Ad Jesum per Mariam

By Saint Matthew’s Example: How Much Do I Follow Jesus?

By Saint Matthew’s Example: How Much Do I Follow Jesus? Today, the Church celebrates the Feast of St. Matthew (September 21st). We all know the Gospel story. Jesus walks over to Matthew’s table, saying nothing but Follow Me! One has to understand the profession of Matthew. He was a tax collector. How the tax collector worked in collecting money is described within the Homily. However, the Jewish people hated tax collectors. They cheated the average citizen. How? Listen to the Homily. The Calling of Matthew We then hear that Jesus walks over to the tax collector’s table. What are the citizens thinking? Will Jesus pay a tax, like all the merchants? Will He reprimand all of the tax collectors? Simply, Jesus does neither of these things. He merely says Follow Me! Jesus Is Really Asking Matthew, and Us, to Imitate His Heart What Jesus is saying to Matthew is imitate Me in your heart and imitate Me in your actions. Imitate Me in who you are and then He begins to show him what He has to imitate. He goes with him to Matthew’s house. When they sit at table, He doesn’t sit with the righteous, the self-righteous, Pharisees, and the scribe. He sits with tax collectors. Jesus sits with sinners. He drinks and eats with them. This is what He is asking Matthew to imitate. For the whole world Matthew wrote his gospel in order that we may know that the promises of God have been fulfilled in Jesus and we must Follow Him. Not with our legs, but with our heart in His mercy. Not with sacrifice, but with the heart. Listen more to this Meditation Media. Listen to: By Saint Matthew’s Example: How Much Do I Follow Jesus? ------------------------------- Image: The Calling of St. Matthew: Italian Painter: Giovanni Battista Caracciolo: 1625 ------------------------------- Gospel Reading: Matthew: 23: 29-39

Broadcast on:: 26 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

"Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you," says the Lord. The Lord be with you, a reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. 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, the 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 had this and said, "Those who are well do not need a physician, but they seek to go and lend the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous, but see us." The Gospel of the Lord. I am told there is a group of students here coming from which school? Some sense about the church. You are most welcome to the shrine, but I have a homework for you. Are you ready for homework? Among you, study history is anyone who is taking history. Thank you very much. This all homily will be about you. Today is the celebration of the fist of the calling of a tax collector to become a follower of Jesus Christ. Now why I want to give a bit of history, that's why I looked for someone who does history. I want us to treat this first of all, look at the history of what is happening today. Jesus is in Capernaum. Capernaum is a small city in the garden, and he is just close to the lake, and he, on this small town, though it was on the highway, commercial highway that connected Egypt all the way through Israel to Syria in the north. And he, in that small city, all the travres, all the merchants from coming down from north to south would stop there to sell their items, their mechanisms, their products. Now if you sell the products like this, necessity someone who takes tax for the Roman establishment. So they would make a booth where everyone who is setting their goods in that place would pay the tax before they sell what they are setting. And how it worked was like this, Roman Empire would employ a tax collector. And they told him, "Every year you will give us an amount of money, take, for example, you are going to remit to Rome $10,000 every year. How you collect that money is up to you. But they gave this tax collector some uniform guts to help them in collecting the tax. To make sure that no one just passed by sell things without paying the tax. So what the tax collector would do was to collect the money, when they have finished with the $10,000 that they are asked to pay, everything they will make in that year goes into their pocket, therefore they became very rich, they became famous and they became untouchable. That people headed them, they could be equivalent now as to gangsters, established gangsters. That would be the godfathers of the small town. So the Jews headed them because they extorted money from the people. And when your son, as your father, or as a parent, when your son chose to become a tax collector, you would say, "Why is my son not like the son of a son and so?" Why did you choose this dishonesty? Occupation. I remember how some of you are parents, sometimes you attempted to say, "Why my son or why my daughter is not like the daughter of so-so." I remember going back home during my holidays and then my uncle says to me, "We grew up with his son, Emmanuel, he says to me, "Father Felix, why is Emmanuel not like you?" I said, "Because he is Emmanuel and you would not love if Emmanuel were me because my life is completely different with Emmanuel's life, Emmanuel, I wake up at 5 a.m. in the morning to cry to God, "Oh God, come to my head." Emmanuel is making his last 10 in bed at that time. I've already woken up, I mean the chapel. That is not the life you want for Emmanuel. Emmanuel is Emmanuel and I am Felix. But why I'm saying this is that the father of Matthew would have desired that Matthew was a different person, did not choose this profession of a tax collector. What more other people that were oppressed by him? And yet today we see that Jesus in this small town of Capernaum has become a center of all Godly, not because it's a big city, not because of the merchants that come to sell things, has become a center because in that small city, Jesus is the name. One is talking about Jesus. He has already done 12 different miracles in this small city, hearing the sick, casting demons and all that. So the name in this city is Jesus. And many of the people that are there are the people that are bringing their sick from different places more than the merchants. The name is Jesus. And everyone is coming to see Jesus, but Jesus walks over to a booth or you walk into the den of a gangster and say, "Follow me." What do you think, what do you think the reaction of the people were? Is he going to pay tax or is he going to reprimand him for what he's doing? He just says, "Follow me." And then the Godfather stood up and then followed him. What has happened here is not that Jesus is asking Matthew to be on his leg and then follow him behind like that. What Jesus is saying to Matthew is, "Imitate me in your heart and imitate me in your actions. Imitate me in who you are." And then he begins to show him what he has to imitate. He goes with him to his house. When they sit at table, he doesn't sit with the righteous, the self-righteous Pharisees, the scribes and those of that he look like he's clean in their own eyes. He sits with tax collectors, he sits with sinners, he sits with prostitutes, he drinks and eats with them. This is what he is asking Matthew to imitate. He is asking Matthew to imitate his heart, his message. He is asking Matthew to understand that what is important is not sacrifice but mess. The father, as I said, the father of Matthew must have said, "Oh my God, I lost it, I didn't. What I had intended." Do you know what the father of Matthew had intended in the very beginning of his son? He gave him the name which is Matthew, which literally means God's gift. But God's gift that had become a frequent. God's gift that gave him a lot of shame because everyone who saw him on the way must have derided him for his son. And yet with the call of Jesus, follow me, be merciful as I am, receive sinners as I do, receive the broken hearted as I do, Matthew became a follower of Jesus Christ. And he who has given us the gospel, the first gospel of the New Testament, Matthew. And he speaks to say, "This Jesus, the son of Abraham, the son of Adam, he is actually the fulfillment of the promise of God to extend his mercy to the whole world." And he wrote his gospel in order that we may know that the promises of God have been fulfilled in Jesus, and we must follow him, not with our legs, but with our heart. In his lesson, not with sacrifice, but with the heart that receives sinners, with the heart, that is merciful. The question for each one of us here is, we are baptized. How much do I follow Jesus Christ? How do I show the world the face of a massive God who forgives sins?