Matthew 9:9
Matthew 9:99As Jesus went on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax booth. “Follow Me,” He told him, and Matthew got up and followed Him.
JWs cite Jesus' call of Matthew as evidence that the preaching work transforms lives — sinners are called out of their former way of life into service. The emphasis falls on the transformation, not on the means by which Jesus engaged. The Watchtower's own 1947 Awake! magazine called excommunication "altogether foreign to Bible teachings" with pagan origins — five years before the organisation adopted the identical practice in 1952.
Jesus called Matthew — a tax collector despised by religious society — to follow him (), and then sat at table "with many tax collectors and sinners" (). When the Pharisees objected, Jesus responded: "I want mercy, not sacrifice, for I came to call not righteous people but sinners" (, quoting ). The passage establishes Jesus' pattern: he pursued the marginalised, shared meals with the ritually unclean, and rebuked the religious establishment for its separationist instinct. The contrast with the Watchtower's shunning policy is stark — where Jesus went to sinners' dinner tables, the organisation instructs families to refuse dinner with their own disfellowshipped children. Second Thessalonians 3:14-15 instructs believers to "admonish" a wayward brother — a verb that requires the very contact the shunning policy forbids.