Today, 21 September, the Church keeps the feast of St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. His entire conversion takes one verse. In the New American Bible it reads: Jesus "saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him" (Matthew 9:9).
A man at a desk, a sentence from a stranger, and a career ends. The Brief has kept feast days before, from Saint Sebastian in January to St Patrick in March. Matthew's day is different in one respect: it honours an apostle whose job, on the day he was called, was collecting taxes. For readers who spend their lives thinking about where they owe tax and how much, his story is worth reading closely, because the Gospels say more about his trade than most people remember.
A man at a customs post
What we know of Matthew is thin, and the sources say so openly. Pope Benedict XVI began his general audience on Matthew in August 2006 by admitting that a complete picture is "almost impossible" because the information is scarce and fragmentary. What remains is a profile rather than a biography.
The name, Benedict noted, means "gift of God" in Hebrew. He appears in every list of the Twelve. But only one of those lists attaches a job title to him, and it is the list in the Gospel that carries his name: "Matthew the tax collector" (Matthew 10:3).
There is a wrinkle that the Church's own Bible notes do not hide. Mark and Luke tell the same calling story, but they call the man Levi. The footnote to Matthew 9:9 in the New American Bible points out that no Levi appears in any list of the Twelve, while all four lists include a Matthew, and it suggests the evangelist may have used the name Matthew so that this called man would be counted among the Twelve. Tradition has long read Matthew and Levi as one person. Benedict simply spoke of "Matthew-Levi".
Where did he sit? The calling follows a miracle at Capernaum, beside the Sea of Galilee. From that, Benedict concluded that Matthew probably worked as a tax collector in Capernaum, a lakeside town and a place Jesus used as a base.
What the job actually was
It helps to be precise about the trade, because "tax collector" in modern English sounds like a civil servant with a pension. The Gospel world saw it differently.
Benedict listed the problems plainly. A man in Matthew's position handled money regarded as impure because it came from people outside the covenant. He collaborated with a foreign occupying authority. And the levies he collected, in Benedict's words, "could be arbitrarily determined". That combination explains why the Gospels keep pairing "tax collectors and sinners", and why the crowd in Luke's Gospel grumbles when Jesus goes to eat at the house of Zacchaeus, whom Luke calls "a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man" (Luke 19:2).
Benedict also quoted St John Chrysostom on the four fishermen and the one tax collector among the first disciples. Chrysostom's point was social: both were humble callings, fishing because it was so common and tax collecting because it was so despised. The Gospels chose to show Jesus recruiting at the bottom of the prestige ladder, at work, in the middle of an ordinary day.
Dinner with the wrong people
The next scene is a meal. Luke says plainly that Levi gave "a great banquet" in his own house (Luke 5:29). In Matthew's telling the table fills with "many tax collectors and sinners", and the Pharisees ask the obvious question: why does your teacher eat with these people? The answer is one of the best-known lines in the Gospels: "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do" (Matthew 9:10-13).
Luke's version adds three words that Matthew's own account leaves out. Levi got up and followed, "leaving everything behind" (Luke 5:28). For a man whose income came from a customs post, "everything" was concrete: the post itself and the steady income that came with it. Benedict drew the line explicitly: following meant giving up "a reliable source of income, even if it was often unfair and dishonourable".
The tax collector's Gospel has the tax stories
Ancient tradition attributes the first Gospel to Matthew. Benedict traced it to Papias of Hierapolis around the year 130, as reported by the historian Eusebius. Modern scholarship debates authorship, and the Bible notes quoted above show the Church's own translators engaging with that debate. But whoever held the pen, the Gospel that bears the tax collector's name contains two of the most interesting tax passages in the New Testament.
The temple tax and the coin in the fish
Only Matthew tells this story. At Capernaum, the collectors of the temple tax ask Peter whether his teacher pays it (Matthew 17:24-27). Jesus asks Peter a question in return: from whom do kings collect tolls and taxes, from their own subjects or from foreigners? Peter answers foreigners. Then, Jesus says, the subjects are exempt. And yet he adds: "But that we may not offend them", go and pay. The coin for both of them turns up in the mouth of a fish.
The Bible note on the passage explains the tax. Before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, every Jewish man over nineteen owed an annual contribution to its upkeep. After the destruction, the note says, the Romans imposed an obligation on Jews to pay that same tax to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. A religious levy became a tax paid to a conqueror's god. The note adds that scholars disagree about which period the story reflects.
Read as a lesson on tax, the passage makes two moves at once. It questions whether the tax is owed at all. Then it pays anyway, to avoid giving offence.
The coin with the emperor's face
The second passage is the famous one. Opponents try to trap Jesus with a question: is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar? He asks for the coin, asks whose image is on it, and answers: "Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God" (Matthew 22:15-22).
The New American Bible note is careful here, more careful than most after-dinner quotations of the line. It identifies the Caesar as the emperor Tiberius. It observes that the questioners produced the Roman coin readily, which implies they used it and benefited from Roman administration. And it states that the answer "avoids taking sides in the question of the lawfulness of the tax" while raising the debate to a different level. The verse is often quoted as a command to pay whatever the state demands. The text is quieter than that: those who use Caesar's coin owe Caesar in kind, and there is a second debt that no emperor can claim.
Patron of the people who count
Catholic tradition made the tax collector a patron. Franciscan Media's saint-of-the-day entry lists him as patron of accountants, bankers, bookkeepers and tax collectors (and, less expectedly, of actors and taxi drivers). The logic of the first four is easy to see. These are professions whose product is trust in numbers: that the figure is right, that the fee is fair, that the money went where the record says it went.
The Gospels offer two portraits of tax collectors who meet Jesus, and they point in different directions. Matthew gets up and leaves the table. Zacchaeus does not resign. He stays a tax collector and promises to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay four times over anything he has extorted (Luke 19:8). Jesus declares that salvation has come to his house.
Put side by side, the two stories suggest what the texts actually object to. It is not the existence of taxes. The temple tax gets paid. Caesar's coin goes back to Caesar. What is condemned is extortion: the arbitrary levy, the collector who takes more than is owed and keeps the difference. The remedy is either to leave the trade or to run it honestly and make restitution.
That distinction has a modern echo. When the Brief set out tests for why boring jurisdictions win, one of them was simply that the official does not want a tip. A tax system where the amount owed depends on the collector's mood is the system Matthew's Gospel describes. A tax system where the amount follows a published rule, applied the same way to everyone, is the reverse of it. On the taxpayer's side the counterpart is documentation: an honest ledger kept by the person who owes, which is the whole argument of the paper trail that saves you.
Mercy and choosing
There is one more text read on this feast, and it has travelled further than most homilies. In the Liturgy of the Hours for St Matthew's day, the Church reads a homily by the Venerable Bede on the calling at the customs post. Bede writes that Jesus saw the tax collector "by having mercy and by choosing", in Latin miserando atque eligendo.
The Vatican's page on Pope Francis's coat of arms explains why that phrase became his motto. On the feast of St Matthew in 1953, at the age of 17, the young Jorge Bergoglio went to confession and experienced what the page describes as a call to religious life. He kept Bede's words as his episcopal motto and then on his papal arms.
The same scene became one of the most famous paintings in Rome. Vatican News recalls that Caravaggio painted The Calling of St Matthew between 1599 and 1600, with the light entering the scene with Jesus rather than through the window. Benedict pointed to the same canvas when he spoke about Matthew in 2006. Matthew's relics are venerated in the crypt of the cathedral of Salerno, where the feast is marked with a procession. How his life ended is uncertain: Vatican News notes that some sources say he died of natural causes, while other traditions, which it calls untrustworthy, place his death in Ethiopia.
What the feast asks of anyone who handles tax
Strip away the painting and the procession and the feast of St Matthew leaves a short list of questions, all drawn from his own Gospel.
Is it owed? The temple tax passage shows that the question is legitimate. Asking whether a levy applies to you is not disloyalty. It is the first step of honest compliance.
Pay what is owed, without drama. The same passage ends with payment, "that we may not offend them". Caesar's coin goes back to Caesar. Neither story supports the idea that tax obligations can be ignored because one disapproves of the collector.
Nothing more. Zacchaeus's promise shows the other side. A collector who takes more than the rule allows owes it back, and in Luke's telling he owes it back fourfold.
Keep a second ledger in view. "To God what belongs to God" is the reminder that the tax return is not the only account a person renders.
And then there is the verse that gives the day its drama. A man sits at his table with the tools of a steady, unpopular trade. Someone says two words to him. He gets up. Whatever one believes about the Gospel, that is a picture most people who have ever changed their lives, their country or their profession will recognise: the moment when the table stops being the whole world, and a person decides to stand.
Work with Sebastian
If you are at the point of getting up from your own table, and the move involves another country, its tax system and the one you are leaving, book a consultation.
