TRINITY · 21 SEPTEMBER
Saint Matthew the Apostle
Apostle, Evangelist & Martyr · The Tax Collector · Author of the First Gospel · Hinge of the Two Testaments
Matthew — MATH-yoo · Levi — LEE-vy · Capernaum — kah-PER-nay-um · Ethiopia — ee-thee-OH-pee-a · Persia — PER-zhah · Pontus — PON-tus
O Almighty God, who by thy blessed Son didst call Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist; Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires, and inordinate love of riches, and to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
He was sitting at the receipt of custom in Capernaum (kah-PER-nay-um) — a tax collector, a publican, a man who in the eyes of his fellow Jews had sold himself to Rome and to ritual uncleanness — when Jesus passed by and said two words: Follow me. And Matthew (MATH-yoo) rose and followed him. The call of Matthew is the starkest in the Gospels: no dialogue, no hesitation, no questioning of what will be required. He leaves the counting table and walks into a new life, and his first act as a disciple is to throw open his house for a feast to which he invites all his fellow tax collectors and sinners — the community of the excluded and the compromised, the people the respectable avoided — so that they too might meet the one who had said Follow me to a man they would all have written off. Matthew is the Apostle of radical new beginnings and of the scandalous inclusivity of the Kingdom: the Lord who calls a tax collector to apostleship will accept anyone, and the first meal in the new community is a feast with sinners.
The Gospel that bears his name is the most deliberately Jewish of the four and the most systematically structured — the Gospel of the five great discourses, of which the Sermon on the Mount is the first, corresponding to the five books of Moses. Matthew writes for a Jewish-Christian community that needs to understand how Jesus relates to the Torah and the prophetic tradition, and his answer runs through every chapter: Jesus does not abolish the Law but fulfils it, does not supersede the Prophets but completes them, does not found a new religion but brings Israel’s story to its promised conclusion. The Gospel of Matthew is the hinge between the two Testaments — the first book of the New Testament, but one that constantly quotes and echoes the Old, beginning with a genealogy that traces Jesus through Abraham and David and ending with the great missionary commission that closes it: Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Of Matthew’s subsequent ministry after the Ascension, the tradition is various and largely unverifiable. He is said to have preached first in Judaea, then in Persia (PER-zhah), Ethiopia (ee-thee-OH-pee-a), and Pontus (PON-tus) on the Black Sea coast. The Ethiopian church has a strong tradition of his mission there, and this is consistent with the tradition that it was Matthew’s Gospel — or a Hebrew version of it — that the earliest Ethiopian Christians possessed. He died a martyr’s death, by sword or spear according to varying accounts, at a date and in a place that the historical record does not securely establish. He is now in the cloud of witnesses — the tax collector who left his table, the Evangelist who gave the Church its most-used Gospel, the missionary whose obedience to the Great Commission took him to places the historical record can only gesture toward. What he accomplished in Persia and Ethiopia and Pontus, how many were baptised in the name of the Trinity at his word, what communities grew from his planting — only the God who called him from the receipt of custom with two words knows the full account.
His feast on 21 September falls in late Trinity-tide, as the long green season begins its slow turn toward Advent — the season of gathering in, which is appropriate for the Apostle whose Gospel gathers together the whole of the Old Testament’s promise and presents it fulfilled in the New. Matthew is the harvester among the Evangelists, the one who brings the full sheaves of Israel’s scripture into the barn of the Gospel narrative, who shows that not one jot or tittle of the Law shall pass away until all is fulfilled. The man who left his counting table took up a different kind of accounting — the reckoning of prophecy and fulfilment, of promise and completion, of Abraham and David and the one who was called the son of both — and the Gospel he produced is the Church’s primary instrument for understanding how the whole of God’s dealings with Israel pointed toward the morning when a carpenter of Galilee said Follow me to a man sitting at a tax collector’s booth, and the man got up and came.
O Almighty God, who by two words didst call thy servant Matthew from the receipt of custom and make of a publican an Evangelist; Grant that we may rise as readily from whatever table we sit at, follow as completely, and gather as faithfully the harvest of thy promise into the keeping of thy Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.