Year: 2017

“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.

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“And one of them … turned back … giving him thanks;
and he was a Samaritan”

Last Sunday we had the powerful and familiar story of the Good Samaritan. Today we have another gospel story in which a Samaritan figures also most prominently. It is an intriguing aspect of the Christian Scriptures, particularly of St. Luke’s Gospel, that the Samaritans are often used by Jesus to teach us about what belongs to the truth of our common humanity. At once an implied criticism of religious divisions, particularly among the Jews but by extension to other religions, Jesus talks about what transcends the differences between and within religious cultures. In these back-to-back Sunday Gospels we are reminded about the true nature of our obligations to God and to one another as well as our failings.

Both Gospels, the one a parable, the other an encounter, reveal to us something of ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ about our humanity at the same time as they remind us of the necessity of God’s grace as the operative principle in our lives. There are our failings but there is the triumph of God’s grace in us compelling to “go and do likewise” both towards our neighbour and towards God. “A certain man” is wounded, lying half-dead on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively. “A certain Priest” and “Levite” “look and pass by”. There were “ten men that were lepers,” ten that were healed by Jesus.

Only “a certain Samaritan as he journeyed”, who having seen the man who was wounded, “had compassion on him” and “came where he was”, “tak[ing] care of him.” Only one of the ten who were healed “turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan.” In the Jewish context of the Gospel, the Samaritans were a despised sect, outcasts, the proverbial “other.” The area of dispute between the Samaritans and the Jews is about the place where the Law of Moses was delivered and about what books truly comprise the Scriptures. In the encounter in John’s Gospel with the woman at the well of Samaria – the most intense Gospel story of Christ in his engagement with the Samaritans – Jesus is very clear about how they have erred on these doctrinal points at the same time as drawing them into conversation, even into communion with him.

Outsiders such as the Samaritans provide a corrective lesson to all the forms of religious self-righteousness and division. Jesus uses the Samaritans to show us our failings and to show us the setting right of our hearts and minds. No one lies outside of the reach of the Gospel.

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