new church life: september / october 2013
to find a way to pay the military,
and ultimately, this responsibility
came down to the tax collectors
who controlled the finances in the
provinces. (Ibid.)
If the Lord walked up to you
and said, “Follow Me,” doing so
would have constituted a lifechanging decision. So it was for
Matthew. He had a job like ours
and must have been immersed
in day-to-day affairs. Scholars
speculate that he would have been involved with collecting taxes on land,
collecting customs duties on luxury goods entering the province, taxes on
homes confiscated from criminals, and so on.
Matthew had the authority to collect taxes according to the terms of a
private contract with the local Roman authorities. He would have actually
paid for the contract himself, because “tax collection was contracted out to the
highest bidder.” (Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, Oxford University
Press 1994) As such, many of them were corrupt.
We would not expect that the Lord would select a disciple from such a
trade, yet:
“As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at
the tax office. And He said to him, ‘Follow Me.’ So he arose and followed Him.”
(Matthew 9:9)
Our story continues:
What would it look like to
be a laborer in the Lord’s
harvest? It need not be
grandiose. One way is
sincerely asking the Lord to
remove our shortcomings so
we can be better laborers.
Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax
collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples. And when
the Pharisees saw it, they said to His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax
collectors and sinners?” (Matthew 9:10-11)
It appears the Pharisees were pointing their finger at Matthew. Publicans
were despised. Even the best of them collaborated with the Romans and
wielded an uncomfortable advantage over their own people. As such, the Jews
hated them. Even the Lord called them out in the Sermon on the Mount: “I say
to you love your enemies, bless those who curse you . . . for if you love those
who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the
same?” (Matthew 7:44, 46)
But hatred is a poison in the human soul. The Heavenly Doctrines warn
us about hatred in the strongest terms: “He who is in hatred not only has no
charity, but he also does violence to charity,” (Arcana Coelestia 1010.2), those
who hate “breathe vengeance,” (Ibid. 814), and “desire to destroy the soul,”
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