A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Matthew 9: 9-13) is one of those gospel
scenes that is almost Shakespearean in its structure: a key event happens – the
call of Matthew to follow Jesus in the simplest and starkest terms - Follow
me – and straightaway afterwards, another scene occurs that is, as it were,
a commentary on the first, and in which the disciples are asked by the
Pharisees why He eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners: Those who
are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick… I came not
to call the righteous, but sinners, Jesus concludes.
This gospel, therefore, begins with the thought that ended
the last blog: Follow me. It is the perennial answer to all our
questions to Jesus. It is the command which corresponds to that prime title of
Jesus that we think about so little: the Way.
But we might wonder more about the commentary that follows it.
What does it mean for Jesus only to call sinners and not the righteous? Does
this mean that if we do indeed become as perfect as our Father in heaven, then
Jesus is no longer interested in us? Does this mean that the innocent are of no
interest to the Lord? Not at all, and that for several reasons.
First, of course Jesus calls the righteous; His phrasing is
simply rhetorical, like so many of the things that He says. We can, however,
consider he uses the word righteous ironically here. After all, who exactly
are the righteous? The just man falls seven times a day, and the prophet
Isaiah tells us that All we like sheep have gone astray. When Jesus
intervenes in the case of the woman accused of adultery, He tells the crowd who
wish to stone her: Let he among you without sin cast the first stone. If,
therefore, there are in reality no righteous - for everyone is to be considered
a sinner - then perhaps what Jesus means here is that He did not come to call those
who think they are righteous.
At this point, perhaps, we need to consider how it is that
most people tend to judge themselves. It usually falls to one of two extremes: either
people loathe what they have done and perhaps hate themselves, or else they can
be persuaded that they are not so bad after all. These judgments tend to be
made simply on the basis of the actions that were performed. But this is not
how God judges.
God sees the actions, but He also knows all the secret
movements of the heart. More particularly, only He knows exactly what help He
gave to the person to refuse some sin or indeed to do some good action. This is
how the saints come to understand their own lives; whereas for outsiders their
lives appear impeccable, the saints who have come close to God are painfully more
aware of neglecting His inspirations, or of choosing to be wayward even in
small things. These things, as we know, are faults that Jesus may be happy to
leave in the soul by means of keeping them humble and reliant on him.
In truth, then, this gospel scene should be reassuring for
us, because we are all tax collectors and sinners. We all claim unjust taxes
from the world, getting and spending not only material things but the
immaterial ones as well: acceptance, esteem, respect, admiration perhaps. We
are all involved in an illicit trade of the heart in one way or another, even
if our physical hand is not really in the cookie jar.
Which means in the end that we can rejoice: for Jesus came
for us.
