The Fifth Disciple

When a young doctor puts out his shingle, he has to get staff privileges at a hospital. When a lawyer opens up for business, he has to get a client funds account set up. In every profession, there are some things you have to do to begin business in that profession. What you do if you are a first century Jewish rabbi? You take disciples. How many disciples before you're a real rabbi? Five; the same number as the Books of Moses.

So in the Gospel today (Matthew 9:9 -13), Jesus takes his fifth disciple. That makes him a real rabbi in Jewish eyes. He's already taken the brothers Peter and Andrew, and the sons of Zebedee John and James. The fifth disciple is Matthew, also called Levi. And Matthew is a real piece of work.

Matthew is a tax collector for the Romans; he has turned his back on his country, his family, his friends, and his religion in order to make money. To get his commission as a tax collector, he would have had to pay a substantial sum of money to the Roman governor, because this was a way to get rich. With a squad of Roman soldiers at his back, he would work very hard to get his quota of taxes demanded by the Roman government and would work even harder to make use of his position to squeeze his fellow Jews for money; for this was an extortion racket. The Romans didn't care how rich Matthew became as long as they got their share of tax money. And Matthew could growvery rich this way.

So it is all the more surprising that when Jesus walked by his customs post and called Matthew to his side, that Matthew actually came. He turned his back on his money and his former life, and chose this new life with the penniless Master who from this moment becomes a rabbi of Israel in earnest. What a powerful grace! What an amazing motion of the Holy Spirit! He turns twice; once away from sin, and the life he had before Jesus; and secondly to Jesus, whose loving Heart has made the first motion towards Matthew's own.

Now, what is the next thing Jesus does? What's the first act of the new rabbi, the teacher in Israel? Does he open a yeshiva? Does he distribute the five books of Moses to his disciples and begin a study of those holy Scriptures? No. He goes to dinner - at the house of his newest disciple.

Matthew is a lowlife. He has no decent respectable friends. No Jew worthy of the name would be seen dead with him. And so when Matthew entertains Jesus at his home, he brings all his lowlife friends - other tax collectors, ladies of easy virtue, ne'er-do-wells and public sinners.

And the righteous start gossiping about it. "What does your Master mean by eating with tax collectors and sinners?" the Pharisees ask Jesus' disciples. Jesus answers : " Learn the meaning of the Scripture, ' I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' I have come not for the righteous but for sinners."

If you are righteous by yourself before God, you don't need Jesus. There is no need for him to save you, because you don't need saving. If you've never robbed, stolen, cheated, committed adultery, been angry, let fear, avarice or desire overrule your judgment; if you have never gossiped, never let an uncharitable words slip your lips; if you have always and at every second of your life loved the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, and you have loved your neighbor at all times and moments as your very self - then you don't need Jesus. But I know I'm not there; I doubt you, dear reader, are either; in fact, I don't believe that anyone has avoided these sins entirely except the Lord Jesus himself, and by the saving grace of his Cross, his Blessed Mother. And but for him, even she would be marked by sin.

So like Matthew, I am unrighteous and need the physician Jesus Christ for my healing. And like Matthew, I need to make the double turn which is an authentic repentance: a turning away from sin, and the turning to the person of Jesus Christ, who is life and healing. And Jesus begins this process in us not by teaching us morality, but by bringing us to table with him, to eat and to drink. The repentant Mathew and his sinner friends become table companions of the Lord. The Lord still does this in every Mass , inviting sinners to sit down, kick back, eat and drink, and come to know him better from the heart.

"I desire mercy and not sacrifice." The Old Testament line goes to the priority of what God demands that we must have if we are to approach him properly. If we start with the objective requirements of justice - and every rational creature owes a debt of worship, praise and glory to its God - we can treat God objectively with our code of morality - "do justice" - and miss the point of the relationship he demands of us, which is that of a personal union. God is love, and the inner life of the One God is of Three Persons united in a single existence of love and knowledge.

I often think that we are shortchanged as Christians by being English speakers; that English has so many inferior ways of talking about things that are most important about being human - a problem that other languages do not have. There is the distinction in Latin, for example between "scire" and "cognoscere"; the first implies an objective, authoritative, and taxonomic intellectual appropriation of reality, and the second, a knowledge of a person based in a shared experience of life. Spanish has the same distinction in the difference between the verbs "saber" and "conocer"; French "savoir" and "connaître"; German "wissen" and "kennen." It is too easy for us in English to miss the distinction between knowing about God and knowing God.

For instance, when we pay our electric bill -a debt we owe in justice - we generally don't worry about how life is going for the person who takes our money. We pay our bill and are done with it. Some people treat Mass as that - an obligation to be paid and be done with. But if we maintain this frame of mind, we never actually get to know the person behind the counter, or the Master behind the Mass. If we take the employee of the electric company to dinner, and listen to him talk about his wife and kids, and his hopes for life and his frustrations with his work; if we spend with him an afternoon of fishing or a night of bowling, we come to "know" him in a radically different, and very personal way than we did before. He will be on the way to becoming a friend, one with whom we share our own heart. And it's this kind of relationship that Jesus wants with us first, before he makes us saints.

And so, when he offered the perfect sacrifice for the world's sins on the Cross, when he paid that debt of justice once and for all on behalf of you and me, he permitted his Heart to be torn open by the soldier's lance, and established two great milestones in the life of each of us in the water and blood that poured from it.

The water we know as the sacrament of Baptism that purifies our hearts that we may sit down with the Master at table. It is a sacrament especially aimed at mortal sin; the person who passes through this holy bath is made fit table company for him who is the Sinless One, and marks our entry into His presence as his disciples. In Baptism we make the same turning away from life without God and life with sin that Matthew made when Jesus called him away from the customs post.

The blood and life of Christ is received in the holy Eucharist, which contains the person of Christ himself, who comes as the sacred Meal which is first movement of his tutelage of us. The Eucharist is aimed at venial sin: the sins committed in inattention and human weakness, the habits that we can't seem to control on our own; the sparkings to sin which remain in us, even after we have deliberately renounced a life without Christ. Healing these is the work of a lifetime; and the Eucharist works first of all, not by instructing us in goodness through the mind, but healing us by Christ's persistent presence in our heart, by feeding us at the very root of our person where he has joined himself to us.

And so any given moment we find ourselves on a road to holiness stretching between our Baptism and our Eucharist- between the font and the altar, between the life of deliberate and unrepentant sin and a spiritual living death which we have left behind us, and the splendid undying life that flows from the heart of the immortal Christ urging us on on our pilgrimage to the new and heavenly Jerusalem.

Matthew's penitence in the Gospel prophesies the shape of our own daily conversion. Since this is a journey, it is a conversion that needs to be renewed daily. Baptism is the beginning but not the end of conversion. The Eucharist is the summit of holiness, but a holiness not completely achieved until we pass fully into the depths of the Sacrament which signifies and effects undying life for Christ and those who follow him.

There are many moments, of course, in which we renew this conversion, but for me, one of the most important has always been my participation in the Sacrament of Penance. When I make my confession, I look back to my Baptism, and essentially renew the vows of that commitment, rejecting sin and choosing again new life in Jesus Christ. I also look forward to my participation in the Eucharist, and specifically how to avoid the traps that I have been following into, the actual matter of my present confession. It is, here, I think that many Catholics make a mistake by not taking seriously the need to make a firm purpose of amendment. This isn't just a commitment to avoid mortal sin; it's a concrete commitment to avoid all sin. And that means, if I'm committing venial sin as a habit, I need to be specific about how I plan to avoid this in the future.

To take a specific example, let's say that I have difficulty with gossip. Now normally Christians do not run out of church to gossip about everyone and everything. Usually it's specific people who get talked about, in the company of other specific people. So if I have a problem with gossip, my formation of my firm purpose of amendment should be something like this: "Every time Aunt Minnie visits, she wants to talk about how rotten Cousin Bob is. So what I'm going to do in the future is, when she mentions him, I'm going to praise him to the skies. " (Gossips generally cease having fun when other people refuse to join in their hobby of character assassination.) Now I have a" firm intention", and a concrete plan of how to avoid this sin. In a month, when I come back to confession, I can check my plan and see how well I've done. If it's not working, I may have to try different strategy - like just telling Aunt Minnie that I don't want to talk about Bob, and would she like a glass of iced tea? Either my besetting sin is under control, or it's not. If it's not, I continue to tweak the situation until it is. If the sin is now under control, then I reevaluate my conscience to see what sin as taken its place as that which is giving me the most trouble. Thus from confession to confession, I continue to grow concretely in the conquest of my various sins and weaknesses, and continue to come closer to the heart of Christ. In this way, instruction in morality and the law of God serves its true purpose, which is to bring my heart and Christ's together, to bind his life and mine into one life - a mercy that transcends the obligations of mere justice.

And if this glory can happen in a life like Matthew's, then it can happen in mine.