A reflection for the Feast of S. Matthæi Apostoli et Evangelistæ, II classis — Monday within the Seventeenth Week after the Octave of Pentecost (21 September)
The Mass of St. Matthew sets two pictures side by side and expects us to see them as one. In the Epistle there are four living creatures burning like coals of fire, faced like a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle, darting and returning in the likeness of lightning. In the Gospel there is a man sitting at a table counting money for the occupying power. The Church reads the first over the second, and by doing so tells us what happened at the custom house: a seraphic thing, a flash of fire, though the only visible event was that a tax-farmer stood up and walked away from his money.
The Introit has already told us where to look: Os iusti meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua eius loquetur iudicium: lex Dei eius in corde ipsius (Ps. 36:30-31). The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom. The Church is about to honour a man whose mouth has been meditating wisdom for nineteen centuries, in a book she hears read from the altar every week of the year.
I. The likeness of the four living creatures
The Epistle is taken from the inaugural vision of Ezechiel by the river Chobar: “there was the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side of all the four: and the face of an ox, on the left side of all the four: and the face of an eagle over all the four” (Ezech. 1:10).
The Fathers were unanimous that the four animalia are the four Gospels, and they were early about it. St. Irenaeus, arguing against heretics who wanted fewer Gospels or more, says that the Gospel is fourfold as the winds are four and the regions of the world are four, and he fits the four faces to the four books (Adversus Haereses III.11.8). St. Jerome, in the prologue to his Commentary on St. Matthew, gives the arrangement that the Latin West has kept and that every carved tympanum and illuminated Gospel-book repeats: Matthew is the man, because he begins from the human generation — Liber generationis Iesu Christi, filii David, filii Abraham; Mark the lion, whose voice roars in the desert; Luke the ox, beginning at the priest and the sacrifice; John the eagle, who mounts at once to the Word that was in the beginning.
Honesty requires the note that the Fathers did not agree in every detail. St. Augustine assigns the lion to Matthew, reading his Gospel as the book of the King, and the man to Mark (De consensu Evangelistarum I.6). Irenaeus himself differs from Jerome over Mark and John. But on Matthew, Irenaeus and Jerome agree, and the Church’s art and liturgy have agreed with them: the Evangelist whose emblem is a man is the one who opens with a genealogy and closes with the commission to all nations — the Gospel that insists on the real human descent of the Son of God.
St. Gregory the Great, preaching on this same vision, refuses to let the four faces be divided up and shelved. All four, he says, are verified in Christ Himself: He was truly made man in His birth, He was the ox in the sacrifice of our redemption, He rose as a lion in the strength of His own power, and ascending He was the eagle. And then Gregory turns the knife toward us: each of the elect ought to be all four — man by reason, ox by immolating himself, lion by facing adversity, eagle by contemplation (Homiliae in Ezechielem I). The vision is not a scheme of classification. It is a description of what grace makes of a soul.
II. Whither the impulse of the spirit was to go
Two details of the Epistle bear directly on the Gospel, and they are the two that are easiest to read past.
The first: “every one of them went straight forward: whither the impulse of the spirit was to go, thither they went: and they turned not when they went” (v. 12). Nec revertebantur cum ambularent. Gregory takes this of the preachers of the Word: the holy man does not turn his face back to what he has left; he goes where the Spirit drives, and the shape of his motion is forwardness. Set that beside et surgens, secutus est eum — “and he rose up, and followed Him.” Matthew does not go back to the telonium to settle the books. He does not turn while he walks.
The second: “the living creatures ran and returned like flashes of lightning” (v. 14). The Fathers read in that running and returning the double motion of the apostolic life — out to men in preaching and mercy, back to God in contemplation, and out again, at the speed of lightning and with its brightness, because a man who goes out without returning soon has nothing to carry. The Gospels themselves are lightning of this kind: they run through the world and return to their source, and the four beasts burn like coals while they do it.
That is the Church’s estimate of the book we call St. Matthew. It is not a memoir. It is one of the four faces of the fire.
III. Vidit Iesus hominem sedentem in telonio
Now the Gospel (Matt. 9:9-13). “Jesus saw a man sitting in the custom-house, named Matthew; and He said to him: Follow Me. And he rose up, and followed Him.”
The Breviary of this feast gives us at Matins the homily of St. Bede on that verse, and one sentence of it has never been improved upon: Vidit Iesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi: Sequere me. Jesus saw the publican, and because He saw him by having mercy and by choosing, He said to him, Follow Me. There are two seeings in the sentence. Everyone in Capharnaum saw the man at the tax table; what they saw was a collaborator growing rich on his neighbours. Our Lord saw the same man and saw an Evangelist. Bede adds that Sequere me means imitate me, and that Matthew followed not so much with the steps of his body as with the affection of his heart.
St. Jerome, commenting on the verse, confronts the objection of the pagans Porphyry and Julian, who mocked the Apostles as credulous men running after a stranger on a word. Jerome answers that they had already seen the signs and the power, and that the splendour and majesty of the hidden Godhead, shining even in His human face, could draw at first sight those who looked on it. This is the point. The call was not magic and it was not arbitrary. Matthew saw Who was speaking.
St. John Chrysostom, in his thirtieth homily on this Gospel, presses the obedience: Christ did not call him at the beginning, but waited until the moment when He knew the man would obey; and when He called, Matthew did not ask leave to arrange his affairs. Chrysostom also notices something which cannot be noticed too often. The other Evangelists, out of reverence for a brother Apostle, use his other name and call him Levi; but Matthew, writing his own Gospel, writes down Matthæum nomine at the custom-house and, in the list of the Twelve, styles himself with the one word his countrymen used as an insult: Matthæus publicanus (Matt. 10:3). He is the only Evangelist to attach that title to any Apostle, and he attaches it to himself. St. Jerome draws the conclusion: he did this so that no man should ever despair of his own salvation, seeing what he himself had been and what he had become.
St. Ambrose, on the parallel scene in St. Luke, observes that Matthew left his own things behind and made a great feast, and that the man who receives Christ into the inner house of his soul is fed with the greatest delights. St. Gregory answers, before anyone raises it, the sneer that a tax booth is a small thing to renounce: multum reliquit qui sibi nihil retinuit — he leaves much who keeps nothing back for himself, and the measure is not the size of the heap but the emptiness of the hand (Homiliae in Evangelia 5).
IV. Misericordiam volo, et non sacrificium
Then the banquet, and the murmuring: “Why doth your master eat with publicans and sinners?” The question is asked of the disciples, not of Him — the standard method of the party of criticism — and Our Lord answers it Himself, with a proverb, a command, and a declaration.
The proverb: “They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill.” Chrysostom notes that this does not merely excuse the company; it defines the office. A physician who avoided the sick would be no physician. If Christ is the physician of souls, the sinner’s table is exactly where He belongs, and the Pharisees’ objection is an objection to the Incarnation itself.
The command: Euntes autem discite quid est — “Go, then, and learn what this meaneth.” It is spoken to professional teachers of the Law, and it is deliberately humiliating: go back to school. What they are sent to learn is Osee 6:6, Misericordiam volo, et non sacrificium. The Fathers are careful that this is not a rejection of sacrifice — the Church of the Apostles would offer the one Sacrifice daily — but a statement of order. God does not accept from us as worship what we refuse to our neighbour as mercy. A man who brings his oblation and withholds pity has reversed the Law.
The declaration: “For I am not come to call the just, but sinners.” St. Jerome remarks that this is said with reference to those who thought themselves just; had the Pharisees been truly just, they would not have needed calling, and had they known they were not, they would have come to the banquet.
St. Thomas gives the architecture of it. Mercy, he says, is of all the virtues that regard our neighbour the greatest, since it belongs to it to give to others and, what is more, to relieve their defects — which is the mark of the superior; and this is why mercy is proper to God, and why His omnipotence is chiefly manifested in sparing and having mercy. Yet charity, which unites us to God, is greater than mercy, which reaches to the neighbour (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 30, a. 4). Mercy, in other words, is not softness of temper. It is the act by which the strong stoop to the wretched, which is precisely what happened at the custom house.
And here the Epistle and the Gospel close upon each other. The Evangelist whose emblem is the face of a man is the Evangelist who was called out of the tax booth by mercy, who recorded misericordiam volo for the Church, and who wrote the Gospel that begins with the genealogy of God made man and ends with the judgment of the nations upon what they did to the hungry, the naked and the prisoner. The face of a man is the face of mercy, because it is the face God took in order to have mercy on us.
V. A word for practice
The feast of an Evangelist makes a demand that is easy to state and inconvenient to meet: the book must be read, and the mercy must be imitated.
First, examine yourself on the two seeings. There are people you look at and see only their record — what they cost you, what they collect from you, what they have been. Our Lord looked at a man like that and saw a saint. Name one person today whom you have been seeing with the eyes of the Pharisees, and resolve to see him miserando atque eligendo.
Second, learn what it meaneth. Take up the Gospel according to St. Matthew and read it through, a chapter a day, between now and the end of October. Not as a study of ancient literature; as the testimony of a man who was at the table. Nine weeks, ten minutes a day, and you will have received from an Apostle’s own hand the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of the Kingdom, and the Passion.
Third, leave the telonium. Every one of us is sitting at some small counter, counting something, unwilling to rise while the ledger is open — a grievance, an advantage, a comfort, a sum of money, a reputation. You will not be given a better day than the feast of a man who stood up and did not look back at the table.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day — Beati Apostoli et Evangelistæ Matthæi, Domine, precibus adiuvemur: ut, quod possibilitas nostra non obtinet, eius nobis intercessione donetur. “May we be helped, O Lord, by the prayers of blessed Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, that what our own power does not obtain may be granted us by his intercession.” Note what it concedes: our own power does not obtain it.
Suggested devotion: Psalm 50, the Miserere, said slowly this evening; and, for those who keep it, the devotion to the Sacred Heart, which is nothing other than the worship of the mercy that saw Matthew at the custom house and has not changed its manner of looking since.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up mercy in the Thomistic order of the virtues — why it is the greatest of the virtues toward our neighbour and yet stands beneath charity, and how misericordiam volo orders worship rather than abolishing it. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the four living creatures as the Church has used them: in the Gospel-book, on the ambo, in the iconography of the sanctuary, and in the Preface of the Apostles sung at this Mass, where the Thrones and Dominations are named beside us.
Sancte Matthæe, Apostole et Evangelista, ora pro nobis.