Matthew 9:9-17

New Testament for Everyone

The call of Matthew

⁹ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-office.

“Follow me!” he said to him. And he got up and followed him.

¹⁰ When he was at home, sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?”

¹² Jesus heard them.

“It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,” he said, “it’s the sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this saying means: ‘It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.’ My job isn’t to call upright people, but sinners.”

¹⁴ Then John’s disciples came to him with a question.

“How come,” they asked, “we and the Pharisees fast frequently, but your disciples don’t fast at all?”

¹⁵ “Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,” replied Jesus, “as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.

¹⁶ “No one,” he went on, “sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. ¹⁷ People don’t put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the skins will split, the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.”