Homily for the Feast Day of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Corinthians 4:9-16; Matthew 9:9-13

As we begin the Nativity Fast in preparation to enter into the great joy of the Savior’s birth, we do so with the recognition that salvation has come to the world through what appeared at the time as utter foolishness.  The eternal Son of God became a human being, born in lowly circumstances in a barn. Imagine how His coming looked to the leaders of the Jewish people who had no expectation of the God-Man, a truly divine Messiah with a virgin mother.  They had wanted a powerful political and military leader who would deliver their nation from the occupation of the Roman Empire.  They also expected their deliverer to be a strict teacher of religious law who would bring earthly blessings upon the righteous and condemnation upon Gentiles and sinners.    

            Jesus Christ certainly did not fit their expectations either at His birth or throughout His public ministry.  On this feast day of St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, we remember that He called Matthew, a tax collector, to be His disciple.  As we remember from the story of Zaccheus, tax collectors were Jews who worked for the Romans, collecting more than was required from their own people and living off the difference.  Their fellow Jews hated them as traitors and thieves.  No one would have expected the Messiah of Israel to call a tax collector to follow Him as a disciple, but that is precisely what the Lord did.  If that were not shocking enough, He also ate with tax collectors and sinners, which in that time and place was seen as participating in their uncleanness.    In the eyes of the Pharisees, Christ defiled Himself and broke the Old Testament law by doing so.   For the Messiah to act in such ways was worse than foolishness; it was blasphemy and a sign that He was not a righteous Jew, let alone the one anointed to fulfill God’s promises to Abraham.    

            In response, the Lord made clear that His apparent wickedness demonstrated a much higher righteousness than that of His critics.  He said that sick people, not healthy ones, are in need of a doctor’s care.   He said that He came to call not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.  Who requires healing, the sick or the well?  Who needs to repent, those who are already faithful or those who are not?  Christ quoted the Old Testament to remind His opponents that God desired mercy and not sacrifice.  In other words, He related to others in ways that embodied the divine compassion toward corrupt and broken people.  He came to heal every infirmity and to restore the fallen image of God in us all, which is why He offered Himself fully on the Cross for the salvation of the world and conquered death through His glorious resurrection.   As so many of the Old Testament prophets had proclaimed, religious ceremonies and rules are worthless for those who refuse to manifest God’s mercy to the human beings they encounter every day.  In conveying the divine compassion to those considered God’s enemies, Christ appeared to be a sacrilegious fool in the eyes of those who had so terribly distorted the faith of Israel.  

            Saint Paul wrote about the ministry of the apostles that they were fools for Christ’s sake.  Before Christianity was popular, established, or well-known anywhere, they left everything behind for a ministry that led to poverty, persecution, and death.   Like the countless martyrs of Christian history throughout the centuries, the apostles certainly appeared as fools to the vast majority of people in their time and place.  Why risk your life for the memory of an obscure Jewish rabbi?  Why not burn some incense to Caesar, become a Muslim, or join the Communist Party?  Why lose your own life for saving Jews from the Holocaust, as did St. Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris? 

            Those of us who face no real persecution for our faith must recognize that Christ still calls us to be fools for His sake in our lives every day.  He scandalized the self-righteous by calling St. Matthew to follow Him and by associating with people of bad reputation.  Christ did not endorse their sins, but He endured criticism in order to draw them to repentance and healing.  He showed them the mercy of God by building loving relationships with them that made it possible to invite them to recover the beauty of their souls. If we are truly sharing in the life of the Savior, we must not become like those who judged Him for treating tax collectors and sinners with compassion.  We must not demonize and condemn our neighbors whose ways of life are not the paths to holiness that we seek to pursue as Orthodox Christians.  Doing so will not draw anyone to the blessedness of the Kingdom, but it will bring judgment upon us for our pride and self-righteousness.  We will then be just like the Pharisees who criticized the Lord for keeping company with disreputable people. 

            Our calling is to remain faithful to the teachings and practices of Orthodox Christianity as exemplified by the saints across the ages.  It is not to accept the lie that all behaviors and beliefs are somehow equally good and holy. That would not be the way of the Lord, Who told His disciples that “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt. 5: 20) Such righteousness requires that we are so transformed by His grace that we do not abandon our loved ones, friends, and acquaintances when they lose their way and make disastrous decisions about how to order their lives.  Our calling is to treat others as the Lord treats us, who are each “the chief of sinners.”   Our Savior looked like a fool to many when He kept company with people known to be sinners, and we should not be afraid to follow His example in maintaining relationships that serve as a signs of God’s steadfast love to broken and confused people whose burdens we never know fully.  If they do not experience a measure of the love of Christ through us, then how will they be drawn to the life of the Kingdom?  If they experience Christians as people who want nothing to do with them, why would they ever want to have anything to do with Christ?

We sometimes forget that those who responded best to the Lord were those who were completely shocked to receive His care, for they knew that they appeared to be lost causes.  That was surely the case for both St. Matthew and St. Zachaeus as tax collectors, thieves, and traitors.   The same was true for St. Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well with a very broken person life, who became a great evangelist and martyr.  The Canaanite woman with a demon-possessed daughter understood that God’s blessings were not only for the Jews far more clearly than did the disciples, and the Savior set her child free.  The only one of the ten lepers who returned to Christ to thank Him for his healing was a Samaritan.  The Lord said that the faith of the Roman centurion, whose servant He healed, surpassed that of any of the Jews.  He said of the sinful woman who anointed and kissed His feet in the house of Simon “her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” (Lk. 7:47)   Their examples show that it is not our place to declare anyone as a lost cause before the mercy of the Lord.  

            In order to have the spiritual strength and clarity to discern how to build relationships with neighbors that convey the healing mercy of Christ, we need the spiritual disciplines of the Nativity Fast, such as prayer, fasting, repentance, generosity to the needy, and reconciliation with those from whom we have become estranged.   These practices also appear foolish in our culture, especially this time of year with its focus on self-indulgence and consumerism.  The great irony is that this season is one of preparation to receive Christ Who, both at His birth and throughout His ministry, looked like a fool according to the conventional standards of His day.  But through what appeared to be foolish, He made—and continues to make-- saints out of tax-collectors, prostitutes, adulterers,  murderers, Gentiles, and other unlikely characters.  So in the weeks before Christmas, let us embrace our calling to live in what seem to be foolish ways that will draw others to the celebration of the birth of the Savior not only on December 25, but in their hearts and lives every day of the year—no matter who they are and no matter what they have done. Christ was born because our only hope, like theirs, is in His mercy for sinners.