Follow me
The Feast of St. Matthew coincides with the Fall or Autumnal Equinox, that point of nature’s year, at least for us in the Northern Hemisphere, when the length of the day and the night are equal. We know, of course, that it marks the official end of summer and the not so slow march to winter with the lengthening of the night. Yet that moment of a kind of equilibrium between day and night, between light and darkness, has a spiritual significance captured in the St. Matthew’s feast day which coincides more or less with the equinox. With St. Matthew, we mark “the closing down of summer” to use Alistair MacLeod’s felicitous phrase, the end of summer officially and symbolically and beginning of autumn. Light and darkness in a kind equipoise, even if it signals the coming increase of darkness.
The wonder of The Feast of St. Matthew is that it signals a kind of inversion of the patterns of nature. If with the Fall Equinox we mark the beginnings of the turn towards the darkness of nature’s year, with St. Matthew we mark the turn to the greater light of Christ. We celebrate two things: the call of Matthew to apostleship and its result in the first Gospel, The Gospel according to St. Matthew. The connection to light and darkness is wonderfully captured, it seems to me, by two paintings by the renaissance painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), a master of the chiaroscuro which is precisely about the interplay of light and darkness, hinted at in the shadowing forth of more profound ideas.
Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ (c.1599/1600), represents the Gospel story for this feast. Another painting, ‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’ (c. 1602), hangs with it in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The themes of darkness and light are central to 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 (think Wall Street imaginatively). Into the darkness of the scene, following the pointing finger of Christ, light illumines the face of St. Matthew. His face is not only illumined but transparent and open to the face of Christ in a way which the other characters in the scene are not. That openness is 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. “And he arose, and followed him.”
‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’ suggests that same power of transcendent and mysterious light falling upon Matthew. He is poised with pen in hand and his figure is twisted while looking upwards to the angel of divine inspiration which results in The Gospel of St. Matthew. We celebrate both ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ and The Gospel of St. Matthew. And at the heart of our celebration is the question about heavenly love in relation to our worldly preoccupations.
In a marvelous phrase, Matthew is called from “the receipt of custom.” As a Jewish tax collector in the employ of the Roman authorities, Matthew could hardly be more despised, a veritable traitor to the religious sensibilities of Israel. The point is not that there is something intrinsically evil and wrong in tax collecting. It belongs, after all, to the necessary functioning of our political and social communities.
The Call of St. Matthew is not from something intrinsically evil and wrong to simply something better and superior. Christ’s word is “follow me”. This stands in contrast to his word to the woman caught in adultery who was hauled before Christ by judgmental and hypocritical accusers. To them he famously said, “he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” But to her, Christ said, “go and sin no more.” The call here, like the call of the fisherman, to James and John, to Simon and Andrew, is a call to something more. “Follow me.” There is no implied judgement, all the social critics notwithstanding.
It is a clarifying and light-bearing call out of the darkness of human ambiguity and uncertainty, out of the confusions of conflicting images, and into the interplay of their coherence and completion; in short, it is a call to Christ. “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ,” as St. Paul puts it in the epistle reading from 2nd Corinthians 4.
Only as open to the light of Christ, can there be the following of Christ and only in the following of Christ can there be the further illumination of Christ in our lives. This is the light that sustains and illumines, the light which is more than our worldly fears and preoccupations. Without that light, we remain trapped and imprisoned in a world which seems increasingly unlivable and, ultimately, inhuman. Such a world is not a world for our humanity and, indeed, is destructive of the world.
The light of Christ recalls Matthew and us to the one in whom our humanity finds its truth and its salvation, its meaning and purpose, the light that is greater than the darkness of human intrigue, complicity and deceit, the light that overcomes the darkness of human folly and despair, even our despair of our world.
The biblical and traditional symbol of St. Matthew and his Gospel is not the winged lion symbolic of St. Mark, nor the winged ox of St. Luke, nor the winged eagle of St. John, but, profoundly, the image of a winged man. Our humanity. The call of St. Matthew is from the darkness of our human aloneness and alienation into the light and grace of Christ, a call which signifies the redemption of our humanity. It signals the discovery of our human vocation, captured in the simple words of Christ to Matthew, “follow me.”
Feast of St. Matthew, 2018
Fr. David Curry