Sermon from September 21, 2025

Sermon Based on Matthew 9:9-13

Let us pray: Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)

The text for our meditation today is the Gospel lesson, read just a few minutes ago, from Matthew 9:9-13, along with some thoughts from just before that reading.

Jesus had just come back to the city of Capernaum, in Northern Israel, by the Sea of Galilee. People had brought, literally carried, a paralyzed man to Jesus, hoping for a healing for the man. Jesus recognizes their faith and says to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” That’s probably not what they were hoping for, but Jesus was teaching what was most important for all of us to have - the forgiveness of our sins, which separate us from God

Some Jewish religious leaders are there, and they are shocked. “This man is blaspheming,” they thought - speaking against God - for only God can forgive sins. Who does Jesus think He is?

Jesus knew their thoughts and proved that he could forgive sins by also doing a miracle of healing. He said to the paralyzed man, “Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” And the man rose and went home, healed physically and spiritually. And as Jesus forgave and healed this man, He used a term for Himself, “Son of Man,” which was used in the Old Testament to describe some of the prophets, but particularly to refer to the coming Savior of the world, who would be a true man and yet also the true Son of God. And the people who saw this miracle were afraid, but they also glorified God, who had given such authority to this man, Jesus (Matthew 9:1-8).

And it was soon after that that our text for today begins. Jesus “saw a man called Matthew, sitting at a tax booth, and said to him, ‘Follow Me,’ and Matthew immediately rose and followed Jesus.” Most scholars assume that Matthew had already had some contact with Jesus and had heard His preaching and teaching about the need for repentance and forgiveness of sins and the new life that Jesus offered. Jesus had already been very active in that part of Northern Israel, and Matthew might already have been brought to faith in Jesus in his heart through Jesus’ preaching of the Word.

What was really surprising, though, was that Jesus has specifically called him, a tax collector, to be one of his twelve chosen disciples. We may not like people from the IRS very much today, but most Jews hated tax collectors, because they worked for the evil Roman occupiers of their land and helped support their evil, pagan ways, and raised money for them.

There was a Jewish scholar in the 1800s, Alfred Edersheim, who became a Christian through his own study of the Scriptures, but also knew what ancient Jewish writings said about many things and about tax collectors. The Jewish Talmud put tax collectors alongside “murderers and robbers” and other notorious sinners, because they so often charged people more than they should and kept the extra money for themselves and became rich. Jewish rabbis taught that tax collectors were so dishonest that they should never be allowed to be witnesses in court. You couldn’t trust them. Rabbis removed, excommunicated, tax collectors from their synagogues. That would be equivalent to being kicked out of a local church today. The rabbis even considered it lawful for Jews to lie in almost any conceivable way to avoid paying tax collectors.

But here is Jesus, choosing one of these tax collectors to be one of His closest disciples. And as our text goes on, it is no surprise that when Matthew soon sponsored a dinner at his home and many tax collector friends and other “sinners” and Jesus came, too, that Jewish religious leaders, Pharisees this time, saw this and said to Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Note that they don’t attack Jesus directly, because He always has answers they have trouble dealing with, but they want to confuse and draw away His own followers. After all, Jesus should have known better than to associate with such lowlife people.

Jesus heard what was said, though, and He answers the Pharisees. He said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Imagine if you had a doctor who would only see you if you were perfectly well. He or she said, “I won’t see you if you are sick, because I don’t want to be contaminated by you.” We actually need a doctor most when we are sick, don’t we?

And Jesus is speaking here about a spiritual sickness, a sickness from sin, that separates us from God and from one another, whom God calls us to care about. And the Scriptures are clear: “All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). It is a sickness of the heart. The Scriptures say, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17:9)? We all have a sense of that. Our hearts struggle, at least at times, about knowing what is right and wrong, and even if we know what is right, we have trouble doing it all too often. That’s why Jesus, in our text, also tells the Pharisees and all those gathered that day, and all of us, still today, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’” (Hosea 6:6).

Jesus is quoting from the Old Testament book of Hosea, where God Himself says through the prophet, “I desire mercy and not (your) sacrifices, the knowledge of God rather than (your) offerings.” God knows our sins and struggles, and yet He still loves us and cares about us. And later on in Hosea, God says, I shall give mercy to people, “I shall ransom them. I shall redeem them, from (sin) and death” (Hosea 13:14). And that’s why God the Father sent His only Son, our Lord Jesus, into this world, not just to preach and teach, but to do all things necessary to rescue us, living a perfect life in our place and paying the penalty for all of our sins by His suffering and death on the cross, and by rising again in victory over death, so that we might have forgiveness and eternal life, through faith in Him, as a gift from God. That’s why Jesus ended this passage by saying, “For I came not to call the righteous (since none of us are righteous, by ourselves). I came to call sinners," like Matthew, and like you and me, pastors, too.

Matthew knew that he was a forgiven sinner, as he left his tax office and his old life and followed Jesus, in faith in Him. Matthew did so in a humble way, too. Two of the other Gospels identify him by his Jewish name, “Levi, son of Alphaeus.” But he uses the name “Matthew” in this passage and “Matthew the tax collector” in a listing of the disciples in Matthew 10:3. Otherwise, he never mentions himself anywhere else in his own Gospel. Some think that Jesus may have given him this name, as Jesus gave the name “Peter” to Simon (Matthew 16:18), and later on, Saul received the name “Paul” (Acts 13:9). The name “Matthew” means “Gift of God,” and Matthew had received God’s greatest gifts of forgiveness and new life and salvation, and Matthew certainly became a "Gift of God” to so many other people, as well.

The one thing that we know for certain about him is that early Christians unanimously said that he was the writer of this Gospel that we are looking at, as he was guided and inspired by God the Holy Spirit. Early Christian witnesses also agreed that this was the first Gospel written, maybe in the early 50s AD. (Liberal scholars often want to make Mark first, with very critical ideas, but the early Christians said that the order was Matthew, then Luke, then Mark, and then John. Mathew’s Gospel was very helpful to Jews (and to us all), as it has many quotations from the Old Testament, showing that Jesus truly was the One predicted to be the Savior. As a tax collector, Matthew had to be organized and skilled not only in financial matters, but in knowing his own native languages, Aramaic and Hebrew, and also the most widely used language of his day (not Latin but Greek) in which his Gospel of Matthew appears, as we have it today.

Matthew ends his Gospel with the call from Jesus to him and the other apostles and to all God’s people to be helping to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Matthew was surely sent out to other places, too, but as one respected Lutheran scholar says, “The traditions about Matthew’s travels are very late, long after the time Matthew lived, and tend to be fantastic and legendary, and mix Matthew up with other people, and offer little basis for a reliable later history of Matthew the Evangelist” (Martin Franzmann, The Word of the Lord Grows).

That’s why we need to keep going back to the Scriptures themselves, including the Gospel of Matthew, as the firm basis for what we believe. As our Lutheran Confessions say, “The writing of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged… Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture" (Formula of Concord, Epitome, 1). So, keep reading the Gospel of Matthew and other parts of Scripture, for then you are on a firm foundation as forgiven sinners, trusting in Jesus Christ and his saving Word and work for you and for us all.

Let us pray: “Now may the peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, keep our hearts and minds safe, only where they are safe, in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen (Philippians 4:7).