2 Corinthians 4: 1-6; Matthew 9: 9-13
As we celebrate the feast day of St Matthew the Apostle, I want to begin by making a very brief connection to the feast we celebrated last Sunday: Holy Cross Day.
That is not a feast that is primarily concerned with the passion, suffering, and death of Christ – which we commemorate on Good Friday – instead, it is a feast where we venerate the cross itself, as a symbol or sign, of God’s victory over sin and death.
On Holy Cross Day, we glory in the cross, for Christ has made the tree of death the tree of life. As Adam brought death by stretching forth his hand to take the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Christ, the Second Adam, stretches out his hands upon the tree of the cross, that his body and blood may be the fruit of new life in the new creation. The cross is the sign of this lavish gift of life and forgiveness given to all people.
However, the cross has often not been used as a sign of the all-embracing love of God, but as a symbol of violence and aggression. Not only in the time of the Crusades, for instance, but also in our own time, the cross of Christ has been weaponised, so that it is frequently the sign of the human tendency toward division and tribalistic antagonism, rather than the unconquerable love of God.
Of course, in the time of Jesus, the cross was used as a symbol of fear and power by the Empire, and this brings us to St Matthew. Because, as a tax-collector, he was also a symbol, a sign of the unjust oppression of the Jewish people by the occupying forces of Rome.
Matthew’s very presence and day-to-day activity signified that God’s holy people were still in exile. They may have come out of Babylon, but they were not truly free. They were in the land promised to Abraham, but it was on loan to them from an empire that could quickly change its mind and unleash all kinds of violence upon them.
And to add insult to injury, Rome conscripted members of the Jewish nation itself to do their work for them. As the person responsible for collecting harsh and unjust taxes, Matthew would have been viewed as the very worst of traitors. He would have been seen as a collaborator, actively working against the redemption of Israel from her oppressors. And so, whatever material wealth may have come to Matthew in payment for his treacherous co-operation with Rome, his must have been a miserable life. He must have been a person held in utter contempt.
We’re not given much information about the misery that must have been Matthew’s, but in today’s gospel it seems that the mere invitation to follow Jesus was enough to move him from his tax booth. In Caravaggio’s famous depiction of The Calling of St Matthew, which hangs in the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of St Louis of the French in Rome, Matthew is hunched over in darkness, counting his coins despondently, as a beam of light shines upon him from the direction of Jesus.
And as Christ fixes his eyes firmly upon Matthew, pointing and calling him, the look of utter surprise upon the faces of those sitting around captures the utter offensiveness of the gospel invitation: I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. From the look on their faces, we can almost hear them saying to themselves, “What? Him?”
And standing in front of the figure of Jesus is another. One dressed, unlike the others, in the simple clothing of a peasant, who holds a staff in one hand, and points at Matthew with his other hand, in imitation of the Lord. This is the figure of St Peter, who would almost entirely obscure the figure of Jesus, if it weren’t for the fact that he shares in the same outrageous gesture of welcome to the despised. All we can see is Christ’s face and outstretched arm, as if Caravaggio is saying that we, the followers of Jesus, must embody this offensive welcome ourselves.
And so, we must ask ourselves, how often do we obscure the glory of the Lord, revealed in the face of Jesus Christ, when we fail to embody this welcome of grace and forgiveness? How often do we betray the God of Abraham, by instead serving the empire of sin and pride, when we judge some to be worthy and others to be unworthy of God’s mercy and blessing?
One of the signs that Jesus used most frequently in his subversive proclamation of God’s kingdom, was the act of surrounding himself with sinners, prostitutes, and tax-collectors at the dinner table. This potent symbolism is so often lost on us, but in first-century Judea this was incendiary stuff. Nowhere was the distinction between the clean and the unclean, the worthy and the unworthy, the righteous and the sinner, more apparent than in the social conventions governing who one chose to eat with.
But Jesus could not have been less interested. In his table fellowship, he pointed to the future messianic banquet in the kingdom of God, where people will be gathered from all four corners of the globe to receive from the goodness of the Lord. By doing so, he pointed to a different kind of release from a different kind of exile. He came not to conquer the Romans, but the hardness of the human heart. He came not to set up an earthly kingdom, but to open the gates of everlasting life and the renewal of all creation. And so, his cross truly can never be the sign of tribalistic or political division, as if his kingdom were of this world. To think that it were, would also be to obscure his true purpose.
As those, like Matthew, who are called to follow the Lord of life and love, we are called to share in his ministry of welcoming the stranger, the traitor, the unworthy, and the sinner, so that they may hear the invitation to the table and altar of God, and receive forgiveness and life in the body of Christ.
And so, let us pray that our celebration of the liturgy here, day after day, week after week, truly would be a proclamation of Christ’s death for all, and a foretaste of the banquet in the kingdom of God.