Mat 9:9 Follow me.

In Greek, akoloutheo moi. These are the first words that Christ spoke directly to the evangelist. We cannot know for certain if Matthew listened to any of Christ's sermons, but given the detail in which Matthew reports on the Sermon on the Mount that came before Christ called him directly, we can assume that he did. I would even speculate that Christ saw him taking notes at the sermon and asked him to join as a follower for the specific reason of writing Matthew.

Given the context, akoloutheo, is an interesting word. It means "follow" in the physical sense, but metaphorically it means "to be guided by," which is Christ's calling not only to Matthew, but to all of us. Even more interesting for me, the term also specifically means "to follow the thread" of a discourse, which is exactly what we are trying to do in this blog.

There is a common thread to Christ's teaching that must be followed closely. The tragedy is the hardly anyone spends time today actually studying Christ's words alone. Paul gets far more attention at Sunday services. The Christ story gets far more attention. Somehow, Christ's words, the ideas he was sent to earth to communicate (John called Christ "The Word"), are often overlooked because they are difficult.

Many of the "problems" of Christ's words are resolved in reading him in the original Greek (as the early Church members all did), but it is still work to understand what Christ was saying about the nature of reality.