Homily on the Feast of St. Matthew, 21 September 2023
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew, apostle and evangelist. Matthew used to be a tax collector named Levi before Jesus called him to be among his disciples. He was known to be the son of Alpheus from Galilee. He must have been a brilliant and responsible guy because he eventually got employed by the Romans to collect taxes from the Jewish community living around Galilee. He must have been an OC too – obsessive compulsive – with care and attention to the smallest details for he could compute even the smallest penalties for delayed payment of taxes. However he must have been hated too by his family and his fellow Jews for having opted to work for the Romans under whose power they were being oppressed. This could explain why everyone in his Jewish community was treating him as a public sinner, an outcast of society.
We really do not know what his true motives were for having chosen a kind of profession that would alienated him from his own people and from God himself. It could be hunger and poverty that drove him to seek greener pastures on the side of their enemy. There was a saying “if you cannot beat them, join them.” So I suppose he eventually became rich and lived a very comfortable life; but we can also surmise that deep within him he must have been very lonely. And despite the frequent bonding with fellow tax collectors and other outcasts, in his heart there must have been an emptiness and void that only a Savior-Messiah could fill. He must have heard a lot about Jesus. And becoming curious about the growing popularity of this blooming prophet he must have tried to listen to Jesus speak, and have seen him perform miracles from a distance. It is also possible that Jesus must have passed by his post several times and looked at him with a different eye.
And so, this could explain why on that day, the moment Jesus called Levi to come and follow him, he immediately abandoned his post, and followed Jesus. And that same evening he surprised all his friends with a dinner in his house to celebrate his new found faith in Jesus, the King-Messiah, whom he has just enthroned in his home and in his heart.
May our Eucharistic celebration today in honor of St Matthew trigger our curiosity about the Jesus of Nazareth whom he wrote about. May we put aside some quiet time everyday to read Matthew’s version of the Gospel written in twenty-eight chapters.
Just consider this. If you try to read one chapter a day, you would definitely finish reading in twenty-eight days. And if you start reading today you will have finished reading the whole Gospel of Matthew by October 18, the feast of St. Luke. Then after that you may want to proceed to reading the next Gospel, the Gospel according to St Luke, which has only twenty-four chapters. By reading these Gospels, we will surely get to know Jesus more deeply, follow him more closely, and hence, serve him more faithfully. GiGsss!
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