A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. As Jesus moved on, he saw a man named Matthew at his post where taxes were collected. Jesus said to Matthew, follow me. Matthew got up and immediately followed Jesus. Now it happened that while Jesus was at table in Matthew's house, Many tax collectors and those known as sinners came to join Jesus and his disciples at dinner.
Of course, that made them all unclean to go into a tax collector's house even if it crossed threshold. The Pharisees saw this and complained to the disciples. What reason can the teacher have for eating with tax collectors and with those who disregard the law? Overhearing the remark, Jesus said, people who are in good health do not need a doctor. Sick people need a doctor.
Go and learn the meaning of these words. It is mercy I desire and not sacrifice. I have come to call not the self righteous but sinners, And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I trust Saint Matthew in his glory will not be offended if I emphasize today a sentence or two from the first reading, which has been chosen this feast of Saint Matthew.
Let's go back to Saint Matthew. Here he is a collector, a man of of course, that made him absolutely a pariah as far as his fellow Jews are concerned to be a tax collector hand hand not only handling Roman money, but being as it were an agent of the despised and hated Romans. So he was not exactly an upper crust gentleman. He was definitely in the lower crust, but he was a man of wealth, position, of power, and he was unclean before the law. He had everything going for him.
He'd made his decisions. He was set in life. He had his Mercedes parked outside. You know, he had a very nice home, two or three bathrooms, nice room, not in the cellar but on the 1st Floor for the family, two or three hearths, you know, he had everything going for him. He had it made.
We have a lot of people like that around. You have them under all forms of government. You always have taxes, and they're not always the most highly regarded citizens. Now our lord comes to this man and asks him to follow him, and he leaves the whole caboodle and follows Jesus. That is that's absolutely extraordinary.
And there must as I've said, there must be some background to this. You see, people don't do this, and Saint Matthew was people. He was just a human being. Same thing, you know, when our Lord chose those disciples up along the lake here. Well, anyway, our Matthew, at our Lord's suggestion, leaves everything and follows Jesus.
Now go back to this first reading. There Saint Paul says to the Ephesians, they were Greeks, he says, live a life worthy of your calling. The word in Latin for calling is vocation. He says, the vocation that you have received. Then he says, make every effort to preserve unity.
Now he says, just as there is but one hope given to you, in but but are we not in received God's favor in the measure in which Christ bestows it. Christ didn't ask everybody to follow him in the sense he he asked Matthew or Peter or John or James. He did not. He asked these few men. And then Paul continues, as Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers in roles of service for the faithful to build up the body of Christ till we become one in faith and one in knowledge and form that perfect man who is Christ come in full nature.
Do you get that message? Paul is telling these good Ephesians, look, you people are very different. You all have different jobs. You have different works to do, and you are called to do that work. He says, you are some of you are apostles.
Others are prophets. Others are evangelists, teachers, pastors. You so many of you are the faithful to build up the body of Christ. But he says, live a life worthy of your calling. We don't all in a sense, we all have the same calling.
We're all called by baptism. That's the big that's the big thing. Baptism remember, that's just not an an initiatory right. It's not like joining the Masons or the KSC or the Daughters of Isabel or joining a fraternity or a sorority. Baptism is a transformation.
It's a recreation. It's a new birth. For what? We all are in the same boat. We're put in the same category of being children of God destined for salvation.
There there's no difference there whatsoever. There's where we all are and we are called upon to live in this life that kind of unity. This is what Saint Paul is saying. I'm just paraphrasing it. This is almost literally what Saint Paul is saying.
He's saying, be a unified body in Jesus Christ. But now we come to differences. We're not all the same. Heaven forbid. What would this world be if everybody was like little old me as much as I love myself?
It'd be an awful bore, wouldn't it? And what would we get done? It's like running a commit it's like running something with a committee. You know how it gets done, you get a camel. And so here's my point.
What Saint Paul is telling these Greeks is, get at your job, your calling, and work at it in unity with the faithful. If you're a bricklayer, don't try to work in steel. If you're a teacher, don't try to be a prophet. If you're a prophet, don't try to be a stonemason. But you are all called into the unity of Christ to build up his body.
They're Paul's exact words. This idea of the mystical body isn't something that came out of the sixteenth century or the second Vatican or something. These are doctrines which we Catholics do and Christians because this goes for all Christians. Because by baptism a person is made a Christian, and as I said Sunday, if you're a baptized Christian you are in the Church of Jesus Christ. You're not fully there, but you're there.
You're you're you're a Christian and you have been baptized. You have been you have suffered. You have been the patient of that transformation. You have a calling, a definite calling, a definite calling. And what I'm talking about is the opus dei, the work of the lord that you've been called to.
And we are all called to something, to something. And if only we could see that something in the in terms of eternity. Now this is not easy. You know, I I I was born and raised in the environs of Baltimore City, And Baltimore City was famous for its for its rows of brick houses and white marble steps. Well, on a Saturday morning, if you went into Baltimore, along rather early, along these long rows of houses, all with the brick fronts and the white marble steps, you would see women out there with their pails of water, their Dutch cleanser, and their scrubbing brushes, having a gay old time getting those marble steps snowy white.
They were concerned with keeping their homes clean. Supposing you came up to one of them and said, look, my dear lady, are you are are you praying? Are you thinking of God? And she looked at you and said, for heaven's sakes, I've got enough to do to try to keep this Dutch cleanser dry so it'll work on the marble. She was trying to do a good job on the marble steps.
Her husband in those days was still at work. It wasn't a forty hour wait. You go to the man in the factory in the office, wherever he was doing, and ask him, look, are you are you thinking enough about God? Thinking of God, he said, I I I got just nearly lost my hand in that darn machine or words to that effect. But you see, what we've got to do is to bring God into those things.
Paul says this, whatever you do our blessed Lord too. Whatever you do, do all for the honor and glory of God. What is it we do? Are we all gonna be called to do magnificent, splendid things? Yes.
You are called upon to do splendid, magnificent things because anything you do in the name of Jesus Christ is splendid and magnificent even if it's changing the diaper on a baby. See, this this is not something this is not an opinion I'm giving you. I'm just telling you what Saint Paul says here. And Saint Matthew is called, and he just like that leaves everything and follows Jesus. But it wasn't to move into a vacuum.
The disciples, when they left their work up on the lake, it wasn't that they became idle men lounging around doing nothing all day long. They had an arduous life if they did nothing else but to follow Jesus and his and his walking around Palestine. They had an awful lot of walking to do. And you just tried on a on those pebbly, sandy, dusty roads in torrid heat, ill shod, water scarce, the sun beating down on you by day and the cold at night. That's I'm not exaggerating these things, that's the way it was.
They were wanderers, they were vagabonds. They lived on what what the people gave them. And and, of course, as we saw, they had other people who went along with them who looked after them too a bit. See? Here again you have the idea.
Some did one thing, others did something else. We can't all do the same thing. If we do, it's chaos. And ditto for the home where everybody's doing everything. It's chaotic.
And so this opus day you see, I was brought up on this thing. I one of the earliest things in my whole life was the the morning offering. Every every month we got that little pamphlet, but we all began the day with a morning offering. That whatever we did during the day we offered to to in union with Jesus Christ. And my point is this, whether I was out there playing ball or shooting pool or chopping wood or shoveling coal for the furnace or drying dishes at night or studying or trying to get a radio signal from Pittsburgh, whatever I was doing, I was convinced as a kid that this was all incorporated in some way into Christian living, and I have never gotten over it.
Never gotten over it. We are all called upon to be followers of Jesus Christ. In baptism, you were given a candle light. You were given a beautiful white cloth to wear through life. We all have that common calling to be focused in upon, to become imbued, to become one with the body of Christ in this world, and that's done through baptism.
We all have our jobs to do which are almost incidental. What is not incidental is how we do them. The most incidental kind of thing we do, we can do magnificently. We can do splendidly. And that's what you do when you do the work of the Lord in union with Jesus Christ.
In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.