The Feast of St. Matthew, commemorating the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity '26
Our custom is to transfer the feast of St. Matthew to the following Sunday for a parish celebration of our patronal feast day. The gospel for St. Matthew’s Day gives us food for thought about our mission. Jesus walked by Matthew and said, “Follow me.” Matthew followed Jesus, became a disciple, and quit his job.
The call to follow Jesus is embedded in our initiation liturgies. We ask candidates for baptism and confirmation, “Do you promise to follow Christ as your Lord and Savior?” However, a question posed by a third party is different from a direct command from the Lord of the universe. The question focuses on our decision, but Jesus did not ask Matthew a question. As a seminary professor of mine once remarked, “Jesus didn’t recruit volunteers. He said, ‘Follow me.’” The liturgical question could be reframed as two personal affirmations. Yes, Jesus has called me to follow him. And, yes, I intend to obey his command.
The disconcerting thing about the command to follow is its ambiguity. Where is Jesus going? In Luke 9, a zealous, would-be disciple said to Jesus, "Lord, I will follow You wherever You go." Jesus responded by saying, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head" (9:57-58). This is cryptic, but I think Jesus meant, “I’m not going to a particular place. If you follow me expecting to go somewhere, you will be disappointed.”
For most of us, following Jesus will look different than it did for Matthew. Unless we are working at an occupation that is inherently bad, or unless we are called to some kind of full-time ministry, following Jesus will likely involve doing many of the same things that we were doing before.
To understand what it means to follow Jesus, we can look at the larger arc of Jesus’ life from before the creation and to the resurrection. Jesus wasn’t just a rabbi who collected followers. He is the eternally begotten Son of God who became man to restore fallen human beings to communion with God. When Jesus says, “Follow me” he calls us to abandon our self-centered lives, oriented around our idols, and to begin a new life in union with God.
Jesus calls us to follow him into this new life out of love. In the beginning, the Son of God experienced the fullness of Trinitarian love with the Father. As St. Augustine taught, The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the personified love that flows between them and then out from them into loving action. Trinitarian love is whole and complete. It does not need anything. This is expressed by St. Paul when he prays that the Ephesians might be “filled with all the fullness of God” (3:19).
However, the fullness of God’s love is paradoxical—as are many truths about God. God’s love is full and does not need anything to complete it. Yet, the fullness of God’s love cannot be contained or kept to itself. The fullness of love naturally overflows into creative activity. God did not create the world because he needed to. Yet the overflowing love of God must, in a sense, be shared. Thus, the creation described in Genesis is the fruit of God’s overflowing love.
This impulse of overflowing love continues in redemption. When the people God created in love rejected his love, God could have let them go their way—theoretically. However, in a sense, the overflowing love of God must do what love requires. Thus, the Son of God became man in love. In the words of John’s gospel, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, to the end that all who believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Thus, Jesus, as the emissary of love from the Father, called Matthew to leave the pursuit of gain and come into Jesus' own life of union and communion with the Father. To experience that union and communion, Matthew had to follow Jesus through the cross to the resurrection. As Jesus said, "Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me” (Mk. 8:34). We are deeply attached to the world's way of life apart from God. Therefore, a death of the “old man” must take place to set us free.
As the death takes place in us and we begin to experience new life ‘in Christ,’ we become participants in Jesus' mission. We are baptized into Jesus, which means we are baptized into his experience of communion with God. We experience this communion through our life of prayer. We grow in our experience of dying to the world and rising to new life in Christ as we live our life of prayer together in the community of the church. The church, with many members who are one body, grows into the love of God, who is three, yet one.
Our mission as the Body of Christ is to call people to “follow me” in Jesus’ name. We call people to follow us into our experience of communion with the Father through Jesus in the Spirit. Mission, thus, requires that we have an experience of life in Christ to share. Two mission errors can highlight this point. One mission error views salvation as a transaction. We call people to believe at a moment in time so that they will be “saved.” Like time-share salesmen, we focus on “closing the deal.” Another error is to attract people to church with exciting events that may not have any relationship to union with God or the gospel. True mission means calling others to follow us into the same experience Jesus called us to follow him into. This is why the spiritual formation of the Christian community is the essential foundation for genuine mission. We must cultivate our experience of God's love, both as individuals and as a community, or we won’t have anything to call people to follow us into.
But if we do indeed experience the overflowing Trinitarian love of God, it will lead us into mission. God’s love will overflow from us to others, just as it overflows from God to us. We will naturally share the love we have experienced with others through the faithful use of our gifts and resources offered freely in love. Mission is not a church growth program or a marketing scheme. Mission is the natural result, or fruit, of our experience of life in Christ.
As we remember how St. Matthew was called to be an apostle and evangelist, we remember that we are also called to follow Jesus in two particular ways. First, we are called into a life of prayer that draws us into a new experience of God’s love “in Christ.” Second, we are called to share our experience of love with others, as God shares his love with us. Formation and mission are inextricably linked. As 2 Corinthians says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4).