There’s an amazing encounter in today’s Gospel between God and a notorious sinner. In it, Jesus reveals both His deepest desire as well as the purpose for which He took on our human nature and came into our world. In it, too, we see what the proper human response is to this divine action.
We begin with Jesus’ desire, His motivation, His deepest yearning. He gives it to us straight: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” His love, which is everlasting, is always a merciful love. He doesn’t love us because we have earned His love, but He loves us even when we have spurned His love. The purpose for which He came into our world was to share that mercy: “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.” All of Jesus’ mission is summed up in this sentence. He whose first homily started, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!,” and whose last homily began, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” has come to call us to conversion. Our first vocation, our primary call, comes not because we’re saints, but because we’re sinners. God who loves us does not abandon us, but comes to call us from that life of sin to a life of sanctity.
We see Him put these truths into action in today’s Gospel. Matthew was a tax collector, and publicans were about the most despicable public sinners in ancient Palestine. But Jesus desires mercy, and He came to call sinners to repentance, and He was going to show that by going after one of the most notorious sinners of His day.
There must have been something extraordinarily powerful about that encounter with Jesus and the force of His call. At the Contarelli Chapel near my University in Rome, there is this most famous painting of the great Italian Caravaggio which focuses on Jesus’ outstretched finger zeroing in on Matthew from across the room, calling him from his customs post, calling him from his life of sin, to follow Him. Matthew points to himself, almost bewildered, as if saying, You couldn’t possibly want me to be your follower.” All we know for sure comes from the autobiographical account he himself gave us in today’s Gospel: He simply “got up and followed him.” Matthew left the money, for which he had longed so greedily, behind him on the table. He left his job behind. He left what he thought was his life behind. But he was about to discover was that his life was just about to begin! There was something about the power of Jesus’ presence and the attractive might of His call that cut through all the entanglements, all the false loves, all the lies that were keeping Matthew imprisoned by sin. Matthew got up from his dark, damp, self-made jail and followed his Liberator out into the true sunshine!
The same Jesus who entered Matthew’s chambers and called him from his customs post is here in this Church today. And across the pews He has each of us in His divine cross and just as poignantly and personally as with St. Matthew, is stretching out His finger to call each of us from our customary posts, from our sins, from our own comfort zones, to get up and follow Him out into that same sunshine. Jesus meets us where we’re at, just as He met Matthew where he was at, but He doesn’t want us to stay where we’re at. He wants us, today, to leave whatever keeps us from Him behind, completely behind. He wants to fill us with His mercy. He wants to call us sinners to conversion.
There are essentially two reactions we can have to Jesus’ call. We can respond like the Israelites, whom God criticized in the first reading for loving Him “like the morning cloud, like the dew that dissipates early.” This would happen if we hear His call to conversion but then leave here without the concrete resolution to bring about fundamental changes in our lives.
Or we can respond like Abraham in today’s second reading, who at 75 years old heard God’s call to get up and leave his native place and WALK with his family and flock all the way to a place where God would show him. He didn’t know where God was leading, he didn’t know that it would be a journey of hundreds of miles, he didn’t know he’d need to fight for it, but he loved and trusted God enough to make the commitment to leave and go.
There’s one other fundamental element to this encounter between Jesus and Matthew that is also crucially relevant to the encounter the Lord wants to have with us today. Jesus didn’t come only to call us sinners to repentance and have us follow Him in sanctity. He desire was for us to share His desire; His mission was for us to partake in His mission. He wanted us to learn how to love others with the same merciful love with which He loves us and loves them. He wanted to give us a share in His mission for the salvation of the world, beginning with our family members, with our friends, with our neighbors, with our colleagues.
We see this first in the life of Matthew. His first deed after encountering his Savior was to call his friends together so that they might themselves encounter Jesus. He knew they were sinners and knew how much they needed Jesus to cure them of the same malady from which Jesus had cured him. We likewise see this reality in the life of St. Peter, whose first words to the Lord were “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Lk. 5:8), but whom Jesus built as the rock on whom His mission of mercy would continue. We see this reality in the life of St. Paul, who used to kill Christians for a living, but after whose conversion became the greatest evangelist of God’s Gospel of mercy the Church has ever seen.
The Lord wants to do the same thing with each of us. He wants to reconcile us and send us out as disciples in mission.
Today Jesus points to us and calls us to conversion, but He also wants to point us to others as His instruments to bring them to conversion. Like Matthew, we all know people who need His mercy. We find them readily among our friends, our family, our co-workers and fellow-students. The question for us is whether we love Jesus enough to share His desire for mercy and for their salvation, and whether we love our friends and family enough to do what it takes to bring them to Jesus’ mercy—by our prayers and sacrifices, by the example of our own continual conversion and practice of confession, and by our patient but insistent echoing of Jesus’ call to conversion.
The Lord Jesus wants to strengthen us to carry out that mission. Just like after He called St. Matthew from his customs post, from his money, from his sins, the Lord led him on an adventure that ultimately brought them to the Upper Room, so the Lord Jesus calls us to conversion and leads us to the Cenacle, where we receive the very same flesh and blood Jesus gave to Matthew during that first Eucharist. The Eucharist is Jesus’ Body given and Blood shed for the remission of sins. It is where the Divine Physician, after He has healed our sins in confession, gives us the medication that will make us strong and bring us back to full health. To receive Him well, we first need to leave behind all sin, which keeps us from communion with Him, and then enter into loving union with Him, sharing His very own deepest desire (mercy) and greatest mission (the salvation of sinners). To say “Amen!” to Him in Holy Communion means to embrace all of these realities.
We are now in the comfortable padded pews, our customary spots in Church. Jesus is extending His divine digit toward us and calling us to get off our duffs and follow him on a journey that will lead to our becoming saints, to our giving our bodies and blood for the remission of sin along with Him, to our experiencing the full joys of loving union with Him in this life and in the next. But for this to happen, we need to be willing to respond like Matthew, to leave everything else behind if necessary, to get up, follow Him all the way, and bring Him to those we say we love. The Lord stands waiting with His outstretched finger looking straight at us—and He and all of heaven are awaiting our response.
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