St. Matthew: The Tax Man Who Followed

Every town under Roman occupation had one, and Capernaum was no exception: a customs post by the lakeshore where a local Jewish man, working for the occupying power, collected tolls and tariffs from his own countrymen — and, by the standard practice of the profession, very likely skimmed a private profit off the top of every transaction. In first-century Judea, there was scarcely a more despised job available to a Jewish man. Tax collectors were grouped, socially and religiously, with "sinners": barred from full participation in synagogue life, treated as collaborators with Rome, and generally assumed to be thieves by trade rather than exception. The man sitting at that particular tax table went by the name Levi, son of Alphaeus. History would come to know him as Matthew.

Two Words That Changed Everything

The Gospels record the moment with almost startling brevity. Jesus, walking along the lakeshore, saw Matthew sitting at his tax booth and said only, "Follow me." According to Matthew's own Gospel, "he rose and followed him" (Matthew 9:9) — no negotiation, no hesitation described, no settling of accounts first. Mark's Gospel and Luke's Gospel tell the same story under the name Levi, and Christian tradition has always understood Levi and Matthew to be the same man, a tax collector who took a new name — as Simon had become Peter — when he took on a new life.

Did you know? A tax collector's job required him to be literate, numerate, and fluent in the record-keeping conventions of Roman administration — skills that would serve him well later, since Matthew is the only one of the four evangelists whose Gospel reads, at points, like a carefully organized ledger of Jesus's words and deeds, arranged into five great blocks of teaching.

A Party for Sinners

Matthew's response to being called was not quiet gratitude but a celebration: he threw a banquet at his own house and invited Jesus, along with what the Gospel calls "many tax collectors and sinners" — his old colleagues and associates, the only social circle a man in his former line of work would have had. The religious leaders who saw this were scandalized that a rabbi would eat at the same table as such company. Jesus's answer, aimed squarely at their objection, became one of his most quoted lines: "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick... I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (Matthew 9:12-13).

Follow me. — Jesus, to Matthew (Matthew 9:9)

It is a small but telling detail that Matthew's own Gospel does not soften his past. It names him, in its own list of the Twelve, simply as "Matthew the tax collector" (Matthew 10:3) — the only Gospel to attach that occupational label to his name at all, as though the man who wrote it wanted no reader to forget exactly whom Christ had chosen to call.

The Gospel He Left Behind

Ancient tradition, running back to St. Irenaeus and St. Clement of Alexandria in the second century, holds that Matthew preached the Gospel among the Hebrews for roughly fifteen years before turning to other lands, and that he composed his account of Christ's life and teaching for that Jewish-Christian audience specifically — steeped in Old Testament quotation, structured to show again and again how Jesus fulfilled the promises made to Israel's prophets and patriarchs. Later Christian art would give each of the four evangelists a symbol drawn from the four living creatures of the prophet Ezekiel's vision, and Matthew's is the winged man: fitting, tradition says, for a Gospel that opens by tracing Christ's human genealogy all the way back to Abraham, emphasizing his full and complete humanity.

Did you know? Whatever else scholars debate about the Gospel's composition and sources, the man traditionally credited with authorship is the same one first named, without ceremony, sitting at a tax booth on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

What Happened After

Here the record thins considerably. The Catholic Encyclopedia is direct about it: regarding the years after his time preaching among the Hebrews, "of Matthew's subsequent career we have only inaccurate or legendary data." Various ancient traditions place his later missionary work in Ethiopia, Persia, or Parthia, and accounts of how he died disagree so widely — variously described as burned, stoned, or beheaded — that the Encyclopedia states plainly that the manner of his martyrdom is simply not known with confidence. What is not disputed by any tradition is that, like nearly all of the Twelve, he gave his life for the Gospel he had first received as two spoken words on a lakeshore.

A Life Turned Around

Matthew's story endures less because of what is known about his death than because of what is known about his life's turning point: a man defined, by his whole society, by what he took from others, who became instead the one who gave away an entire account of the life of Christ so that it would never be lost. Every collection plate, every accountant's ledger, every person whose profession makes them easy to distrust has, in Matthew, a patron who was once exactly that — and who left it all, immediately, the moment he was called by name.

Helper

Reflection Questions:

1. Matthew got up from his tax table the instant Jesus said "Follow me," without settling his accounts first. What in your own life would you need to leave unfinished if Christ called you today?
2. The religious leaders were scandalized that Jesus ate with "tax collectors and sinners." Are there people you find it hard to imagine Christ choosing to sit down with — and what does that say about where you've drawn your own lines?
3. Matthew's own Gospel is the only one that calls him "the tax collector," refusing to hide his past. Is there a part of your own history you're tempted to conceal rather than let God transform it into a testimony?
4. Tradition remembers almost nothing certain about Matthew's later years except that he died for the Gospel. What would it look like to hold your own legacy loosely, and let your faithfulness matter more than your recognition?
5. A man skilled at keeping ledgers and accounts became the one who recorded the words and deeds of Christ for every generation after him. What skill or training you already have might God be asking you to place in his service?