And as He passed by, He saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the receipt of custom.
The call of Matthew
The story is placed immediately after a miracle, as if to hint that Matthew’s conversion was a miracle. There are points of similarity between the miracle and the conversion. Matthew was spiritually palsied by his sins and his money making; hence he needed the Divine command, “Arise and walk.” There may be points of likeness also between Matthew’s personal story and our own. These may be profitably considered.
I. His call seemed accidental and unlikely.
1. Jesus had often been at Capernaum, which He had selected to be “His own city;” and yet Matthew remained unsaved. Was it likely he would now be called? Had not his day of grace closed?
2. Jesus was about other business; for we read, “As He passed by.” Would He now be likely to call Matthew?
3. Jesus left many other persons uncalled; was it not highly probable that the tax gatherer would be passed by? Yet Jesus called to Himself, “Levi, the son of Alphaeus,” while many another man had no such special call.
II. His call was altogether unthought of and unsought.
1. He was in a degrading business. None but the lowest of the Jews would care to gather taxes for the Roman conqueror. His discipleship would bring no honour to Christ.
2. He was in an ensnaring business. Money is bird lime to the soul.
3. He would not have dared to follow Jesus even if he had wished to do so. He felt himself to be too unworthy.
4. He would have been repulsed by the other disciples, had he proposed to come without the Lord’s open invitation.
5. He made no sign in the direction of Jesus. No prayer was offered by him, nor wish expressed towards better things.
III. His call was given by the Lord, with full knowledge of him. “He saw Levi,” and called him.
1. He saw all the evil that had been in him and was yet there.
2. He saw his adaptation for holy service, as a recorder and penman.
3. He saw all that He meant to make of him.
4. He saw in him His chosen, His redeemed, His convert, His disciple, His apostle, His biographer. The Lord calls as He pleases, but He sees what He is doing. Sovereignty is not blind; but acts with boundless wisdom.
IV. His call was graciously condescending.
1. The Lord called “Levi, the son of Alphaeus,” or, as he himself says, “a man named Matthew,”-that was his best.
2. He was a publican-that may not have been his worst.
3. He allowed such a sinner to be His personal attendant; yea, called him to that honour, saying, “Follow Me.”
4. He allowed him to do this immediately, without putting him into quarantine.
V. His call was sublimely simple.
1. Few were the words-“Follow Me.” It is very tersely recorded-“He saw … said … and he arose and followed Him.”
2. Clear was the direction.
3. Personal was the address.
4. Royal was the command.
VI. His call was immediately effectual.
1. Matthew followed at once.
2. He followed spiritually as well as literally.
3. He followed wholly.
4. He followed growingly.
5. He followed ever after, never deserted his Leader.
VII. His call was a door of hope for others.
1. His salvation encouraged other publicans to come to Jesus.
2. His open house gave opportunity to his friends to hear Jesus.
3. His personal ministry brought others to the Saviour.
4. His written Gospel has convinced many, and will always do so.
Application: Are you up to your neck in business? Are you “sitting at the receipt of custom”? Yet may a call come to you at once. It does come. Hear it attentively; rise earnestly; respond immediately. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Call of Levi
Such as sit at the receipt of custom are hard to be converted; but Jesus manifests His power by doing it with one word alone. Grace disengages Matthew from the love of money, to make him an apostle; the love of money will separate Judas from Christ, to make him an apostate: thus our Lord makes Himself amends beforehand. St. Matthew’s example had no influence on Judas, though perhaps it was Christ’s design to lay it before his eyes. Let us profit by the one as well as the other; and let us, with feat and trembling, adore the different judgments of God in relation to souls. (Quesnel.)
Calls to duty joyful
When the Saviour calls, follow Him gladly. Never regret a duty, or lament a responsibility, or grieve over a sacrifice required. If we were as wise as Matthew, we should celebrate with festive joy every call to duty. (R. Glover.)
The attraction of the Divine call
We read in classic story, how the lyre of Orpheus enchanted with its music, not only the wild beasts, but the very trees and rocks upon Olympus, so that they moved from their places to follow him; so Christ, our heavenly Orpheus, with the music of His gracious speech, draws after Him those less susceptible to benign influences than beasts, and trees, and stones, even poor, hardened, senseless, sinful souls. Let Him but strike His golden harp, and whisper in thy heart, “Come, follow Me,” and thou, like another Matthew, shalt be won.
The call of Levi
Well might he sit down here; for he had a great weight upon him, the burden of his covetousness, and the desires of gold, bred in him by the often traffic he had with it. Gold is heaviest of all metals; but it is made more heavy by covetousness. For it more oppresses the heart of him that loves it, than the back of him that bears it. And where was he sitting? At the receipt of custom. “If it be more blessed to give than to receive,” certainly to be a receiver of extorted oppression from the grudging people must be no happy nor blessed thing. This customhouse was such. The receiving of custom breeds a custom of receiving; and that, a desire still to receive more; which desire worldly men will ever seek to satisfy, though with the oppression of their poor brethren. This made this place and office hateful to the people. “Publicans and sinners” went ever together in their mouths … Christ found him, as he was Levi, the publican; but looked on him, as he was Matthew, the apostle … He called him to an office much more gainful … where he should still be a receiver, and a gainer too; but not, as here, ten or fifteen per centum; but where one should “bring forth thirty, one sixty, one an hundred-fold.” (Wm. Austin.)
God often calls men in strange places
Not in the house of prayer, not in the preaching of the Word; but when all these things have been absent, and all surrounding circumstances have seemed most adverse to the work of grace, that grace has put forth its power. The tavern, the theatre, the gaming house, the race course, and other similar haunts of worldliness and sin, have sometimes been the scene of God’s converting grace. As an old writer says, “Our calling is uncertain in respect of place, for God calls some from their ships, and some from their shops; some from under the hedges, and others from the market; so that, if a man can but make out unto his own soul that he is certainly called, the time when and the place where matter little.”
The call of Levi, or Christ’s voice to the soul
I. That Christ calls men to follow Him.
1. That the call of Christ is antecedent to any human endeavour after Him.
2. That it is often effectively addressed to the most unlikely men.
3. That it is addressed to men when they are occupied with the secular duties of life.
4. That it takes men from the lower duties and sends them to the higher.
II. That Christ’s call to men must be immediately obeyed-“And he arose and followed Him.”
1. That obedience must be immediate.
(1) Not to be hindered by intellectual perplexities.
(2) Not to be hindered by commercial or domestic anxieties.
2. That obedience must be self-sacrificing.
3. That it must be willing.
4. That it must be continuous.
Learn:
1. To heed the calls of Christ to the soul.
2. To subordinate the secular to the moral.
3. That true religion consists in following Christ.
4. That it is well to speak to men for their moral good. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)
Matthew the publican
Alas! that the son of a devout, God-fearing Israelite should have fallen so low. Even the outcasts, the sons of Belial, hesitated long before they thus sold themselves to work iniquity. But he had gone freely and voluntarily into the service of the heathen. A father’s stern commands, a mother’s earnest pleadings, the entreaties of a loving sister and the expostulations of manly and pure-hearted brothers, the fair fame of the family, upon whose proud escutcheon no such blot had ever come since the days of their great ancestor, David-all these were of no avail to turn this wayward young man from the evil course he had chosen, and at length his name had been blotted from their record and; to all outward seeming, he was to them as if he had never lived. The neighbours and friends left out his name when they spoke of the children of Kolas (as in Mark 6:3), and at morning and evening prayer no audible petition went up to heaven for the erring and sinful one. But, hardened as he was, and great as was the distress he had given to his family, Levi was not beyond the free grace of the Redeemer of men. Jesus was his cousin, according to the flesh, and though He knew how the hearts of that dear family at Nazareth were breaking with anguish over him as utterly lost, yet He, the Divine Redeemer, did not despair of his recovery from the depth of his degradation and sin. Having loved him with an everlasting love, He would draw him out of the depths by the power of His loving kindness. And so it came to pass that when Jesus had left Nazareth and the home of His youth for busy, bustling Capernaum, because there He could accomplish a more comprehensive and effective work in establishing the kingdom of God on the earth, His eye more than once rested on poor Levi, and He saw that, in spite of his bravado, his sins were making him wretched. And when on that bright summer morning He went from Peter’s house to His work of teaching and healing at the shore of the lake, as He passed the stall or booth where Levi was receiving the tolls and taxes, He said only, “Follow me;” and the tax gatherer, a few moments ago so hardened and brusque, instantly abandoned his books and accounts, his money and receipts, and, rising from his seat, followed Jesus. Nor did he ever return to the base employment he had left. The change of heart and purpose, though apparently instantaneous, was thorough and permanent. One evidence of its thoroughness was manifested in his desire to bring others who had fallen into the same degradation as himself under the gracious influence of Christ’s teachings. “And Levi made Him” (i.e., Christ)
, says the evangelist Luke, “a great feast in his own house; and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them.” To these sinful souls our blessed Lord spoke words of forgiveness and pardon, and they became, as St. Mark tells, His followers thenceforward. As for Matthew, he undoubtedly grew in grace, and was restored to the loving favour of his family; for it was, at the farthest, but a very few months later that Jesus chose him as one of the twelve, and with him two, and possibly three of his brothers, the devout and exemplary James the Just being one, and gave him his new name “Matthew,” “The gift of God.” Matthew’s remembrance of his early history and sins seems to have kept him humble, and have prevented him from participating in those unseemly wrangles as to who should be the greatest, in which some of the others indulged; but he was a keen observer, and from the day when he abandoned his publican’s stall to his death he must have felt more profoundly than any of the others the certainty that Jesus was the Son of God as well as the Son of Mary. Some practical lessons:
I. Family pride is not a sufficient preservative against deeds of shame.
II. Has dishonour been brought upon your family name by a prodigal? Do not despair of him. You have a great burden of shame and grief to bear; but do not cease to love the prodigal, to pray for him, to hope for him. He, like St. Matthew, may yet hear and obey the voice of Christ.
1. If you did your best to train him in the way in which he should go, be very sure that the healthful influences by which you surrounded him are still with him, fighting mightily against the degrading influence by which he is now encompassed, and they may yet prevail. Not in vain did you do your duty in regard to him.
2. Ah, but it may be that you cannot recall the days of his boyhood without personal shame. You permitted many things to prevent you from training him duly in godliness and true manliness; the example you set before him was not really ennobling. Well, humble yourself before God, and hope in God for your son as well as for yourself. He may yet yield to the persistent drawings of the Divine love.
III. No man should permit his business or his social surroundings to hinder him from following Christ.
IV. One of the very best evidences of a man’s conversion is a real manifestation of care for the spiritual welfare of these of his own class. (Anon.)
The call of Levi
I. The person called, A publican, etc.
II. The manner in which he is called.
1. Externally-by the Word.
2. Internally-by Christ’s power and Spirit.
3. These two must ever be combined.
III. The manner in which Levi treated the call.
1. He did not disregard it, as many.
2. He did not promise a compliance like others.
3. He instantly obeyed, and is thus an example to all who are called.
IV. The call itself. Christ goes before-
1. To prepare Himself for sympathy.
2. To remove doubts as to the way.
3. To free from oppressive responsibility.
4. To show how we are to walk in the way.
5. To remove obstructions.
6. To be a companion. Are you following Christ? (Expository Discourses.)
The feast of Levi, or the festival of a renewed soul
I. It was a festival held to celebrate the most important event in the history of a soul.
1. It was indicative of joy.
2. It was indicative of gratitude.
3. It was indicative of worship. The newly converted soul is characterized by devotion.
II. It was held to introduce to Christ those who were in need of his loving mercy.
1. It was a time for the introduction of sinful companions to Christ.
2. It was a time of leave taking between Levi and his former friends. Not to leave the old life in a hostile spirit.
III. It was a festival too lofty in moral significance to be rightly interpreted by the conventional bigots of the age.
IV. It was a festival beautifully illustrative of Christ’s mission to the world.
1. We see from this festival that Christ came to save the morally sinful.
2. We see from this festival that Christ came to heal the morally diseased.
Lessons:
1. That the life of the renewed soul should be a constant festival of icy.
2. That Christians should endeavour to bring their comrades to the Saviour.
3. That humanity has a Divine Physician. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)