Christ’s Vocations Plan, Feast of St. Matthew, September 21, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of St. Matthew, Apostle
September 21, 2019
Eph 4:1-7.11-13, Ps 19, Mt 9:9-13

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in this homily:

• In the Gospel, Jesus today says quite clearly, “I desire mercy,” and adds “I have come not to call the righteous but sinners.” In the calling of St. Matthew and in every vocation except that of the Blessed Virgin, he acts on those words. Today we see a powerful manifestation of this desire for mercy in his calling the despised tax collector Matthew to be his disciple and apostle. Christ indeed came to call not the healthy but the morally sick, not the just but sinners, to repentance. Matthew, the converted disciple collector, would forever be a walking advertisement of how great the Lord’s forgiveness really is. St. Matthew immediately began to bring his friends to receive that same gift from Jesus. He is an example of good soil who received the gift of the Lord’s mercy and immediately started bearing fruit. The Pharisees, on the other hand, had hardened soil. As Jesus’ response to them in the Parables of the Lost Coin, Lost Sheep and Lost Sons showed us last Sunday (Lk 15:1-32), they were resistant to the need for mercy in their own lives and weren’t happy when that mercy reached even those they knew were sinners. Jesus was seeking to help them understand with his words today that they cannot respond to God’s call except through mercy. St. Paul in today’s first reading urges us to live in a manner worthy of the calling we have received and to come to full maturity in Christ, two things that can only happen when we live in a manner worthy of God’s mercy received and shared and mature to become as merciful as our Father is merciful. He, the Divine Physician, wants to heal us with his medicine and send us out as his nurses. Our call and the cure for our sinfulness and coextensive.
• I don’t think many of us ponder this truth enough. Many in the world think that when someone receives a vocation to the priesthood or to religious or consecrated life, he does so because we must be somehow canonizable, that we are more in the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for example, than we are in the mode of St. Matthew, or St. Peter (whose first words to the Lord were “Depart from me for I am a sinful man”) or St. Paul (who used to hunt down and execute Christians). One of the reasons that others occasionally beatify us is because we often don’t speak enough about how much and why we, too, desperately need God’s mercy. I don’t think we ponder enough St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” (1 Cor 1:27-29). God has called us to be Christians, not to mention priests or religious, because he comes to call sinners and the sick, the foolish, weak, lowly, despised, nothing-counters! But then at the same time he exalts the humble by associating us with his holiness as he calls us to be saints!
• This was made plain 66 years ago today in the call of Jorge Bergoglio to be a priest while he was going to confession. It was September 21, 1953 and a teenage Jorge Bergoglio was planning to spend the day with friends. Before meeting with them at the train station, he stopped by to pray at his parish Church dedicated to St. Joseph. A priest he had never seen before, Fr. Carlos Duarte Ibarra, was in the Church. He decided to approach him and asked him to hear his confession. We don’t know what Jorge said to the priest or how the priest replied. But we do know that that confession totally changed not only the teenager’s plans for the day but for the whole course of his life. A few years ago on the Vigil of Pentecost, Pope Francis shared some of his memories of this pivotal event in his vocation story. “One day in particular was very important to me: September 21, 1953. I was almost 17. It was ‘Students’ Day,’ for us the first day of spring — for you the first day of autumn. Before going to the celebration I passed through the parish I normally attended. I found a priest whom I did not know and I felt the need to go to confession. For me this was an experience of encounter: I found that Someone was waiting for me. Yet I do not know what happened. I can’t remember. I do not know why that particular priest was there whom I did not know, or why I felt this desire to confess, but the truth is that Someone was waiting for me. He had been waiting for me for some time. After making my confession I felt something had changed. I was not the same. I had heard something like a voice, or a call. I was convinced that I should become a priest.” He was called to be a priest so that he could continue that mission, just as much as St. Matthew did. His papal motto, taken from the Office of Readings every priest reads on September 21 for the Feast of St. Matthew, relives the encounter that took place in the Buenos Aires confessional. “Miserando atque Eligendo,” St. Bede’s words about the former tax collector that can also fittingly be said about the one-time Argentine chemist: “He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him.” The Lord wants us to recognize that he has chosen us through his mercy and wants us to help others to recognize the same calling. Little did Jorge Bergoglio recognize then that he would one day become the successor of St. Peter. But he already intuited he was to be a successor of St. Matthew, someone called through mercy and sent out as a herald and minister of that mercy. We, too, each in our own way, are called and sent out by the Lord as successors of St. Matthew as well.
• Our whole life is meant to be contextualized by this call to mercy. At the end of today’s first reading, St. Paul describes God’s desire for us to attain true knowledge of the Son of God and to come to “mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ,” who is, as he revealed to St. Faustina, “Mercy incarnate.” We need to mature in mercy in order to produce abundant fruit. We see this truth very beautifully in the life of St. Augustine, about whom Pope Benedict has often said there were three stages in his maturation in mercy. The first was his massive conversion from a life of sin; the second was to go from serving God as he wished to serving God as God himself desired to be served by his serving others, for after all, Christ “indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor 5:15); the third stage, at the very end of his life, was to grasp that everything he did was by God’s mercy, not by his own power, such that he recognized that to live the Christian life at all was to live by mercy.
• Today as we come here to this Mass the same Jesus, the Divine Physician, who called and chose Matthew through his mercy, comes to call and choose us anew again. St. Matthew, we know, was present at the first Mass and was given the sacramental power by Christ to “do this in memory of” him. As we prepare to offer with faith and gratitude Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity shed “for the forgiveness of sins,” we turn through St. Matthew’s intercession to God, the eternal Father, to receive us together with his Son in expiation for our sins and those of the whole world.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Reading 1
EPH 4:1-7, 11-13