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In today’s Gospel lesson, we witness Jesus at dinner with His future Disciple Matthew, a tax collector. In Jesus’ day, tax collectors were looked down upon as dishonest people, so it would have been shocking, as we see in the leaders of the Pharisees’ response, for a great teacher like Jesus to have been seen with such people.
Yet God often chooses those we least expect. God chose Jacob, later named Israel, to become the namesake for His Chosen People even though Jacob was a cunningly dishonest man. God chose Moses to be a leader even though he had a speech impediment. God chose Sampson, even though he broke all the rules of his order. God chose David to be King, even though he was small and did not, at all, have a warrior’s build. God chose Peter even though the Disciple was always jumping in too quick, and not in a good or smart way generally. God chose Paul even though he was persecuting the church. Why not, then, choose Matthew, even though he was a tax collector?
If we think we are worthy to be chosen by God, we are not. If we think we are unworthy to be chosen by God, we are not. God chooses the crafty and the foolish. God chooses the weak and, at times, the strong. God’s choices tend to be the least obvious, at least to us. The one thread in God’s choices seems to be that of faithfulness, like that of Abraham or Mary.
There’s not a certain type that God is looking for. God chooses all sorts of types. We just need to wait for when God calls us.