by CCW | 21 September 2014 15:33
It is not often that a Saints’ day intrudes upon our Sunday worship. I say “intrudes” because there is a modern liturgical opinion that such celebrations get in the way of the primary focus of each Sunday service, namely, the Resurrection of Christ. There is the fear that the celebration of a saint might detract from the centrality of Christ. A legitimate fear, I suppose, but it overlooks the ancient wisdom which sees the saints as saints only in the light of Christ’s Resurrection. As today’s epistle appointed for The Feast of St. Matthew reminds us, “we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake”. The focus, we may safely conclude, is Christ. And if, we look more closely, we shall see that the Call of Matthew is altogether about the Resurrection of Christ in us and about our being with Christ; in short, The Feast of St. Matthew illumines the very nature of salvation for us. Light shining out of our darkness and light shining in our hearts.
And all because Jesus is 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 light and life itself, who is always active, and never static, and whose activity is always purposeful and therefore, always requires a response from us.
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. “Follow me,” he says to Matthew who “arose, and followed him”.
Immediately before this scene in Matthew’s gospel is the story of the raising of the paralytic. Jesus sees the man lying on a stretcher. Jesus sees the faith of those who brought him and Jesus sees as well the skeptical criticism in the hearts of the Pharisees, the same criticism that is seen here, too. Christ sees and speaks, proclaiming, first, the forgiveness of sins 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, enveloped in the darkness of our confusions and uncertainties or more frighteningly, the darkness of our certainties!
Jesus by looking upon 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 Jews for the Roman overlords, gaining an economic interest for himself at the expense of his ethic and religious identity. No one could be more despised in the culture of Jesus’ day, 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 resurrection. Light in a dark world.
Matthew is the first saint of autumn. His feast stands at the equipoise of darkness and light in the cycle of nature’s year, the Fall Equinox, when the day and the night are of equal duration. It points us in the direction of the slow and inevitable slide into winter – I know, we don’t want to think about that just yet as we cling to the dying embers of the summer or at least to the memory of summer in the chill and change of the Fall. His feast signals the encroaching darkness of nature’s year. And yet, in The Feast of St. Matthew we are awakened to the light that shines out of the darkness of our worldly lives. We are awakened to “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ,” to spiritual light and life.
Two paintings, perhaps, help us to appreciate the interplay of darkness and light. Caravaggio’s two paintings, one of ‘The Call of St. Matthew’[1] (c.1599/1600), his representation of the Gospel story we just heard, and his depiction of ‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’[2] (c. 1602), hang in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The themes of darkness and light are prominent in both.
The painting of ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ depicts a dark and interior scene of men at a table counting money with huddled heads; a worldly scene, we might say, of cupidity and cunning, about which we are, sadly, only too familiar. In the darkness of the scene, following the pointing finger of Christ, light illumines the face of Matthew, a face that is not only illumined but transparent and open to the person of Christ in a way which the other characters in the scene are not. That openness is precisely the moment of Matthew’s conversion. Out of the darkness of human intrigue, with the accompanying overtones of deceit and dishonesty, comes the contrasting and compelling glance of Christ, a look and a word which challenges and changes everything. “He arose, and followed him.”
The painting of ‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’ suggests that same power of transcendent and mysterious light falling upon Matthew, poised with pen in hand whose figure is twisted while looking upwards to the angel of divine inspiration that culminates in The Gospel of St. Matthew. This is what we celebrate, ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ and The Gospel of St. Matthew. At the heart of our celebration is the question about heavenly love in relation to our worldly preoccupations, about light and darkness.
In each painting the light ultimately comes from no natural source. Like Carpaccio, a century before, Caravaggio, the ultimate genius of chiaroscuro painting, the interplay of light and darkness, does not need the older tradition of halos and doves on shafts of light to convey the spiritual. The presence and, even more, the glance of Christ are light enough to illumine the darkness and the confusion of our human hearts.
It is the point of our liturgy. It is always about Christ looking at us in love and compassion and calling us to follow him. His look is what we see and hear in the dance of the liturgy. It always counters the easy yet despairing hedonisms of our worldly lives or the depressing pressures of our age with all of its worries and anxieties. It always challenges us about our fundamental commitments. The call of Matthew and the Gospel of Matthew illumine the darkness of our “covetous desires and inordinate love of riches,” as the Collect puts it and call us simply and truly “to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ.”
Through the glance of Christ, Matthew discovers what is “more gold than gold” to use Sappho’s lovely phrase. He is found in the light that illumines and redeems, the light that sanctifies and reveals in the midst of every darkness, both the darkness of nature’s year and the darkness of our confusions and concerns. His calling and his Gospel awaken us to “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.” Like St. Matthew, it is our vocation to follow him.
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Matthew/Trinity XIV
September 21st, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/09/21/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-matthew/
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