My Past Is Public Record

Peter’s problem was a night.

This one is a life, and it’s harder.

Because there’s a difference between having done a bad thing and having been a certain kind of person for a stretch of years, and if you’re in the second category you already know that Peter’s story only gets you so far. A man can be forgiven for a night. What do you do about a decade?

So let’s talk about the tax collector.

I need you to understand what Matthew was before this gets useful, because if you file him under “guy with an unpopular job” it does nothing for you.

He collected taxes from his own people, in his own town, for the empire occupying it.

Everybody who paid him knew where he sat. The system he worked in was widely understood to let a man take more than he was owed and keep the difference, and no one could do anything about it, because behind him was Rome.

So when a family in Capernaum came up short that season, some portion of that was him. Not a policy, not an abstraction. Him, personally, at a table, taking it.

He was not a man with an embarrassing résumé. He was a man who had personally contributed to his neighbors’ suffering, by name, and they could all point at the booth.

That’s the category. If that’s your category, this chapter is the one.

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

That’s the whole call.

Two words, mid-shift.

Not at a synagogue. Not after Matthew had shown some sign of a change of heart. He was sitting at the booth. He was, at that moment, in the act of doing the thing he was despised for, and the call came to him there, in his work clothes, at his station, in the middle of a Tuesday.

Nobody asked him to clean up first. Nobody asked him to make it right first, which I want to come back to, because you’re already thinking about it.

Luke tells the same story and calls the man Levi. Scripture never says in so many words that the two names are one person. The call scenes match down to the wording, and the church has read them as the same man for as long as anybody has been reading them, and I’m going to do the same.

Because Luke adds a detail that changes everything.

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them.

He throws a party. And the guest list is every person he used to work with.

Think about what that means for a second. The first thing this man does after his life turns is invite his entire old network into his house and sit them down at a table with Jesus. Not the respectable people. Not a fresh start with a better class of friend.

His old life became the room where it happened.

We’ll come back to this hard in the third part of this book, because it’s the answer to the purpose question and it’s not the answer anybody wants. For now just notice that the contacts he was most ashamed of turned out to be the only asset he had that nobody else in the story had.

And the religious people complain about it, and Jesus answers them, and the answer is the one everybody quotes: it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

Here’s the part almost nobody notices, and it’s the reason Matthew is in this book.

There are four apostle lists in the New Testament. In three of them, he’s just Matthew.

In one of them, his name has a label attached. Matthew the tax collector.

That one is in the Gospel of Matthew.

Now, people argue about whose hand actually held the pen on that gospel, and I’m not going to settle it in a chapter and neither is anybody else.

Here’s what nobody argues about.

The one account that carries his name is the one account that keeps his old work attached to him. Mark doesn’t do it. Luke doesn’t. The list in Acts doesn’t. Somewhere in the making of that book, with every opportunity to let the man be simply Matthew forever and nobody any the wiser, somebody left the label in.

Whether that was his own hand or the hand of people who knew him, it comes to the same thing.

That is how he was remembered. With the worst part still written down.

And nobody ever took it back out.

I’ve thought about that for a long time and I’ve landed here.

A man who is still ashamed hides it. A man who is still defending himself explains it. Matthew does neither. He writes it down flat, the way you’d note a date, and moves on to the next name.

That’s what it looks like when a thing has actually been dealt with. Not erased. Not justified. Just no longer load-bearing.

He stopped needing his past to be different than it was.

And here is where books like this usually lie to you, so let me not. That is not the same as it not mattering. It mattered. The families he took from were really short that year and nothing in the gospel undoes that. Grace never tells the truth by making the damage smaller.

It’s that the damage stopped being the thing he was, and became a thing that happened, that he did.

Now the hard sentence, and it’s the hardest one in this book, and I’ve put it here because Matthew is the only man who can hold it.

Being hurt and hurting people are not two different categories of person. They sit in the same man, usually in that order.

You know this. You’ve known it a long time and you’ve never had a good place to put it.

Because there’s a version of your story where you’re the one it happened to, and that version is true. And there’s another version where you’re the reason it happened to somebody else, and that one is also true, and you’ve never once been able to hold both of them in the same hand.

So you pick. Most people pick one and live there.

If you live in the first one, you get bitter and you stay stuck, because you’re waiting on an apology that isn’t coming.

If you live in the second one, you get what you’ve probably got, which is a low permanent hum of being the villain, and a settled understanding that you are not the kind of person these things are for.

Matthew is the proof that you don’t have to pick. The man was genuinely complicit. He also lived under an occupation that built the booth and put him in it. Both. Neither one cancels the other and neither one is the whole account, and Jesus walked up to the middle of all of it and said two words.

One more thing before your move, because you’re already thinking about it and I’d rather say it than let it sit.

Nothing in the text says he paid anybody back.

There’s a tax collector in Luke who does. Zacchaeus, up a tree, promises four times over. It’s a different man, a different story, and it’s beautiful, and it’s not this one.

Matthew’s account has no restitution scene. Which does not mean he didn’t. It means Luke and Matthew both thought the story worked without it, and that should loosen something in you.

If there’s amends you can make, make them. I’m not going to talk you out of that and I’d think less of you if I did. But if you have been sitting out here for twenty years because you cannot make it right, and the people are dead or gone or would not welcome hearing from you, understand that Matthew got up from the booth anyway.

You are not being held at the door until the ledger clears.

Here’s your move, and it’s a strange one.

Write your job title.

Whatever your version of the tax collector is. The label the people who knew you then would put next to your name. The one you’ve spent years hoping nobody attaches when your name comes up.

Write it down plainly, in three or four words, with no sentence around it. No explanation, no context, no but you have to understand what was going on.

Just the label.

Then read it once and notice that the world did not end and that you’re still sitting there.

That’s the exercise. You’re not confessing and you’re not accepting a verdict. You’re finding out whether the thing can be written down without you catching fire, which it can, and which you have not tested in a very long time.

Matthew wrote his in a book that a couple billion people have read.

He never took it back out.