In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Today when the Lord is calling Levi (who is also Matthew – that is really who we understand him to be) from the tax office, Levi immediately gets up, and follows Him. The Lord just says: Come, and he comes. Then the Lord was eating in a house with many such people. As I keep saying, these days we Canadians have a hard time appreciating the meaning of this. All these tax collectors were following Jesus. Then the local authorities: the lawyers, the Pharisees, and the experts in how to live life according to the Jewish customs, got upset with Him because according to their reckoning you are not supposed to have anything to do with these people. Why? Because they were traitors. A tax collector in the Roman Empire was collecting money from the Jewish people for the Roman Empire because the Roman emperor had conquered them, oppressed them, and people were being killed every year in that land. So, anyone under those circumstances would feel the same way.

Here in Canada, for the most part (except when people manage to get out of hand for a while), we have a fairly safe system of tax-collecting. It’s all supposed to be above board, and they’re supposed to collect only what the law says they’re supposed to collect. However, in the days of the Roman Empire, the Roman emperor would spread the word to each of his provinces how much money he needed to govern the Empire that coming year, and the tax collectors had to collect it. He didn’t tell them how. The tax collectors were not obliged to tell the people how much was owing to the emperor, either. There was none of that. The tax collectors just had the authority to go, and collect the taxes from the people, and so they did. People every year at certain times, when they knew the tax collector might be coming around, were hiding everything that they had, and, probably as I understand it, they were hiding as many of their animals as they could, too, because the tax collector could just come to your house, and say: I’m taking this, this, this, this – give over. It had to be liquidated for the tax.

The tax collector, of course, would keep a lot for himself. This is another reason why these people were rejected by the Jewish people because not only were they collecting money for the oppressing emperor, they were also stealing from their own people, and everyone knew it, too.

So, this is the environment, and that’s why people were getting upset that Jesus went to visit such people – tax collectors, and other people of disrepute, real disrepute in His day. The Gospel says that people were complaining not only that He was talking with those who are disreputable, but that He was also eating with them, and then, thirdly, that there were lots of them. They said to His disciples: “Why does He eat with tax collectors, and sinners?” The Lord said to them: “Those who are healthy have no need of a physician”. He came to heal these people, in other words. These people are sick in their hearts, and He came to heal them.

There’s an important lesson for us in this, because we believers very often become very relaxed, ourselves, in our environment here in North America where it’s so comfortable. We just live more or less in, and for ourselves. We forget or often overlook this basic example of Christ (which you see everywhere in the New Testament): that He is always reaching out to the people who are “outside of the box”, as you would say – people who are dispossessed, people who are poor, people who are blatant sinners, people who are even corrupt. He is bringing wholeness, and life to them.

We forget that our responsibility in this country as Orthodox Christians is to be a light shining, and to be yeast growing bread. We are supposed to be like the Saviour, also, being a witness to people like these tax collectors, people who don’t know Him. We can’t bring them to Him exactly, because you can’t force anyone to come to Christ. My grandfather always said that even though you can lead a horse to water, you can’t make him drink. We can, at least, lead the horse to water. It’s up to the horse whether it wants to drink or not. Our responsibility, in our way of living, in how we are behaving, is to present Christ and His love to people around us somehow (even if we are weak about it), so that they might find some encouragement, hope, and maybe find Him, in, and through us.

When the Apostle was talking earlier about how many people have suffered physically and otherwise, for the sake of Christ, saying that they had not given up but held on, it is important for us to remember that the sort of suffering that very many people have endured – physical suffering even unto death – still exists among us. There is other suffering, too, besides that. Many of us in North America are suffering in one way or another – spiritually, emotionally, and in other ways. Even though our Canada, which is such a nice country, is supposed to be a free country (and in a sort of a way it is), the trouble with Canada is that this freedom is more like license than it is real freedom. It’s a bit wild, out-of-hand, and unfocussed in this country nowadays, because there’s no clear sense of direction for anyone. As a result of this, for people who are Christians, there’s now very much the tendency to have to suffer ridicule or other sorts of negative attitudes, because people either have suffered one way or another, and they’re paying back, or they just don’t know anything, and they think that we are strange.

It’s important for us to accept that we suffer one way or the other in this life. As those people who suffered unto death, who suffered physical tortures, and who still are suffering, it’s important for us to offer this suffering to Christ (even though it’s not like some people’s, nevertheless, our suffering is real), and to learn how to pray for the person who is hurting us. This is the big way in which Orthodox Christians can show Who is Christ: by how we can forgive – and not only forgive, but bless people who are hurting us.

I always love to tell the story about St Juvenaly as retold by Father Michael Oleksa, who got this from the oral tradition of the Aboriginals in Alaska, and it’s true enough. We all know that St Juvenaly was martyred in Alaska. He was killed by the Aboriginals. There are various sorts of inaccurate stories that have been told about him, but the most likely story is, in fact, that as he was coming with a companion to the west coast of Alaska, to the Yupik people, he appeared to the shaman of the Yupiks as an invading shaman from someplace else because he was wearing a chain with a cross on his neck (which happened to be the sign of authority of a shaman in the local area). They started to attack him. They told him not to come, and he kept coming with a boat. So, they started shooting arrows at him, and the people said at first that they thought he was maybe somehow a little bit “cuckoo” because it looked to them as though he were trying to brush away the arrows as though they were mosquitoes. Father Michael points out that what they didn’t understand at the time (but they did understand later) is that Father Juvenaly was not “cuckoo”, and brushing those things away. They didn’t recognise the sign of the Cross yet. Father Juvenaly was blessing the people who were killing him while they were killing him. This is really the authentic Christian way.

If we can find in the love of Jesus Christ the way to live in this sort of forgiveness, we will be of some use to people around us, and be a sign of hope to people around us, even if we never really do see the fruit, ourselves.

It’s up to the Lord what He does with our faithfulness. It’s up to us to be faithful. Let’s ask the Lord to give us the Grace to be faithful, the hope to be faithful, the love in our hearts to be faithful, and to try, out of love, to glorify Him in everything that we are, and do, together with His Father, who is from everlasting, and His all-holy, good, and Life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America