Following Him

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.