Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

Speaker 1: Jesus passed by and he saw Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, follow me. And he got up and followed him.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to Scripture for your inner outcasts. Today is Monday, September 21st, 2026, the Feast of Saint Matthew. Today we're joined by doctor Jerry Crete, a marriage and family therapist.

Speaker 1: A welcome. It's good to be with you today on this feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and evangelist. Let's take a moment. I'd like to invite you to take a breath. You know, maybe relax, notice your physical body a little bit as we enter into this reflection, especially here, because this is a powerful gospel passage, I think that can easily get kind of some aspects of it could get missed. So we know it says Jesus passed by and he saw Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, follow me. And he got up and followed him. So let's sit with that. Maybe we don't realize or we forget just how despised tax collectors were in that world. It wasn't a neutral profession here. He would have been seen. Matthew would have been seen as a collaborator with the Roman occupation and someone who profited off his own people's oppression. So they were widely assumed to be dishonest. I mean, they would have been excluded from really true participation in the social, religious life of the community. So he wasn't just disliked. He was truly an outcast. Yeah. He's a man whose identity had been shaped by exclusion, by being the one that everyone else looks down on, you know. Um, and that he deserved that. All right. So if we think for a moment what it must have been like to be Matthew sitting there day after day at his post doing a job that made him a pariah. Maybe I don't know what he would have told himself. You know, maybe it didn't matter what people thought. Or, you know, maybe he just numbed himself to being isolated.

Speaker 1: I don't know, just maybe he's grateful. You know, he made money. Maybe he had some kind of, like, hardened pride, you know? Um, you know, against that shame of being excluded. We don't really know exactly what parts he carried into his job every day. But we can imagine that a man in his position would need some serious internal armor just to survive being so thoroughly cast out of his own community. So then we get Jesus, right? Jesus passes by and doesn't pass judgment. He doesn't lecture Matthew about his career choices. He simply says two words, follow me. Just notice how little qualification is attached to that call. Jesus doesn't say, follow me. Once you've made restitution or follow me, once you've proven you're not really like the other tax collectors. He just says, follow me. To a man sitting exactly where his exile had placed him in, Matthew got up and followed him. So this is a beautiful picture of an exiled part being called home. Um, but not after this part. Cleaned himself up. He was called home right from where he was sitting in that customs post, right there in the middle of his excluded, compromised, ordinary day. So is there a part of you today sitting at its own customs post? Maybe a part you've written off as to compromise, to complicit too far outside of the boundary of who gets invited to something important or meaningful. Or I want you to hear. I want that part to hear Jesus's words directed right to you, right to that. That part. Follow me.

Speaker 2: Doctor Jerry is the author of a book called litanies of the heart. You can order a copy in the link below.

Speaker 1: To Our Lady, our mother. Untier of knots. Pray for us and our chaste spouse, Saint Joseph, pray for us. Our patron Saint John the Baptist, pray for us in Saint Matthew the Evangelist. Pray for us. God bless.