Homily for the Feast of Saint Matthew - preached at St Thomas' Church, Jersey, on Wednesday 21st September 2022. Gospel reading Matthew 9:9-13.
It’s very rare that someone can say anything about the Church or the Catholic Faith that would shock or surprise me, but one of my friends, when he found out I was a Catholic, managed just that. He asked,
“Is it true that you Catholics believe that anyone, even the worst murderer in the world, if he was sorry for what he did and went to confession, could go to heaven?”
I told him it was true, that even the worst murderer in the world, if he repents, could be saved. This is when he shocked me, because his answer to that was;
“that, is why I couldn’t be a Catholic! I just can’t agree with that!”
Most often, when people reject the Catholic Faith, it is because they think we are judgmental; that we condemn people as sinners and tell them they’re going to hell. But here was the opposite, someone whose sense of justice was so acute that they couldn’t accept that evil could ever go unpunished. This is the tightrope we walk; whenever we teach about sin and repentance and judgment, there are always those ready to condemn us.
Today we celebrate the feast of one of Jesus’ twelve Apostles, one of the men to whom the ministry of governing the Church, teaching the Faith, and passing on the gifts of the Holy Spirit was given; Saint Matthew, who in his own Gospel, shockingly identifies himself as a tax collector. [1]
It might be difficult to understand to us today, but a tax collector in first century Israel was one of the worst kind of untouchable. They were traitors, collaborators with an occupying power, taking money from Jews to fund their oppressors’ armies. Very often they used the position they had been given by foreigners to extort money from their fellow citizens and to overcharge them so they could grow even richer. They used armed thugs to extract money when people couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. They were, perhaps, the most hated men in Israel and the Jewish Talmud even taught that it was righteous to lie to a tax collector, calling them robbers and professional extortioners. They were banned from Synagogue, they and their families were banned from being witnesses in court, it was forbidden to take any money (either payment or charity) from them because the money was considered stolen.
We have to bear this in mind then, when we read Matthew’s account of His calling and what happened after; He was sitting in the customs house, literally in the middle of a gravely sinful act, when Jesus came upon him and called “follow me” – Matthew immediately downed his tools and went with Jesus. Jesus then goes to dinner, and is joined by tax-collectors and sinners (heavily implied to be prostitutes and other Jewish untouchables) and the Pharisees are outraged; “why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?” they ask the Apostles. The same as my friend asking “how could you let a murderer into heaven?!” Their sense of justice, that sin ought to be punished is the same.
Jesus’ answer is telling. It isn’t relativism, it isn’t Him saying “you don’t know their story” or “what they’ve done doesn’t matter to God” – Jesus says “It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick.” Jesus is the doctor and the sickness is sin. He does not condemn sinners, but nor is He content to leave them where they are, instead He calls them to follow Him and by following Him to transform their lives. He offers healing, even to the worst untouchable, even to tax collectors, and prostitutes, and killers. All it takes is willingness to follow St Matthew’s example. When the Lord calls us out of sin; get up, leave our sin behind, and follow Him. And when we stumble into sin again, as we often do, we might remember the words of Saint Jean Vianney, the Curé of Ars;
God is quicker to forgive than a mother to snatch her child from the fire
Nobody is beyond the love of God, which means nobody is beyond his mercy. He wants to forgive you. He wants to heal you. When you are in need of His mercy you need only come to Him in the sacrament of the confessional and hear those blessed words from the mouth of Christ acting through His priest; “I absolve you of your sins.”
[1] St Jerome notes that the other Evangelists' accounts change the Tax-collector's name to "Levi" (wanting to spare the Apostle from being identified with such a shameful profession) but Matthew identifies himself as the Tax collector.
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