The Gospel passage for the Feast of Saint Matthew is Matthew 9:9-13:

As Jesus passed by,
he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.
He said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.
While he was at table in his house,
many tax collectors and sinners came
and sat with Jesus and his disciples.
The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples,
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
He heard this and said,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
Go and learn the meaning of the words,
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

The Feast of St. Matthew recounts the call of Jesus to the tax collector Matthew in the Gospel which tradition attributed to him. I love the sparseness of Jesus’ call: “follow me.” Whether this is the sort of attribution which was shaped over time by the oral tradition into its simplest form or whether Jesus was always this terse, the reality is that every disciple of Jesus must respond to this command, each and every day. This, it seems to me, is the issue with which the Pharisees struggle. There is no question that the Pharisees were attempting to live according to God’s Law. And as such, they made distinctions between those who seemed to be truly on the path to righteousness and those who had wandered far from it. Everyone knew who they were: tax collectors and sinners. How would you like to be identified primarily as “the sinner” or “a sinner”?

The question that the Pharisees ask of his disciples, then, is both apropos and far from the point – “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” From the point of view of the Messiah, from the divine point of view, that is, what option does Jesus have but to eat with sinners? That is a reality that the Pharisees now seem not to consider, that we are all sinners in need of God’s mercy, even the Pharisees themselves. Jesus is able to see everyone not simply as sinner, but the beloved of God, each one created in his image. I used to be troubled when I was younger by the final phrase of this passage, “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners,” because I could only see it as exclusionary. Why could the righteous not be called by God? I see now that we are all sinners, called by God, and that our necessary response to God’s mercy is to hear always Jesus’ call to “follow me.” Whenever we drift toward sin, God calls us back to righteousness. We need to hear the call and respond.

The call is issued and heard in a variety of circumstances, but on this day, my wife Tabitha’s 40th birthday, I reflect on it in the most concrete of realities: her. Most of us have such a person, one through whom Christ’s call is heard and who sees us not as sinner alone, but one who is called to righteousness. Many years ago when I met her, at a time when I had an academic grasp of the Scriptures but was spiritually hollow, she called me back quietly and gently. Her quiet desire to live a righteous life, without need of attention or glory, gave me a constant model to imitate, a lifeline to Christ’s call “follow me.” For all these years she has whispered it through her words and her deeds. I hear Christ’s call through her each and every day, and I am thankful that God has given me such a gift. May we all be attuned to those who are issuing Jesus’ call to us to hear and to respond.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.