The Christian Path Pictured

Missions is not as much about going somewhere as it is about following Someone. Whether Christ calls us to cross an ocean and bear witness to the one and only Savior or to cross the street and speak of him, calling always begins with following. When we strip away what we think we bring to the table — our talents and limitations, our plans and fears — what’s left is much less complicated: the loving, redeeming, commanding relationship between the Lord and his servant. The story of Matthew, the publican-turned-apostle, reminds us how wonderfully radical this relationship is when we make following Christ the beginning and ending of our calling.

Bookends to a Life

In my travels, I once came across two paintings that brilliantly capture this truth. In Rome’s Church of San Luigi, two enormous canvases face each other like bookends of a life: The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. They are the work of Renaissance giant Caravaggio, who had two great talents as an artist: turning paint into light and freeze-framing action.

In The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, the moment of Matthew’s murder at the command of a pagan king looks so vivid that you feel as if you’ve reached the scene of the crime a second too late. The bystanders around Matthew suddenly turn back in revulsion and sorrow, and we take our place with the onlookers. Caravaggio himself joins us in a self-portrait among the crowd, and light etches the grief in his face as he witnesses the violence (Caravaggio, 142–43). In the foreground, the aged apostle is no match for the strong swordsman who has just struck, his withdrawn sword peppering Matthew’s tunic with fresh blood. There are two parallel lines on this chaotic canvas: the sword in the hand of Matthew’s killer and, higher up, a palm branch extended by an angel to the dying saint about to receive an abundant entrance into the presence of his Savior.

How fitting that Caravaggio’s equally dramatic The Calling of Saint Matthew fills the opposite chapel wall. On this canvas, Jesus enters the dark room of the tax collector’s counting house, where five men are gathered around a table, pooling the day’s take of coins. Light streams into the room from a singular source: the entrance of Christ. Jesus points to Matthew, and the light catches an expression of surprise in the publican’s eyes, as if to say, “Who, me? Why me?” If you look closely, Jesus’s feet are turned, as if he is already about to leave the room. Matthew has a decision to make, and Christ is not waiting or begging. Matthew himself tells us what happened in Matthew 9:9:

As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.

Matthew was a tax collector in Capernaum on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. Tax collectors (or “publicans,” a word that comes to us straight from the Latin publicanus, a public official) served the empire — and themselves. They had a reputation for something akin to highway robbery, so it’s no wonder the phrase “publicans and sinners” was considered a redundancy.

“Missions is not as much about going somewhere as it is about following Someone.”

The Scriptures are silent as to how much Matthew had interacted with Jesus before his calling, but what is clear is that the call was direct and the response decisive. Matthew’s radical obedience in following the call of Christ would eventually cost him everything, as Caravaggio painted in blood on the canvas opposite The Calling. Yes, Matthew’s losses were gain — ultimate, abundant, and lasting gain. But let’s not rush to that satisfying conclusion and miss out on counting the cost, a mistake a former tax collector would never make.

Following the Friend of Sinners

Matthew’s calling was simple and direct, and so was his obedience to that calling. It was quite ordinary, but in the essential, life-giving way that breathing is ordinary. I love the speed with which Matthew answers the call, as if he is seizing hold of life itself, which indeed he was! Action followed obedience. Matthew was all in, and so he invited his friends to dinner to meet Jesus.

As Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matthew 9:10–13)

The Pharisees saw scandal, a house of ill repute. But Jesus saw an emergency room of the sick and dying — and he was the only one who could save them. Matthew, who had only recently quit his job at Herod’s local revenue office, could never — would never — have dreamed of such a gathering in his home until he tasted grace. “Friend of sinners,” an intended slur, was a name of sweet mercy to Matthew — and to us too.

Not on every day that followed, though, would Matthew pursue Christ with such confidence. There would be times in which he forgot his place and jockeyed with the other disciples for position in the apostolic pecking order (Mark 9:33–34). And there was the time he abandoned Jesus. The feet that had so recently been washed by the Master in the upper room ran from Gethsemane, leaving Jesus in the hands of his enemies (Matthew 26:56). Days and nights of fear, shame, and doubt followed for Matthew. But the risen Christ never abandons those he calls, as John 20:19–21 shows:

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

Following: The First Calling

Matthew went on to fulfill his calling, as the great arc of the gospel spread from “Jerusalem and . . . Judea and Samaria . . . to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Early church tradition recounts Matthew’s ministry in Judea and Syria, mirroring the kingdom’s concentric advance, and tells how he met a martyr’s death — as Caravaggio portrayed — in Parthia, a region in what is today Iran (Quest for the Historical Apostles, 195–96). Beyond his days, Matthew’s Gospel, the book that opens the New Testament, would indeed go to the end of the earth and in a thousand languages.

But all of that — his writing ministry, his mission, his martyrdom — was yet ahead of Matthew when on the night of that first Easter, Matthew looked with wide-eyed wonder into the glorious face of his risen Lord, the same Lord who years before saw an unlikely sinner in Capernaum and said, “Follow me.” The poet Mary Oliver once asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Matthew would answer that great question with joy and without hesitation: “Follow Christ!”

How about you? Have you heard the same voice Matthew heard, calling you to come after him? You may not know exactly where to go or what to do, but you know the Lord who lays his claim on your life. You know what commands to obey and what promises to trust. You know whom to follow. So follow him, secure in the knowledge that Christ our Captain takes the lead in life and in death.