St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

Matthew, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, is generally identified with Levi, the tax collector mentioned in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. Matthew’s Gospel tells us that he was sitting at the tax booth when Jesus came to him and simply said, “Follow me.” Matthew got up and followed him. There was no long discussion and no list of qualifications. Jesus called, and Matthew answered. Later, Matthew welcomed Jesus to a meal where other tax collectors and people considered sinners were also present.

That meal caused trouble. The religious leaders could not understand why Jesus would sit at the same table with people like these. Tax collectors were among the most despised people in Jewish society. They worked within the Roman system, collecting money from their own people for an occupying government, and many had a reputation for collecting more than was required and keeping the difference for themselves. They were regarded as collaborators, extortioners, and traitors. Respectable people avoided them, and devout Pharisees wanted little to do with them.

Matthew, then, was hardly the sort of man anyone would have expected Jesus to choose as one of his closest followers. But that is part of what makes his story so important. Jesus did not look at Matthew and see only a tax collector or an outcast. He saw a man who could answer the call to follow him. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly challenged the comfortable assumption that respectable people were always closer to God than those society had pushed aside. In his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, it was the tax collector who humbled himself and prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” and went home justified before God.

Early Christian writers such as Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria tell us that Matthew preached among the people of Judea and later carried the Gospel farther east. How much of that tradition can be established historically is uncertain. The Church has also long remembered Matthew as a martyr, although we do not know with certainty when, where, or how he died.

What we do know is where his story begins. Matthew was sitting at a tax booth when Jesus called him. He left it behind and followed. His life reminds us that Jesus was never limited by the labels people placed on one another. A man regarded as a sinner and an outcast became an apostle of Christ and, in the Church’s tradition, one of the great witnesses to the Gospel.