“And he arose and followed him”
The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and seemingly arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.
It is a story of conversion but without anything of the inner struggle and conflict displayed in the conversion of St. Paul. Yet the external details suffice. He is a tax-collector and that is associated here with being a sinner. Why? Publicans, as the name suggests, have an immediate connection to the res publica, the public things, the things pertaining to the life of the political community especially in its natural and economic life. There is a certain necessity to taxes, unpleasant as they may seem to be. Why then the association with sin?
There are two reasons. The first has to do with the particular context. Matthew’s tax-collecting is seen as a kind of spiritual betrayal, a form of treason against the spiritual community to which he properly belongs. He is collaborating with the Roman overlords in collecting taxes for them from his own people while benefiting personally. Rome, perhaps, was the first imperial power to outsource tax collecting! Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community. It is an issue of spiritual justice, we might say, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities.
The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signaled in the Collect for St. Matthew’s day which applies Matthew’s conversion to every one of us. “Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches.” It is a question of disordered love, of love in disarray, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities for each of us. We sense the gospel imperative, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon” – worldly riches – “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The suggestion of the gospel is that we are more than our material acquisitions and more than our acquisitiveness. We are spiritual creatures who cannot, ultimately, be satisfied with anything less than the kingdom of God.
At issue is the relationship between the forms of our spiritual identity and the forms of economic life. What is overlooked in all forms of economic determinism is sin and evil, in the form of our “covetous desires” and “inordinate love of riches” and the willful destructiveness born out of deep hatred and animosity. What is overlooked is how all forms of economic determinism are essentially materialistic and atheistic.
There is nothing new about this. The overarching metaphor for almost every aspect of our lives for quite some time has been that of the technical arts, the arts of production. The professorate are in Kant’s telling phrase the “technicians of learning”, our universities but information factories. As Edward Tingley notes “learning is now a traffic in information, in material that has achieved commodity status precisely by disengaging itself from the problems of human life.” Education no longer speaks to the souls as well as the minds of students. We speak of a Health Care Delivery System as if we were delivering pizzas. Everything becomes a commodity, including ourselves, our children, our bodies, and now even our genes. Religion is not exempt. God, too, has become a market commodity.
So what next? Matthew “arose and followed” Jesus. Does this mean that we should eschew all and every form of economic activity. No. For one thing, not being angels, we can’t. We are inescapably caught up in the necessities of economic life – food, shelter and clothing, to put it simply. But we need to ask, for what end? And demand for ourselves that economic activity be not an end but a means. Worldly riches are not the ends for spiritual creatures. Spirit yearns for things of the spirit and seeks to draw all things into the life of Spirit. “The Word”, says Origen, “is the Shepherd of all rational things” and they that serve that Good Shepherd must share in that greater conversion of all things to their spiritual source and principle. “The Kingdom of God and His justice is our good; and the end we must set before us”, Augustine tells us.
There is, then, a redemption of all human desires, and therefore a redemption of the economic, too. Matthew, to be sure, left the “receipt of custom” but Zacchaeus didn’t, yet in the case of each “salvation has come to this house.” How? The answer, I think, is to be found in the gospel story: “As Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and the disciples” provoking the Pharisees and prompting Jesus’ twofold reply. “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick”, he says, and then, “go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Thus the call to Matthew is shown to be “the call of pure mercy toward sinners” and the response can only be like the pure faith of Abraham – simple and direct. It is the response of sinners who know in themselves the need for mercy. That Christ quotes Hosea further intensifies the point. For Hosea is the love-prophet of the Old Testament who proclaims the mercy of God even in the face of our willful betrayals of that love. There is hope for us all; sinners are called to repentance. What stands in the way is ourselves, our own self-righteousness and the illusions of our own self-determinations.
The counter is conversion, the life-long project of returning ourselves and everything else to God in prayer and praise. Without God we make the world and ourselves a desert. The mercy is that we have a God to return to, the God in fact who has turned to us to save us from ourselves. We have only to will it and to let that mercy season all our actions, all our responses.
Thomas Traherne suggests wonderfully something of that right relation of ourselves to the world and to God.
You never enjoy the world aright…till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in sceptres…till you delight in God for being good to all, you never enjoy the world.
Matthew discovered in Sappho’s phrase what is “more gold than gold” and so may we if we follow the one whom he followed.
“And he arose and followed him”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St Matthew
September 2017