by CCW | 21 September 2012 10:00
The Gospel story for the Feast of St. Matthew is the call of Matthew to discipleship in Christ. In a way, his call is altogether about the resurrection of Christ in us and about our being with Christ. The commemoration of St. Matthew illumines the very nature of salvation for us.
And all because Jesus is simply passing by, the Jesus who is always passing by. It all seems so casual, so accidental, so incidental but, to the contrary, Jesus’ passing by is not casual; it is essential. That is to say, it belongs to the very principle of God who is life itself, who is always active, and never static, and whose activity is always purposeful and therefore, always requires a response.
For Jesus’ passing by is not without consequence. Something happens. He glances upon us. “Salvation begins by our being seen by Jesus, by his turning toward us his compassionate eyes”. Here Jesus “saw a man named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom,” at the tax collector’s bench. Everything unfolds from that glance of Jesus.
The story which immediately precedes this story in Matthew’s Gospel is about the raising of the paralytic. Jesus sees the man lying on a stretcher, sees the faith of those who brought him, and sees as well the skeptical criticism in the hearts of the Pharisees. Christ sees and speaks, proclaiming first the forgiveness of sins, “take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven,” and then the healing of his body, “arise, take up thy bed and go unto thine house”.
Here, Jesus sees Matthew, like so many of us, deep in our worldly concerns and preoccupations and caught in the conflict of our desires.
Jesus’ seeing us awakens the need for a response on our part. His glance is a moment of clarifying and illuminating truth. It speaks to the deep and inner essence of the human personality regardless of where we are on the plane of human affairs. Like the paralytic, so Matthew is on the fringes, on the margins of society – rejected and despised because of his job, a job which alienates him from the Jewish society to which he belongs. He is collecting taxes from fellow Jews for their Roman overlords, thus gaining an economic interest for himself at the expense of his ethnic and religious identity.
No one could be more despised, but in this Gospel, Jesus is in the company of the despised and the rejected. He has come to a world of the lost to bring healing and salvation. His presence signals hope; his glance redemption. His word is resurrection. “Follow me,” he says, “for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
His glance and word is freeing. Here is, as Sappho puts it, “more gold than gold,” something more precious and of infinite worth. It is the discovery on Matthew’s part of who he is in the sight of God, a sinner redeemed and called to a new life, a new life in Christ and with Christ.
Matthew’s call “from the receipt of custom” obscures the deeper point of our call to follow Christ in our lives. That is the primary concern. It may mean a dramatic change, an outward change like Matthew’s, but it is also about an inward change, a change in our hearts that conveys a new sense of spiritual freedom no matter how oppressive and dismal our outward circumstances may be. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well,” as Julian of Norwich remarks. This is not just wishful thinking. It is about responding to the gracious glance of Christ upon us. It signals the discovery of who we are in the sight of God. It changes everything. We are all called like Matthew to the one thing needful – the love of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of St. Matthew, Sept. 20th, 2012
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/09/21/meditation-for-the-feast-of-st-matthew/
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