Today is St Matthew’s Day. Tomorrow, we shall celebrate this important festival of the Church at the Wednesday Eucharist – a return to our regular midweek Communion services which have been suspended since March 2020. Hallelujah!

In his gospel, Matthew describes the encounter with Jesus which changed his life: 

“ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.” 

Matthew was a tax collector, someone who was despised by fellow Jews as a collaborator with the occupying Roman power and whose income was probably expanded by some casual extortion on top of the conquerors’ levy. Money, however, as the Beatles sang, can’t buy you love, and Matthew and his kind enjoyed their relative wealth alone, cut off from the rest of society.   

The gospel narrative goes on to present the fallout which came Jesus’ way as a result of breaking the social taboo and making friends with such people:

“And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ But when he heard this, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’” (Matthew 9, vv.9-13) 

Of course, did they but know it, the Pharisees needed God’s love just as much as the seedy tax collectors. They also needed to learn, from opening up to receive God’s mercy, how to pass it on to others – to practice mercy in their dealings with all their fellow human beings. So important to Jesus was this principle that it also lies at the centre of the Lord’s Prayer – “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”. 

Post Communion Prayer for the Feast of St Matthew

Lord God, the source of truth and love,

Keep us faithful to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship,

United in prayer and the breaking of bread,

And one in joy and simplicity of heart,

In Jesus Christ our Lord.   AMEN 

Morag Bushell