Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the King’s College Chapel on 23 September 2001, shortly after 9/11.
“And he arose and followed him”
The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – what a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and apparently 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.
We are, of course, greatly disturbed and, no doubt, disquieted about other things than the seemingly arbitrary actions of a Jewish tax-collector over two millennia ago. The events in New York and Washington and elsewhere are deeply disturbing (9/11). Suddenly we realise that the Global Village means that terrorism isn’t just “over there” in some far off remote corner of the world. Suddenly it is very close at hand. There is a crisis, only we may not be quite so sure about the response. Indeed, that may very well be what disturbs and disquiets us most in the aftermath of these terrible acts of terrorism. What kind of response will there be?
Now it is not my place nor my business to offer advice on matters of foreign policy and international affairs whether brilliant or banal, whether wise or foolish. But here is a crisis which should recall us to the spiritual principles which underlie our moral, social, political, and economic lives and which alone enable a respectable dialogue with other spiritual traditions that are different from our own. To recall such things, perhaps in the face of their having been forgotten or denied, is surely the business of the Church. Even an obscure publican who became an Apostle and Evangelist may actually be able to help our thinking.
And if so, then the Global Village will in some sense have become more truly global in the discovery of how the communities of the past belong to our present rather than being cavalierly rejected, ignored or destroyed. “Innovation replaces tradition” after all, is the slogan of globalisation. The position of the defining economists of globalisation, Joseph Schumpeter and Andy Grove, is summed up this way: “the present – or perhaps the future – replaces the past. Nothing matters so much as what will come next, and what will come next can only arrive if what is here now gets overturned.” The super fast-track into the cyber future means that there is no here; it is always sliding into a past which is forever being overturned. “Daddy, are we there yet?” takes on a whole new horror of meaning.
The call of St. Matthew 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!
Unlike contemporary politics which, we might say, is “politics within the limits of economics” where the state exists for the markets, here in this story there is no doubt that the economic is subordinate to the political and that the political is inescapably spiritual. It is a question of fundamental loyalties and identities. Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community. It is an issue of spiritual justice, we might say.
The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signalled in the Collect for St. Matthew’s day which applies Matthew’s conversion to everyone 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 (Trinity 15), “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The Gospel suggests 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. Thomas Friedman in his book, The Lexus and The Olive Tree, is aware of the problem for the global village. He puts it this way: “Any society that wants to thrive economically today must constantly be trying to build a better Lexus and driving it out into the world. But no one should have any illusions that merely participating in this global economy will make a society healthy. If that participation comes at the price of a country’s identity, if individuals feel their olive tree roots crushed, or washed out, by this global system, those olive tree roots will rebel. They will rise up and strangle the process. Therefore the survival of globalisation as a system will depend, in part, on how well all of us strike a balance.” Yet he assumes, as do many, the subordination of political states to economic forces and assumes too great a rationality to markets in themselves. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has now a global reach but without his qualifying recognition of the necessity of the state and a moral order. 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 professorial class 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. A Lexus will eventually rust, even in the desert, and the olive trees may well outlive all our toys. 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 themselves the need for mercy. That Christ quotes Hosea (Hos. 6.6/Mt. 9.13) further intensifies the point. Hosea is the great Old Testament prophet of the love of God who proclaims the mercy of God even in the face of our wilful 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 – no olive trees, no Lexus, nothing. 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.
The poet 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
King’s College Chapel
September 23, 2001