Alright, we're talking about Matthew the tax collector, the guy who wrote the book that we're looking at right now, as the repugnant cultural other, the character in society that is just different enough from all of his neighbors and also just close enough in proximity that he is revolting, he's disgusting to them. He is the absolute worst, the thing that you wouldn't want to be. And for you and me, we gotta dig into that a little bit to fully understand why. For the original audience, like one word got it done: publican, tax collector. Now, theoretically, most people still don't like paying taxes that much. And I understand that there's been more of a cultural political divide lately where some people are like, no, taxes are the way to a good society. More people should pay more taxes, and then we can use that money through the efficiency of government, my biases are showing there, to make everything better for everyone. I'm not sold on that. Like just full disclosure, I have a bias against what Matthew was doing because I'm not a huge fan of taxes. I think probably some taxation is a reasonable thing in society, but when you take things from people without consent, I don't know, it gets into some pretty sticky territory. Well, the Romans took a lot of things from people without their consent, like the entire Mediterranean world. They went on a gigantic conquest expedition that started when they defeated their neighbors, the Carthaginians, way back in the Punic Wars, that's the second century BC, a couple hundred years before the time of Jesus. And they just didn't quit after that. Carthage was like the Czech, the Soviet Union to the 1980s United States, who kept Rome in the western part of the Mediterranean instead of letting them leak into the more Greek part of the Eastern Mediterranean. But once Carthage was out of the way, with the famous battles that you've heard of, like the Battle of Zama and the famous characters you've heard of, like Scipio Africanus and Hannibal, the great Hannibal, who fought legendarily with elephants going over the Alps to go and attack and surround Rome. I mean, all this interesting legendary stuff happens, and the original audience would have remembered those interesting legendary things, but they would have also remembered that after that Rome turned mean. And they went around and they set up what are called client king states in Judea and Galilee that we read about as the setting for the book of Matthew, were client king states. They had local ethnic rulers who were in charge, in this case the Herod family, and then they had a governor, a representative of the Roman state that was there, and they kind of worked in tandem with the governor really being the person in charge to make sure that order was maintained, enough justice was dished out so that people would continue to not revolt against the government, and to make sure that taxes were collected. And the taxes part is where Matthew comes in. Now, there were multiple classes within Roman society. You've heard a lot of these names before, like the equestrian class is a higher-ranking, mild nobility that obviously, I mean, they were horsemen, they were knights. And then you've got your plebes, your plebeians, who are the lowest ranking types. That's why when you see movies from the 80s where they're introducing frat guys through hell week to make them pay to get into the frat, they're like, come on, plebe. It's a Roman reference there. But then the patricians, they were the fancy types, the noble types that had the money and the senatorial seats. And back in the Roman Republic, there was a bicameral legislature kind of setup where you had the really fancy people governing at the highest level, but then you had another house of more normal people. And all before the time of Jesus, this system broke up and collapsed in the era of Julius Caesar and Pompeii and all of this, about 50 years, 60 years before the time of Christ. But in all of that, there was this little crack, this little window that appeared as Rome tried to expand with a new class of Roman citizen. And it was a mild nobility class, and it was one of the only ways to crack into your overlord's authoritarian caste system, and that was by becoming a part of the social class known as the publicani. So you're never gonna be a patrician, you're just like, you can't do that. You're not Roman, it's not happening. You're never gonna be an equestrian that's a noble knight, equestrian's not gonna rule Rome very often, but you know, they're powerful and wealthy. And you're never even really gonna be a plebeian because you're not really Roman, you're a conquered person, you're an outsider to this whole game, but publican, that was possible. And the way you did this is that you went to the Roman government and you would make a bid, and you would say, All right, I'm gonna give you this much money in tax revenue if you give me a double O license to tax my own people. And then I'll go around and do that. And the risk that the publican would assume was that they couldn't collect enough taxes, and then they would take a loss on that private tax contract. And then the upside for the publican was that they found a way to gouge their own people enough by knowing all the ins and outs and who does business where and all the different places that you could tax in order to come out way ahead. And so there's this game that is being played that isn't just about tax money. But the way that the tax collector, especially the local indigenous tax collector, got paid was in two forms. One, they got paid with money that they took from their fellow countrymen who were also being occupied. But two, they got paid with status. They earned this ridiculous title that their overlords would hand down to them. You get this Roman social status, congrats, but they couldn't use it. It's not like they could cash that in at parties or whatever and stuff and be like, hey guys, guess who's the publican now? Like, you just get beaten to death. Everybody hates you. You earned that by shafting us, you jerk. So it's this really strange role that would have come with really bizarre social limitations like we were talking about yesterday. You are signing up for a life of wealth and literally nothing useful socially to spend it on. The only people you're gonna be able to hang out with are other people who no one likes or has a use for. So who's that gonna be? Well, maybe you could also hang out with people who have dirty jobs if you were a tax collector. Not like micro dirty jobs where there's some dignity to it, but like the stuff that is ethnically and religiously dirty that would cause uncleanness and would make it so that if anybody was around you because of your job, they would become unclean and wouldn't be fit to go in worship. So you might be able to hang out with that person. You might be able to hang out with an occupier, but they're gonna view you for what you are, a complete stooge and a snitch. So you're probably not gonna make much traction with a Gentile or an outsider. And I guess the other people you could hang out with would be other tax collectors hanging around comparing notes about who gouged hardest and best. So the dude's making a killing, but he's become a part of the untouchable class. And here he is in Matthew chapter 9, just sitting there at his tax booth doing his thing. And then this happens. Jesus went on from there, and he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. So everybody is already hackles up and on edge and irritated. And by the time Matthew is written, whether you agree with me that this is relatively close in proximity to the events it describes and written by actually literally Matthew, I think there's great evidence for that, or whether you believe that this was written even a hundred years after the fact, either way, the original audience still would have responded the same way because the publican or tax collector thing, that gig was still going on. Follow me, he told him. Follow me, Jesus told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. The frankness of that account is mind-boggling for me. I mean, set aside for a minute the reaction the original audience would have had, the revulsion they would have felt at the idea that this person could be called. We'll unpack that more soon. But just think about the exchange here. How can I explain this? It's like it's like Facebook or Twitter. Do you know anybody who's quit one of those lately? They don't just quit and go away. I mean, maybe you've quit it lately. You felt pressure to write some lengthy missive explaining to everyone why it's so toxic and you can't do this anymore, and you need to take a break, or if you're taking a break, you gotta do a tweet to be like, hey guys, I'm taking a break from Twitter for a while. It's just been weird around here. I just need to focus on me right now. So something as small as no longer participating in a goofy little social media platform causes us to feel like we need to explain it to the whole world as to what we're doing. I mean, how much more so if you're making a gigantic life shift? Do you feel the pressure to explain that to everybody? And I think that in part also is played out in people doing conversion and deconversion testimonies all over YouTube and podcasts these days. Here's why I'm not this anymore, here's why I'm that now. And the idea of coming out used to be something associated with sexual orientation or things like that, but now we come out for everything. Like everything that we think now, everything that we align ourselves with now, whichever team we're a part of, it's like this big, gigantic announcement. Contrast that with what Matthew did here. Remember, he's writing this book. He's got the pen in his hand. He can do whatever he wants theoretically. He could tell this incredible, dramatic story about all the inner turmoil he felt, and the things that he had heard that Jesus had done and said, and the pressure that put on him, and how he felt agony over the things that he'd done, and how he got into it in the first place, and how that was a bummer and a misstep, but he got mixed up with the wrong guys, and then he was just there, and then you get addicted to the money and the women and the booze, and you can't bring yourself to let it go. And then Jesus shows up and he makes his call, and I feel so torn, but ultimately he doesn't give us any drama. Nothing. He skips it. Why? What's he trying to communicate implicitly by not giving us any of those juicy details or the oh so important insight to his rugged up and down emotions? I think it's not too hard to come up with an answer to that question because I think he's trying to point at Jesus. Because I think what Matthew is trying to do is to say, I'm not the point. I think Matthew is modeling what he's writing in the book right here. It's like it's not really about me. It's not really about this amazing story of me signing up. And I'm not saying that stories about you signing up or me signing up are bad or that we shouldn't do them. Like I think those things are awesome. Matthew just elected not to, I think, because very clearly the details and the drama and the social rejection that he felt as a result of this move that he chose to make just weren't the point. I think he felt like maybe it distracted from what was the point. Well, what was the point? Okay, well, one, we've already talked about it. It's the authority of Jesus, it's the profound call of Jesus on his life. It's Matthew recognizing that what was a bigger deal and more important than this gig was this truer, realer thing. Why does Matthew go on to include in chapter 13 when he gets into the kingdom parables the stuff about the pearl of great price, this treasure that was buried in a field? He has these twin parables that are about somebody who knows what value looks like when they see it, and they see that there is this great thing right there, and they go and sell everything else they've got to apprehend that thing of great value that they happen to discover before it goes away. Is Matthew talking about himself a little bit there? I think maybe he is, because he's going to punt on an unbelievably lucrative gig to follow Jesus on what he chooses to describe as looking like a whim. So, one, there's that authority of Jesus, there's the incredible value that Matthew is trying to convince the readers of his book to see in Jesus and the values of the kingdom. But then there's also this weird contrast between Jesus' character and his kingdom values and the weird opposition that he's starting to run into. And I think Matthew is trying to just roll us into that story because he views that conflict and the distinction between the world values of the Pharisees and the kingdom values of Jesus as being really the bigger story here. So it's amazingly humble, it's amazingly compelling, and it's also amazing that a guy who was the repugnant cultural other, the absolute reject outsider of reject outsiders, you could not have imagined a more repugnant character to describe here than what Matthew was. It's pretty telling that he ends up not just getting to sign up or being allowed in, but being put in charge of writing this thing. He plays an infinitely important role in the unfolding of the kingdom because of his time with Jesus and what he writes down about it later on. Which, last thought, brings us back to that theme that we've already seen play out a whole bunch, which is that the kingdom is not just for people who you would expect. It's not for people who look a certain way and sound a certain way, and who are very impressive and well liked. The kingdom does not care about our stupid social rules and our stupid social pecking orders. It doesn't care about those silly, stupid social pressures that to us feel so binding in our little moment in time. And Matthew being roped into this thing with nothing more than two quick words as a homeless guy walked by his tax booth is evidence of that reality, both in this moment and right now, for each of us as we think about what to do with the open invitation to be a part of the kingdom as well. Wrapping it up there. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.