‘And it came about that as he reclined at meat in the house, behold, many public servants and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples.'
We know from the other synoptic Gospels that this gathering was in Matthew's house. He, together with Jesus and His other disciples, had come there to eat. Often at such meals Jesus would almost inevitably become the focal point. It was so here. This was probably some time after Matthew's conversion and call to discipleship, and he had therefore called together some old friends to meet Jesus, possibly even at their request. These consisted of public servants like he had been, together with other people who were looked on by the Pharisees as ‘sinners'. By ‘sinners' is meant those who failed to live according to even the minimum requirements of the Pharisees. They would include many who worked in trades that made it difficult to do so, for example, tanners, and probably also some with bad reputations. To eat with such people was to risk becoming ‘unclean'. The Pharisees would have withdrawn in horror at the idea.
But even worse were the public servants. They served a foreign state, who used locals for collecting taxes and other revenues in order to try to make them more acceptable. But to the Jews these taxes were an insult to their religion. So these public servants were seen by the vast majority of Jews as traitors, especially in a fanatically nationalistic country like Galilee, and even moreso as they used their positions in order to make themselves rich. They were on the whole notoriously dishonest. They often overtaxed the people, keeping what they skimmed off for themselves, they would take large bribes so as to look the other way when assessing taxes, and they presented a false picture to the authorities to whom they had to account. They were by the nature of their contacts looked on as unclean, and they were excluded from the synagogues. Along with robbers and murderers they were unacceptable as witnesses in Jewish courts. No one with any respect for themselves would have relations with them.
However Jesus did not hesitate, and His disciples followed His lead (they had even been willing to accept Matthew into their number). This did not mean that Jesus compromised on His own standards, nor that He relaxed His requirements for discipleship. But it did mean that He did not cut Himself off from them nor demand of them unnecessary observances. They would not, however, be there ‘partying'. The point was that they had come to hear what Jesus had to say.
‘In the house.' It has been suggested that this rather vague description arises from the fact that the writer was speaking of his own home. How often many of us must have said, ‘I've got one in the house' or ‘let's go into the house', calling it that because of its familiarity to us.