Feast day: September 21

St. Matthew

Apostle & Evangelist · 1st century

Patron of Accountants, bankers, tax collectors

Tax collector — a profession despised as collaboration and theft — called by Jesus from his customs post with two words: 'Follow me.' He stood up and never went back.

Matthew, also called Levi, was a tax-collector at Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, gathering customs duties for the Romans through Herod Antipas. As a publican he was despised by his own people, lumped together with sinners and traitors, for the tax-collectors were notorious for extortion and for serving the occupying power. It was to this outcast that Jesus came, sitting at his customs post, with two words: 'Follow me.'

At once Matthew rose, left the money behind, and followed — and then threw a great feast in his house, gathering his fellow tax-collectors and sinners around Jesus. When the Pharisees objected that a holy man should not eat with such people, Jesus answered with words that capture the whole meaning of Matthew's call: 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.'

He became one of the Twelve, accompanied Jesus through his ministry, and was a witness of the Resurrection. By the ancient tradition recorded in the early Church, he afterward preached to his own people, the Hebrews, and before leaving Jerusalem wrote down in their language the Gospel he had preached — the Gospel that opens the New Testament.

That Gospel, written to show Jesus as the promised Messiah and fulfillment of the Scriptures, is his great legacy. Later tradition sent him to preach and die a martyr in distant lands, and in Christian art he is symbolized by a winged man, because his Gospel begins with the human ancestry of Christ. He is the patron of tax-collectors, accountants, and bankers — a reminder that no past disqualifies a person from the call of God.

His Gospel records the call with brutal brevity: Jesus saw him, said 'Follow me,' and he rose. The despised bookkeeper wrote one of the four Gospels.

Image: Peter Paul Rubens (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/10056b.htm