Daily Reflection Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

 Our Feast Day today brings us a two-fold bounty for spiritual insight and contemplation. 

"As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he rose and followed him." ~ Matthew 9:9 

This brief verse supplies the extent of our knowledge of the disciple/apostleMatthew. Was he a tax collector, as the parallel texts in Mark and Luke indicate? If so, he would have been despised by his fellow Jews as a collaborator with the Roman occupation. Jesus, coming to call not the righteous but sinners, says simply, "Follow me." And Matthew does. Whatever his former life, he apparently recognized that he must leave his past behind. Matthew threw a party to celebrate his new life; he invited his old friends to come and meet his new ones. Saint Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises uses the conversion of Matthew as a way to show us that Jesus is inviting us, calling us, right where we are -- seated in our own version of the tax office. We need only follow.

The rest of the story of this apostle and his intimate encounter and transformation with Jesus is lost to us in history, but the Evangelist -- a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian writing at the end of the first century -- pays him homage. Such treasures of our faith do we find here. 'Matthew' joins Luke in completing our Christmas tableaux of the birth of Jesus. His portrait of Jesus shows him as the new Moses for the new Israel, the Messiah longed for by the Jewish people now offered for the salvation of the world. And no other Gospel gives us the teachings of Jesus with such order and elegance. The sublime litany of the Beatitudes, the prelude to the Sermon on the Mount, and the great parable of the Last Judgment ("Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.") -- Thank you, our Anonymous Evangelist. The Gospel ends with the commissioning of the eleven apostles to baptize and to teach. There is no Ascension or Pentecost story. The Church itself is to be the witness of the resurrection, and the Risen Jesus resides now in the life of the community. 

Matthew closes his Gospel with words that speak to our time and every time: "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age." This was a favorite Bible memory verse of mine as a young Presbyterian. But I always wondered.... Who was "Lo"?? For many years, I yearned to be 'like Lo.' (I knew it wasn't 'Lois' !!) Now I know. Lo or Lois -- Jesus is with me in the particulars of my own sinful, paltry, puny attempts to honor my own Great Commission. I need only follow him. Now that invitation is worth a party.