consider NOT fitting somebody else’s mold.

Exhortation Number TWO—IF GOD IS TRYING TO BREAK THROUGH SOMEHOW TO YOU, BE READY FOR YOUR MOMENT. It doesn’t have to come in a certain way... It doesn’t have to fit a certain pattern. It probably won’t come with the words “YOUR MOMENT” written across it in indelible phosphorescent paint.

One of the great things about God is that his overtures are just that... overtures, not bludgeoning.... they come as whispers, intimations... and are always accompanied by impeccable tact. But if down in your viscera there is a stirring, a tug, an “incipient inclination Godward”, as someone has put it, BE SUSPICIOUS. Don’t chill it by attributing it to greasy food.

Old Scrooge, or was it Dick Mahaffey, at first thought Marley’s ghost was “a blot of mustard, a bit of undigested beef”, but it was really an emissary from God, sent to save him from his own selfish greed. HE ALMOST MISSED IT.

Matthew could have, too. He probably was a very ordinary man. He probably had ordinary talents, and ordinary virtues, which he was using in a very ordinary way. Almost certainly he would never have been known to subsequent history if Jesus hadn’t crossed his path. AND EVEN THAT would not have made much of an impact if he hadn’t acted on the opportunity that presented itself.

BUT HE DID, and “that has made all the difference.” That decision freed him, so that

the innate possibilities that were in him could be swept up in a great movement that

literally transformed the world.

If God is trying to get your attention, BE READY FOR YOUR MOMENT, and let it happen

in all its potential flowering.

Now, finally Exhortation Number THREE....No, not exhortation, Invitation. “As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a person called... Your Name. And he said, ‘Follow me.’”

Well....

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[1] Crocodile Dundee a movie 1986 about a brave Australian who took on life-threatening challenges with ease.