The name “Matthew” means “gift of Jehovah” — a fitting name for a man who would go on to become one of the most unlikely disciples of Jesus Christ. Before he was a follower of the Lord, Matthew was a tax collector, a profession that in his day carried both wealth and deep social disgrace.

The World of the Tax Collector

Tax collection is one of humanity’s oldest institutions, predating even the invention of coined money. Long before markets and mints, early rulers and governments needed resources to fund wars, build infrastructure, and maintain their palaces. The simplest way to secure those resources was to extract wealth directly from their subjects.

By the time of the Lord Jesus, the Roman Empire had refined this practice through a system built around the publicani — private contractors who bid on government contracts to collect taxes, supply armies, and build public works. In the provinces, Rome often relied on local men to do the actual collecting. In Judea, that meant Jews collecting taxes from their own people on Rome’s behalf.

These local collectors, men like Matthew, were expected to meet a government quota — but whatever they collected above that quota was theirs to keep. It was a system built for exploitation. The pressure to squeeze as much money as possible from the local population wasn’t incidental; it was the business model. As a result, tax collectors were viewed by their fellow Jews not merely as unpopular bureaucrats but as traitors — dishonest men who grew rich by making life harder for their own people.

A Life Built on Wealth — and Willingly Abandoned

This was the world Matthew lived in. He was almost certainly financially comfortable, perhaps even wealthy, by the standards of his community. He had built a life — profitable, secure, and steady — even if it was a life built on the suffering of others.

And yet, when Jesus came and called him, Matthew didn’t hesitate. He got up, left his tax booth, and followed. No negotiation. No looking back at the security he was walking away from. He forsook the very thing he had built his life around — for the sake of the Truth that had captured his heart.

It’s worth pausing on how radical this must have looked to the people around him. His wife, his family, his colleagues — they could easily have thought he’d lost his mind. Why would a man walk away from wealth and stability to follow an itinerant preacher with nowhere to lay his head? But Matthew had encountered something greater than money, greater than comfort, greater than the life he had known. He had encountered the Truth, and it changed him from the inside out.

What Matthew Teaches Us

Matthew’s story is a challenge to every one of us. Most of us will never be tax collectors squeezing money from our neighbors, but all of us have something we cling to — comfort, security, reputation, wealth, control — something we’d struggle to let go of even if the Truth demanded it.

Matthew shows us what it looks like to hold nothing back. When the Word came to him, he didn’t try to fit it into his old life. He let it remake his life entirely.

May we have the same courage: to forsake what we love most, the moment the Truth asks it of us.