Saint Matthew

That is how Matthew enters the Gospel story: with a single, decisive, surprisingly brief gesture. He made no stirring speech to prove he deserved to be chosen. He offered no excuse for the trade everyone despised. There was only a loving call that reached him right at his disreputable place of work, and a whole life turned around from the moment he dared to stand up and answer.

The location was no accident. Capernaum lay right on the border between the territory ruled by Herod Antipas and the territory governed by his brother Philip — two separate realms in a Jewish land carved up under Roman rule. Goods crossing that border paid customs duty, and Matthew was the one collecting it. The post was guarded by a detachment of Roman soldiers, which shows this was no small, obscure job but a link in the empire’s great machine for squeezing out revenue.

Scripture does not record Matthew’s birth, age or childhood. But his work is stated plainly. In the Jewish society of the time, tax collectors were in a bitter position: despised and shunned by their own people as traitors, lackeys of a foreign power growing rich on the sweat and tears of the poor. The Gospels often list them alongside public sinners, the kind of people a devout Jew would avoid at all costs.

That does not give us leave to invent frauds Matthew might have committed. But it helps us feel the weight of Jesus’ gaze when he stopped in front of that tax booth. Where everyone else saw only a contemptible trade and a sin that could never be washed away, he saw a man who could be forgiven and made completely new.

Matthew stood up. Saint Luke has a beautiful phrase for that moment: he

“left everything and followed him.”

The Lord’s call was not just a passing feeling of being forgiven and comforted. It demanded a real change in his whole way of life: leaving the table where he had piled up money for so long, giving up a steady if disreputable income, and stepping into a future he could not foresee.

The Pharisees and scribes saw it and grumbled openly to the disciples: why does your Master eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? Jesus answered with a simple image:

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

In the Gospel that bears his name, Matthew adds his Master’s pointed reminder that God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

That warm meal did not do away with the need for real conversion. But it shows that conversion often begins when a person feels truly welcomed, allowed to sit close to the One who can heal every hidden wound of the soul. Before he was an Apostle honored through the ages, Matthew was simply someone Jesus was glad to share a meal with.

We do not know exactly what he shared that day with his old friends. But the house of a shunned tax collector became a place where other lost souls could meet the Lord. The new life of a convert, it turns out, does not have to cut off every old tie; it can open up right in the middle of the friendships of their former life.

He was among those who heard the Sermon on the Mount, who were sent out to preach in the villages, and who walked with the Master through the days of the Passion and the Resurrection. Yet the Gospels record nothing in particular that Matthew said or did afterwards. We cannot put words in his mouth that Scripture never recorded, nor say where he was in the hour of the Cross.

After the Lord ascended to heaven, the Acts of the Apostles still lists him among the Apostles gathered in prayer in the upper room, awaiting the Holy Spirit. From a lonely tax table by the road to a room where he prayed with his brothers in one heart and mind is a long way, and the lack of details takes nothing from it. He stayed quietly, steadily faithful to the call he had heard beside that tax booth long before.

In the Gospel bearing Matthew’s name, readers meet a Jesus who fulfills the promises of the Old Testament to the people of Israel. The genealogy that opens the book places him right in the middle of a human history full of failures and weakness, neither glossed over nor hidden. The Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes, for the poor, the meek, the peacemakers. And all through the book runs teaching about forgiveness and about caring for the least of our brothers and sisters. Perhaps it is no accident that the man who wrote those words had once been counted among the most despised.

The Gospel closes with the great command of the risen Lord: go and make disciples of all nations, together with the warm promise that comes with it:

“I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

A man who once sat alone collecting taxes by the roadside, shunned by everyone, is forever linked in the Church’s memory to a message that reaches the ends of the earth.

The Church celebrates Saint Matthew the Apostle on September 21 each year. He has been venerated since the Church’s earliest days, without the formal canonization later saints received.