There are professions that make the neighborhood cross the street when someone walks by. Levi knew that feeling well: sitting at his tax booth by the Sea of Galilee, collecting taxes for the Roman government, he was seen by his own countrymen as a traitor serving the foreign occupier.
It was right there, in the middle of his workday, that Jesus passed by and said just two words: “Follow me” (Mark 2:14). Levi got up from his desk, left everything, and followed him, with no bargaining, no asking for time, no looking back.
Levi’s first act as a disciple reveals who he was: he threw a great banquet in his own house and invited his former colleagues, other tax collectors and “sinners,” to meet Jesus (Luke 5:29). He did not hide where he came from; he used that very past to introduce friends to the Master.
The feast bothered the Pharisees, who asked why Jesus ate with people like that. His answer defined the whole mission: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).
Levi came to be called Matthew, and his name appears among the twelve apostles chosen by Jesus, identified right there as “the tax collector” (Matthew 10:3), as if the text itself wanted to keep a record of where he came from. After that, the gospels almost never mention him by name again.
Church tradition, from the earliest centuries, recognizes him as the author of the Gospel that bears the name of Matthew, the account that most closely links Jesus’ life to the prophecies of the Old Testament. Matthew seems to have preferred writing about Jesus rather than about himself.
Levi’s story reminds us that God does not require a clean résumé to call someone: he calls in the middle of the workday, in the wrong profession, in the wrong place, and turns the despised tax collector into a witness and writer of the good news. Whoever feels left out today, because of what they do or what they have done, finds in Levi a direct invitation: Jesus’ table has a seat reserved precisely for those who feel least worthy of sitting at it.
