Does this sound familiar? The prayer meeting closes; you’re usually too busy to make it but this time you did. You’ve prayed for the pastor or vicar, the Peruvian missionaries and the youth worker; you’ve prayed for the Senior Women’s Fellowship Total Abstinence Union day trip to Nuneaton Priory… and tomorrow you go back to work. God’s interested it seems, in the youth worker and the Women’s Fellowship but not, it seems, in your job in finance (for example). You even feel guilty sometimes about the money you make which is certainly more than the vicar or pastor, Peruvian missionaries or youth worker. Next day nose-to-nose or bumper-to-bumper you reflect on how wonderful it would be to receive a call to serve the Lord working on the front line. In the meantime you serve the Board and your calls come via the switchboard.
Levi and Zaccheus both received calls from God – both in tax. Both were reasonably well-off but both with no sense of call. Levi’s call meant that he should become a disciple, leave his job and write an account of Jesus which has become Matthew’s Gospel; Zaccheus’ call meant that he should become a disciple, stay in his job and re-write his accounts.
Levi’s call meant that he should change job; Zaccheus’ call meant that he should change the way he did his job. Levi embarked on a new job whereas Zaccheus started a new way of doing his job. In fact, for him, he started doing his job properly for the first time.
Here is the clue: The call for both was to be a follower of Christ; the difference was in how that was worked out.
So which was the most important? Well if you asked Zaccheus’ clients I suspect they would be mightily impressed with an honest tax collector, especially when he paid them back. In fact it was his clients who were the first group to experience the power of calling in Zaccheus’ life. For Levi he threw a party for his friends to which he invited Jesus. Given that tax collectors most likely had no friends other than tax collectors, it was Levi’s colleagues who were the first to experience the power of his call. The question of importance is redundant.
They, and he, discovered, and you can discover, that calling in work is not just about what you do but how and why you do it. It may mean you stay or it may mean you leave ; it will always be meaningful.
BIBLE SECTION
Luke 5:27-32
27After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, 28and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. 29Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” 31Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Luke 19:1-10
1Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2A man was there by the name of Zaccheus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. 5When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zaccheus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” 6So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. 7All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a ‘sinner.’ ” 8 But Zaccheus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” 9Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”
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