A reflection for the Feast of Saint Matthew.
There is something wonderfully unsettling about the story of Jesus calling Matthew. He approaches a man sitting at his tax booth, a man whose work has made him wealthy or at least comfortable at the expense of others, and simply says, “Follow me.” Matthew gets up and follows him, but the story does not end there.
Soon Jesus is sitting at a table with Matthew and a gathering of tax collectors and sinners. These are not the people a respected religious teacher would ordinarily choose as companions, and the Pharisees notice. They ask his disciples why their teacher eats with such people.
It is a reasonable question if we believe that holiness requires keeping our distance from those whose lives we disapprove of. But Jesus seems far less concerned about protecting his reputation than about making sure the people at the table know that God has not given up on them.
I wonder what that dinner must have felt like for Matthew. He was accustomed to being judged, perhaps with good reason, but Jesus had looked at him and seen more than his profession or his past. Now Jesus was sitting in his home, sharing a meal with the very people others preferred to avoid.
There is something deeply human about that gesture. Jesus does not merely tell Matthew that he is welcome to follow him; he enters his world and makes himself comfortable among his friends. He seems to understand that sometimes the first step toward a changed life is being treated as someone worth knowing.
And this is where the story begins to challenge us.
We are often quite sincere when we say that everyone is welcome in the Church. We believe in the dignity of every human person, and we know that God’s mercy is not reserved for those who have lived blameless lives. Yet we also have unspoken expectations about who belongs comfortably in our communities and who should make some changes before pulling up a chair.
What would happen if Jesus came to dinner in our parish? Would he invite the undocumented immigrant whose presence makes some of us uneasy, the woman who has been divorced and remarried, the young gay man who has stopped coming to Mass because he no longer feels welcome, or the person whose political convictions are so different from ours that we can hardly imagine sharing a conversation?
Perhaps he would invite the person whose mistakes have become public knowledge, the one everyone talks about but few people approach. And perhaps, as we watched Jesus pull out a chair for that person, we would find ourselves wondering whether he understood the whole story.
We might even feel compelled to explain why this person is different, why the situation is complicated, or why welcoming someone too readily could send the wrong message. We would have our reasons, some of them sincerely held, just as the Pharisees had theirs.
But Jesus responds to their question with words that should make all of us uncomfortable: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
He does not suggest that Matthew’s choices have no consequences or that following him will require nothing. Matthew has already left his tax booth, and the invitation to discipleship will continue to change his life. But Jesus does not make acceptance the reward for a transformation that must be completed before the relationship can begin.
Instead, he sits down to dinner.
There is a difference between welcoming someone and agreeing with everything they believe or do. We know this in our own families, where love often requires us to remain close to people whose decisions we do not understand or whose choices we would not make. We do not stop loving them until they become easier to love.
Why, then, do we sometimes expect the Church to operate differently?
Perhaps we have become so accustomed to thinking of the Church as a place where people come to learn how to live rightly that we forget it must also be a place where people can bring their unfinished, complicated, and sometimes painful lives. The Church is not a gathering of people who have already figured everything out. It is a community of people who need God’s mercy, even when we are reluctant to admit how much.
That includes those of us who consider ourselves faithful Catholics. We may attend Mass regularly, serve our parishes, and try to live according to the Gospel, yet still carry judgments that make it difficult for others to experience the love of Christ through us. We can become so concerned about whether someone else deserves a place at the table that we forget we are sitting there only because we, too, have been invited.
I find myself returning to the simple fact that Jesus did not call Matthew from a distance and then leave him to find his own way into the community. He went to his home, sat among his friends, and allowed himself to be seen in their company. His willingness to draw near was itself a proclamation of God’s mercy.
On the feast of Saint Matthew, perhaps we are being asked to consider what our own tables say about the God we believe in. Who feels comfortable sitting with us, and who has learned, through our words or our silences, that there is no place for them?
Jesus tells the Pharisees that he has come to call sinners, not the righteous. Perhaps the unsettling truth is that none of us can claim a place at his table on the strength of our own righteousness, and none of us has been given the authority to decide that someone else is beyond the reach of his invitation.
We may discover that the person we would rather Jesus not sit with is already seated beside him. And if we are willing to take our place at that same table, we might find that God’s mercy is larger than we imagined—not only for the person whose presence makes us uncomfortable, but for us as well.