My name used to be Levi. Ironic, isn’t it. Levi, in Hebrew, means “joined”. I wasn’t joined to anyone – I was the most despised and hated person in Capernaum.

I lived and worked on a border – the border between the territory ruled by Philip the Tetrarch and the territory ruled by Herod Antipas. So I wasn’t just a tax collector, I was in Customs and Excise as well. And because of that I lived and worked on a different kind of border – the border between respectability and crime, and I crossed that border many times.

People had good reason to hate me. I was collecting taxes, some of which went to the Romans, the occupying power. I was a collaborator. I was the man to whom the local farmers had to take a tenth of all the grain they harvested, and a fifth of all the grapes and olives they picked. Then there was income tax – 1% when I was collecting it, which may strike you as minimal, but it was still a source of resentment. There was a poll tax which you paid just because you existed. If you moved, they taxed you – You had to pay if you want to drive your animals along a Roman road. And, of course, I was on the take – taking a cut for myself to increase my earnings. Well, after all, I was a skilled worker – I can read and write, and what’s more, I can read and write Greek, the language of commerce.

I was excluded from the synagogue. As a customs officer, I was seen as permanently unclean. A customs officer has to search people and their possessions, Jews and Gentiles alike. If I’d gone through all that purification ritual every time I frisked a Syrian or searched a Samaritan’s saddlebags I’d never have had time to do my job. So the leader of the local synagogue treated me as if I were a leper.

And then I began to hear stories about the teacher from Nazareth, and about the astonishing miracles that he was performing. About how he reached out to people who were outcasts – touching and healing lepers.

And then one day, there was a hubbub in the street, and the sound of a crowd approaching. I grabbed my money bag and got ready to run. It might be an angry mob. And then Jesus came in. When he came in, there was a gasp from the crowd. They couldn’t believe that he would make himself unclean by entering my office and talking to me.

Even some of his followers looked shocked – it took a while for those of them who had been fisherman to accept me – I’d taken a lot of money off them in the past. Then the crowd fell silent and into that silence Jesus dropped two words – “Follow me.”

The ripples from those words are still spreading out through my life, years later, and I shall never forget how they made me feel. A door had opened – not the door of my office, but a door in the wall of hatred and prejudice that cut me off from other people, and I was being invited to step through it.

And then I got a crash course in what following Jesus involves, for the very next person who asked his help was the leader of the synagogue, the man who for years had treated me like dirt. His little girl had died. He was hoping for a miracle. And on the way to his house, a different miracle happened. Jesus healed a local woman who had suffered from years and years of bleeding. All it took was for her to reach out and touch the fringe of his cloak. Which, by the way, rendered him unclean. Not that the leader of the synagogue made any fuss about that. He was just desperate for his daughter to be healed, and so she was.

Responding when Jesus said “Follow me” was easy. I was being offered love and acceptance for the first time in many years. What came later was difficult and challenging, but it was possible because the love and the acceptance were there, and they still are.  I now know that it was the love and acceptance of God that entered my office that day.

My name used to be Levi. When I chose to follow Jesus, I was given a new name. Now I’m Mattityahu, but you can call me Matthew. Mattityahu is Hebrew and it means “Gift of God”. And the amazing thing is that since Jesus began to call me by that name, no-one has seen any irony in that.