“Follow me,” Jesus says. And Matthew gets up. He leaves the booth where he works. Walks away from the ledger, the coins, the compromises, the quiet exclusions he has both suffered and enforced. No hesitation recorded. No moral inventory. No probationary period. Just… movement.

And then, almost immediately, a table.
Not a tidy, curated table of the respectable. Not a carefully managed gathering of the nearly-there. But a crowded, compromised, socially awkward table—tax collectors and sinners, bodies pressed close in a space that respectable religion (and a lot of churchgoers, if they’re honest) would instinctively avoid. It is not simply that Jesus tolerates their presence. He eats with them. He chooses proximity. He risks contamination of reputation.

The scandal is not accidental. It is the point.
Because the Pharisees, watching from a safe theological distance, ask the question that still echoes in our churches with unnerving familiarity: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
It is, on the surface, a question about holiness. About boundaries. About what faithfulness requires us to refuse. We often think, “I must do this to stay holy and safe, within God’s rules!”

But underneath, it is a question about imagination. A question that risks shaking the very foundation of our faith.

Who do we believe God is for?
Jesus’ answer does not tidy things up. It disrupts further. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” This is not a compliment to the Pharisees, as much as they might wish it were. It is a reframing of the entire enterprise. The kingdom is not a reward for the already-adjusted. It is a place of encounter for those who know, or are willing to discover, their need.
And then that line—so easily domesticated, so rarely allowed to bite: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”

Go and learn.
Not “you already know.” Not “you are nearly there.” But go. Learn. Begin again.
Ouch!

Because it turns out that it is entirely possible to build a religious life—structured, sincere, even sacrificial—that still resists mercy when it arrives in inconvenient bodies, or bodies that ask us to change.
The Church, if we are honest, has often preferred sacrifice. It is easier to organise. Easier to measure. Easier to control. Sacrifice allows us to draw lines, to name insiders and outsiders, to reassure ourselves that we are on the right side of them.

Mercy, by contrast, is unruly.
Mercy sits at table with people who do not yet know how to behave. Mercy refuses to wait until the story is resolved. Mercy risks misunderstanding, criticism, even failure, in order to remain open.
And mercy, crucially, requires proximity. It is very difficult to welcome the outsider from a distance.
We can, of course, say the words. Our websites can be immaculate in their inclusivity. Our signage can be clear. Our liturgies can include carefully crafted invitations. But the question this Gospel presses upon us is far more uncomfortable:

Who do we actually eat with?
Who knows, in their bones rather than on paper, that they would be received by us not as a project, not as a disruption, not as a theological problem to be solved—but as a guest, as a companion, as someone whose presence might even reveal something of Christ to us?

Those who are inconvenient to the tidy know it in their bones. Like children, they have a finely honed insincerity detector. And so they stay away from those places that want to solve them, or make them “like us”.

Matthew’s house becomes, in this moment, a kind of testing ground for the kingdom. Not because everything is resolved there, but because something true is allowed to begin. A space is made in which people who do not belong—by any conventional measure—find themselves sitting with the one who calls them anyway, and loves them just ‘because’.

And the Church is, or ought to be, that kind of house.
Not pristine. Not controlled. Not anxious about who might walk through the door or what they might bring with them. But expansive. Hospitable. Brave enough to trust that Christ is already present in the encounter, not waiting anxiously at the threshold for us to manage it correctly.

To broaden our outlook is not simply to become more “inclusive,” as though this were a matter of policy adjustment or branding. It is to undergo something closer to conversion. To discover that the boundaries we have drawn so carefully may not be the ones Christ recognises. To learn, again and again, what mercy looks like when it takes flesh in real communities, with real people, who do not arrive pre-sanitised, “looking like us”, knowing “our ways”.

It may even mean accepting that the Church does not always get to choose the terms of its own transformation. In fact, that’s pretty much guaranteed!

After all, Matthew did not apply. He was called.
And the table he hosted was not approved in advance.
The question is whether we are willing, like Jesus, to sit down anyway.

Rev. Talisker