10th sunday in ordinary time 8 June 2008

Homily for Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time 8 June 2008 Today’s Gospel passage, the calling of Matthew, always reminds me of that great painting of this scene that was done by Caravaggio and is to be found in the French church of St Louis in Rome. There is Matthew, absorbed in his dirty tricks, busy with his collecting of taxes for the occupying forces, and there in the doorway stands Jesus, just fixing him with a look and pointing to him- “I want that man!” he seems to be saying, and Matthew has his hand on his heart and is looking up in amazement- “who, me?” We do not know what had led Matthew to become such a traitor to his own people, to throw in his lot so completely with the hated Romans, to become one of those publicans, those tax collectors, that were looked on by the Jew in the street with such contempt and who were treated as such total outsiders that the critics of Our Lord as here always held it against him that he even considered mixing with them, with “tax collectors and sinners”. We only know that Our Lord saw him one day, up to his eyes in all his nefarious practices, and saw through all the rubbish in Matthew’s life to the real man within, and chose him for his own. Our Lord’s penetrating gaze fell upon him, and pierced through all the dross to the essential Matthew hidden within, and saw in that moment all the potential for goodness that lay submerged in him. Heaven knows, we too have done a few deals with the enemy in our time, we too make shameful compromises of one sort or another as we muddle our way through life, we too let the side down and fail to be true to our own people, that is, to the Christianity that we profess and to the Church that we identify with. And yet, Our Lord is gazing on each one of us with that long look of knowledge and love, Our Lord has a desire for each one of us, and he sees into our hearts and sees our potential, the person we could be if we would. Who me? Yes, says Jesus, You. What a relief that is for us! We are not, whatever we have done, whoever we are, whatever we have become, we are going to be ostracised by God. In fact, as the Holy Father pointed out only recently at Corpus Christi, the whole idea that some people are the in crowd and others the outsiders is foreign to Christianity, the idea that some Christians are front rank and the rest no good, that the ones in the know are OK, in some sort of special clique, while everyone else is just an also-ran of no consequence, goes against the heart of our Catholic Faith, for the very word “catholic” means universal, embracing everyone.. Pope Benedict quoted St Paul in his Letter to the Galatians “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” and went on to say “In these words the truth and power of the Christian revolution is heard, the most profound revolution of human history….here people of different age groups, sex, social background and political ideas gather together in the Lord’s presence”. He reminds us that the eucharist is the great example of all this- “a public event that has nothing esoteric or exclusive about it” he says, where “we open ourselves to one another to become one in him”. And the Holy Father reminds us that “it is always necessary to be alert to ensure that the recurring temptations of particularism, even if with good intentions, do not go in the opposite direction”. What he means by that, I suggest, is that we have always to be on our guard against becoming like those Pharisees! Not just in becoming more and more obsessed with the detail and the minutiae of our religious observances but in drawing up boundaries of the us and them variety, that is so deeply engrained in our human nature. In Christ, as St Paul reminds us, there can be no us and them- we are all one. There must be no boundaries made by us as to who is a good Catholic, a good Christian, and who is a bad, who is in and who is out. Fr Faber back in the mid 19th century wrote that hymn we never seem to hear nowadays that began “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. God is, as we heard in our Old Testament reading today , a God who can say “What I want is love not sacrifice” , which Jesus renders as “what I want is mercy, not sacrifice”. It is that mercy, that unconditional ever-forgiving love, that we are relying on for ourselves, and we must make certain that we do not, for all our petty human reasons and prejudices, withhold or limit it in our dealings with our fellow human beings. Let there be no boundaries put down by us to the love of God, which it is our job to be showing to the world. We are the followers of the one who said “Indeed, I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners” and like those first hearers of this Gospel passage, it is to us that Our Lord is saying “Go and learn the meaning of the words!” I close with one of the alternative prayers appointed for today’s Mass: “Father in Heaven, words cannot measure the boundaries of love for those born to new life in Christ Jesus. Raise us beyond the limits this world imposes so that we may be free to love as Christ teaches.“ And may Saint Matthew, that outcast, that pariah whom Jesus looked on and loved, help us to understand the meaning of Our Lord’s words today, to appreciate the universality and the essential inclusiveness of our catholic faith, and make us people of mercy to all those we meet and live among, for we are those sinners who pray “Jesus, Lord, I ask for mercy, let me not implore in vain”. Amen.