Jeremy Myers
In my junior year of high school, I was cut from my high school basketball team.
I can still remember where I was and how I felt when I learned I didn’t make the cut. I was standing outside the office of the athletic director/coach of the boys team where the list was posted. All around me were other young men celebrating their shared joy of finding their names on that white sheet of paper hanging on the bulletin board.
But alas, as I surveyed the sheet, my name wasn’t included. I surely wasn’t the only one who was cut from the team that year, but it sure felt like it in that moment. I felt isolated, unwanted and unworthy.
As I reflect back all of these years later, I can see the growth that came from that experience, and I understand the difficulty and unenviability of the coach’s position. But the pain was extremely disorienting and discouraging. And while the impetus of the pain is different for everybody, each of us at some point in time has or will experience the heartache of being excluded.
In the gospel of Mark, there’s a story about a guy who knew the pain of being excluded all too well. He was a tax collector named Matthew. One could argue Matthew had earned his exclusion through poor life choices. Tax collectors were collaborators with an extremely unpopular and oppressive government. They became very rich by using their positions to effectively legally rob the people in their community.
Consequently, most people avoided tax collectors at all costs, and they certainly didn’t invite them to participate in any communal functions. Matthew knew what it was to be isolated, unwanted and unworthy, but everything changed when he met a man named Jesus.
In Matthew 9:9-13, Matthew makes the cut as Jesus issues an invitation to become part of his crew. What’s of most interest to me, however, is not Matthew’s response to the invitation but what immediately follows. The passage indicates Matthew’s first course of action following his induction into Jesus’ entourage is to invite several other unwanted and unworthy people, referred to as “tax collectors and sinners,” to join him for dinner with Jesus.
Upon hearing the religious elites questioning the morality of Jesus’ social circle including such people, Jesus famously declares, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Part of what makes the gospel good news is that it is available to all who hear and are willing to receive it. It’s an invitation that is unlimited in scope. John 3:16 famously tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son,” not to condemn the world, “but to save the world through him.”
1 Timothy 2:4 tells us God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” And several times throughout the gospel narratives, Jesus himself issues the invitation for any who were willing to come and follow him, extending to all much the same invitation he extended to Matthew.
I wonder if the alienation and accompanying hurt and heartache Matthew had felt before Jesus invited him to follow didn’t inspire Matthew’s actions in the immediate aftermath. Could it be that the pain of being excluded in the past drove him to invite others to join him when he was finally invited in?
The truth is that Matthew was unworthy, but Jesus still wanted him. That same truth extends to each of us. Though we have sinned time without number, though we have rebelled against God’s holy expectations for our lives, Christ came and sacrificed his life on our behalf. And Jesus continues to issue unexpected invitations to and through unworthy people like me and you.
I pray that each of you reading this experience the amazing grace of Jesus. I hope that you in response seek to spread the love to others who are on the outside looking in. The grace of God is a free gift, but it’s not something we are to hide away for ourselves. Just as we have freely received, so too we should freely give to others.
While all of us will feel the sting of failing to make the cut or being uninvited, that shouldn’t be the case when it comes to salvation and the gospel. God’s amazing grace carries an invitation that is open to all who are willing to receive it. Everyone’s invited.
The Rev. Jeremy Myers is the lead pastor of First Baptist Church in Seymour. Read his blog at jeremysmyers.com. Send comments to [email protected].