Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 9, 9-13
As Jesus passed by,
he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.
He said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.
While he was at table in his house,
many tax collectors and sinners came
and sat with Jesus and his disciples.
The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples,
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
He heard this and said,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
Go and learn the meaning of the words,
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
Jesus came to call sinners
1. Sitting at the customs post. Perhaps Matthew repeats the same thing every day and what he does hurts and harms many people. Maybe there are things you’re doing every day that cause anger and pain to others. At this point, I would like to talk to you about an attitude that may be defined as “that always happens to me and I can’t avoid it”, for example your moments of anger or negative attitudes that you repeat even knowing that they hurt others. Apart from the fact that you think you cannot avoid it, you know that those attitudes harm you because you hurt other people and you hurt yourself. You know that your actions have consequences and that you must be responsible for them. So, then you begin to feel anger at yourself, blaming yourself and hurting yourself saying: “Why am I like this?” You hurt those you love and that makes you feel even guiltier. It’s a vicious circle, you question yourself and destroy yourself and you lock yourself in a monotony of life. In addition, you get angry with others and it’s because you’re angry with yourself. Matthew is at the tax table alone, in isolation which he himself has caused and he’s even isolated from himself. There are times when you feed what I call “death drive”, where you keep bringing up the mistakes you’ve made and you blame yourself again and again. It’s as if you were sitting at the table of life, not the tax table, feeling deep guilt and anger, just watching how people pay you and how you keep demanding more from them in your resentment.
2. He followed him. Jesus’s call is not based on prototypes and much less on castings, but rather on the search for others. Jesus seeks to bring people closer and doesn’t make it difficult for them to change and to believe. As a Church, we shouldn’t make it difficult for people to come closer to the Lord. There are times when we turn into a religion lacking in grace, using labels and phrases that are far from what Jesus is proposing to us today. Here are some of them: “we only seek holiness here”, “it’s better to be few and holy than many and sinful”, “if people don’t change, it’s better for them to leave”. But behind all this there’s only one message: “our church is only for church people” or “here we only admit saints and if they aren’t saintly, they should pretend to be so”. This ends up transforming the Church into a church of bacteria and parasitic strains. We cannot fall into being an elite group that is full of statutes and regulations that don’t allow Jesus to enter into a close relationship with each one of us. I love this Gospel; seeing Jesus pure, simple and free, calling whoever He wants and however He wants.
3. Sinners. Christianity is a way of life and it’s knowing that you are called not by your merits, but by pure grace. Jesus first called Matthew and then helped him to fix his life, because for Jesus what comes first is love, always. There are times when we are the other way around. In spite of not being called to fix anyone’s life because only Jesus does that, there are times when we want to meddle in someone else’s life and tell them what they have to do if they want to follow Jesus. Yet Jesus teaches you today that He loves you first, and the more you let him in, the more you’ll become like him.
Remember, something good is on the way!
God bless you, be with you and protect you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
