A Life, for his feast on the twenty-first day of September — II classis
Et cum transiret inde Iesus, vidit hominem sedentem in telonio, Matthaeum nomine. Et ait illi: Sequere me. Et surgens, secutus est eum. “And when Jesus passed on from thence, he saw a man sitting in the custom house, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he rose up and followed him.” — Gospel of the Mass, Matthew 9:9
I. A man sitting in the custom house
He was a Galilean, the son of one Alphaeus, and he bore two names: Levi, which is what his mother called him, and Matthew — Mattai, the shortened form of Mattithiah, the gift of Yahweh. St. Mark and St. Luke, telling the story of his conversion, use the first name. He himself uses only the second. Whether he took it at his calling, as St. Jerome and the older commentators suppose, or carried both from birth as many Jews of that country did, the tradition has always heard in it something providential: a man named gift of God sitting in a booth counting what he had taken from other men.
The booth stood at Capharnaum on the north shore of the lake, where the caravan road from Damascus came down to the water and crossed out of the tetrarchy of Philip into the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas. There was a frontier there, and where there is a frontier there is a toll. Matthew was not a great financier of the Roman sort; he was a local contractor’s man, a publicanus of the lowest and most visible grade, who taxed fish and salt and wine and dyed cloth and the pack animals that carried them, and who took his living out of the margin between what he collected and what he remitted.
It is necessary to be exact about what this meant, because the modern ear hears only that he had an unpopular job. It was worse than that. To the devout Jew a publican was a collaborator who farmed his own people for a foreign prince; he was reckoned ritually defiled by his constant traffic with Gentiles; his testimony was not received in a court; alms from his hand were suspect; and the Gospels themselves preserve the ordinary manner of speech, in which “publicans and sinners” is a single phrase and Our Lord can say of an obstinate man, “let him be to thee as the heathen and publican” (Matt. 18:17) — a sentence, we might notice, that St. Matthew is the only Evangelist to have written down.
One thing more should be observed about the booth, since it bore fruit later. The man in it could read and write, and keep accounts, and very probably in more than one language: the Aramaic of his neighbours, enough Greek for the trade, and the Hebrew of the synagogue. Among the first disciples, who were fishermen, he was the literate one. The Holy Ghost had his reasons.
II. Sequere me
The three Synoptics give the scene in almost the same words, and its power is in its brevity. Our Lord passes along the shore. He sees the man at his table. He says two words. The man stands up and walks away from the table, and St. Luke adds the detail that fixes it forever: relictis omnibus, “leaving all things, he rose up and followed him” (Luke 5:28).
St. Bede, whose homily on this Gospel the Church reads in the Office of the day, will not let us attribute the change to Matthew. Vidit publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi: Sequere me — He saw the publican, and because He looked upon him with mercy and with choice, He said to him, Follow me. The look came first. The seeing was itself the grace; the rising was the answer.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, asks why the Lord did not call him at the beginning, when He called Peter and Andrew and John, and answers that He came to each when each was prepared — that Matthew had heard of the miracles in Capharnaum, that the ground had been worked, and that the seed fell at the hour it would take root. This is not a diminishment of the miracle but an account of how grace ordinarily behaves: it arrives suddenly at the end of a long preparation we did not know was happening.
The commentators have long noticed a hard edge to Matthew’s obedience that the others did not have to face. Peter and Andrew left nets, and nets can be picked up again; we see them pick them up again on the morning by the lake after the Resurrection. Matthew left a franchise. A tollbooth once vacated is given to another man before nightfall, and no publican who walked away from his table was ever taken back. St. Gregory the Great’s sentence about the Apostles is exactly true of him: multum reliquit qui sibi nihil retinuit — he left much who kept nothing back for himself.
III. The banquet
The first recorded act of Matthew the disciple is not a sermon. It is a dinner party. “And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that were at table with them” (Luke 5:29).
He did the only apostolic thing available to a man of one day’s standing: he gathered everyone he knew — which meant every disreputable man in the customs service of Capharnaum — and put them in a room with Our Lord. The Pharisees murmured at the scandal of it, and the Lord’s answer became one of the governing sentences of the Gospel:
“They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth: I will have mercy and not sacrifice. For I am not come to call the just, but sinners.” (Matt. 9:12-13, citing Osee 6:6)
It is worth pausing on the Church’s choice of readings. On the feast of this Apostle she does not read a passage in which he preaches, governs, or suffers. She reads the account of his sin, his calling, and the objection of the respectable — and she puts on his own lips, as the record of his own conversion, the Lord’s declaration that He came for the ill and not the healthy. The Church honours St. Matthew by rehearsing publicly the worst thing that was ever true about him.
Which is precisely how he wished it. When he comes to give the list of the Twelve, he writes: Matthaeus publicanus — “Matthew the publican” (Matt. 10:3). St. Mark and St. Luke, in their lists, write only his name; and in telling of his conversion they use the name Levi, which was less notorious. St. Jerome draws the conclusion: the other Evangelists spared him out of reverence, but Matthew names himself publican against himself, that no reader might despair of amendment, seeing that he himself was turned in a moment from a tax-gatherer into an Apostle. Humility of this kind is rarer than the willingness to leave a table. Many men will abandon a disgraceful trade; fewer will sign their name to it in a book they know will be read until the end of the world.
IV. In the upper room, and then silence
After the list of the Twelve, Scripture tells us almost nothing of him personally. He was present at the great discourses he would afterwards record; he was in Jerusalem after the Ascension, named among the eleven who persevered in prayer with Mary the Mother of Jesus (Acts 1:13); and there the inspired record of his life closes.
Honesty about this silence is part of honouring him. What follows — the mission fields, the manner of his death — comes to us from tradition of unequal weight, and it is better to say plainly which is which than to hand on legend with the confidence due to Scripture.
V. The first Gospel
Of his work we know a great deal, because we have it.
The witness of antiquity is unusually consistent. Papias of Hierapolis, quoted by Eusebius, records that Matthew composed the oracles of the Lord in the Hebrew tongue. St. Irenaeus states that Matthew published a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and founding the Church there. Origen, Eusebius, and St. Jerome all repeat it: he wrote first, he wrote in Judea, he wrote for the converts from among the Jews, and he wrote in the Hebrew or Aramaic speech of Palestine. Jerome adds that a copy in Hebrew characters was still preserved in his own day in the library at Caesarea. The Greek text which the Church has always used and read as inspired appeared early — how early, and by whose hand, the ancients do not tell us.
The ancient computations of the date vary; the common reckoning places the composition some eight years after the Ascension, about the year 42, and in any case before the dispersion of the Apostles and long before the destruction of Jerusalem. Against the confident reconstructions of the last century, the Pontifical Biblical Commission in its decree of 19 June 1911 reaffirmed the ancient position: that the Apostle Matthew is the author of the Gospel bearing his name, that he wrote before the other Evangelists and in the native language of the Palestinian Jews, and that the Greek Gospel is substantially the same work.
The character of the book is the character of its purpose. It is written to prove to a Jew that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ foretold. It opens not in heaven, as St. John’s does, but in a genealogy: Liber generationis Iesu Christi, filii David, filii Abraham. It is stitched throughout with the formula ut adimpleretur quod dictum est per prophetam — that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet. It arranges the Lord’s teaching into five great discourses, of which the first is the Sermon on the Mount, preserved here in full and nowhere else. It alone gives us the word ecclesia on the Lord’s lips, in the promise to Peter at Caesarea Philippi and in the rule of fraternal correction (16:18; 18:17) — so that the Gospel of the Church’s constitution comes to us from the hand of the customs clerk.
And there is a smaller thing, which the Fathers did not need to point out and which no attentive reader misses. This is the Gospel of accounts. The ten thousand talents and the hundred pence; the labourers hired at the third hour and the sixth and the eleventh, and the reckoning at evening; the talents entrusted and audited; the tribute money and the coin in the fish’s mouth; the thirty pieces of silver, and the potter’s field bought with the price of blood. A man who had spent his working life adding columns wrote the Gospel most preoccupied with debts, wages, and settlements — and with the King who forgives a debt that could never have been paid. Grace does not abolish a man’s nature; it conscripts it.
Hence also his symbol. The Epistle of his Mass is Ezechiel’s vision of the four living creatures, each with four faces: the face of a man, of a lion, of an ox, of an eagle (Ezech. 1:10-14), which St. John saw again before the throne (Apoc. 4:7). The Fathers read the four as the four Evangelists, though they did not at first agree on the distribution — St. Augustine assigned the lion to Matthew — and it is the arrangement of St. Jerome that prevailed and that the Church’s art and liturgy have kept: to Matthew the face of a man, because he begins with the human generation of Christ and traces the Son of God through the long human line of David and Abraham.
VI. Ethiopia
For the rest, we depend on tradition. The older accounts hold that he remained in Judea some years, preaching to his own people, and departed to the Gentiles when the Apostles dispersed — Eusebius says that, being about to go to others, he committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and left it to the Hebrews as a substitute for his presence.
Where he went afterwards, the ancient authorities do not agree. The Roman Breviary and the Martyrology send him to Ethiopia; others name Parthia and Persia. It should be said that “Ethiopia” in ancient usage was an elastic word, applied both to the lands south of Egypt and to regions further east, so that the accounts may be less contradictory than they appear. The persistent tradition of the Latin Church is Ethiopia, and there she places his martyrdom.
The details of that martyrdom come from apocryphal Acts of uncertain date, transmitted through the Golden Legend: the king Aeglippus, the raising of his son, the king’s daughter Ephigenia consecrated to God by the Apostle, and her uncle Hirtacus, who succeeded to the throne and desired her; and Matthew, refusing to give her, struck down at the altar as he finished the holy Sacrifice. The Church has never guaranteed these particulars, and a sober hagiography will not present them as history. What is old, constant, and liturgically settled in the West is the substance: that he preached far from his own country and died a martyr for the faith and for the chastity of a consecrated virgin. From the story come his emblems in Christian art — the sword or the spear, and the money-bag or ledger that names the life he left.
VII. Salerno
His relics were venerated in early times at Velia in Lucania, on the coast south of Paestum, and were translated in the year 954 to Salerno, where they rest to this day. Robert Guiscard raised the great cathedral over them, and St. Gregory VII — who died in exile in that city and is buried there — consecrated it. The body lies in the crypt beneath the high altar, and Salerno keeps St. Matthew as her patron with a devotion that has never lapsed.
His feast is kept in the West on the twenty-first of September, and in the traditional Roman calendar it is a feast of the second class, with the Mass Os iusti: the Introit from the thirty-sixth Psalm — “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart” — the Epistle of the four faces, and the Gospel of the custom house. The Greeks keep him on the sixteenth of November. He is the patron of accountants, bankers, tax officials, and customs officers: a patronage that is neither a joke nor an accident, since the Church has thought it worth saying that these trades, too, have a saint who worked in them and was saved out of them.
VIII. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That the call is not earned, and the answer is not negotiated. Nothing in the record suggests that Matthew was seeking. He was at work. The Lord looked at him with mercy and with choice, and spoke two words, and the man stood up. In his own Gospel, Matthew would afterwards write the account of another man, young and rich and blameless, who was invited in almost the same terms and “went away sad, for he had great possessions” (Matt. 19:22). Matthew had walked the other direction out of the same encounter, and he wrote both scenes into the same book. He knew exactly what he had been given and exactly what it was possible to refuse.
That the Church is built of men with a past, and that the honest way to carry one is in the open. Misericordiam volo et non sacrificium. The objection of the Pharisees at the banquet is the perpetual objection of the respectable against the mercy of God, and it has never been answered better than it was answered that evening. Matthew’s own answer was to write the word publicanus after his name. There is a kind of humility that consists in concealing what one was; that is not humility but management. His consisted in stating it, once, plainly, and then getting on with the work.
That grace takes what it finds. He brought to the Apostolic college a pen, a trained memory for figures and documents, and the habit of writing things down — the exact equipment his eleven colleagues lacked. The first of the four Gospels exists because a man who had spent twenty years keeping ledgers for Herod Antipas was called, and did not leave his literacy behind at the booth. Whatever skill a man has acquired in a bad cause is not thereby forfeit; it is material awaiting requisition.
Practice
Examine. Two questions, both from the custom house. First: what am I sitting at that I would not rise from if I were called this morning — not sinful necessarily, but held, arranged, counted on? Second, and harder: is there something true about my past that I spend energy managing rather than simply having confessed and having done with? Matthew wrote his into Scripture.
Do. Keep his first act. Invite one person who is far from the Church to something — a meal, a walk, Sunday Mass — without an argument attached. Matthew did not debate his colleagues into the Kingdom; he put them in a room with Our Lord and let that do the work.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Beáti Apóstoli et Evangelístæ Matthǽi, Dómine, précibus adiuvémur: ut, quod possibílitas nostra non óbtinet, eius nobis intercessióne donétur.
“May we be helped, O Lord, by the prayers of the blessed Apostle and Evangelist Matthew: that what our own ability cannot obtain may be given us by his intercession.”
And, for the examen above, the publican’s prayer that Matthew’s own trade made famous: Deus, propitius esto mihi peccatori.
Devote. Read the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) straight through in the Douay-Rheims, slowly, in three days — the discourse that exists in full because this man wrote it down. Or the Glorious Mysteries, with attention to the Descent of the Holy Ghost, when he was in that room and received what made him an Evangelist.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues through the Apostles — Peter, Andrew, James, Bartholomew, Thomas — and the manner in which the Church distinguishes what is certain from what is merely venerable in their histories. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the inspiration and inerrancy of Sacred Scripture: what the Church means when she calls this book the work of the Holy Ghost and the work of Matthew at once, and how Providence uses a man’s whole nature, tollbooth and all, to write a word that is God’s.
Sancte Matthæe, Apostole et Evangelista, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Douay-Rheims Scriptures; the Roman Missal and Breviary of 1962 for the propers and Office of the day (Mass Os iusti*, Epistle Ezech. 1:10-14, Gospel Matt. 9:9-13, with the homily of St. Bede); St. Jerome,* Commentarium in Matthaeum and De viris illustribus 3; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 30; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica III (for Papias and for St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses III.1.1); the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Matthew”; the decree of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on the authorship and date of the Gospel of St. Matthew, 19 June 1911. The Ethiopian mission and the circumstances of the martyrdom are given as tradition, not as documented history; their earliest source is a body of apocryphal Acts summarized in the Legenda Aurea*.*