Following Matthew and John of God on the Path of Lenten Conversion, Saturday after Ash Wednesday, March 8, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Agnes Church, Manhattan
Lenten Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum
Saturday after Ash Wednesday
March 8, 2025
Is 58:9-14, Ps 86, Lk 5:27-32

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth,” we prayed several times today in the Responsorial Psalm. And the Truth incarnate responds in the Gospel, first for Matthew and then for all of us, by coming into our lives and saying, “Follow me!”
• “Follow me!” These words mean that we have to change course, we can no longer go our own way and do our own thing. Once Christ calls us, once he teaches us his way, we are summoned to walk in his truth. That’s the call to conversion. Conversion literally means turning with Jesus.  When he turns to the Father, we turn with him. When he turns to his mother, so do we. When he turns to our neighbor, we follow him across the road. When he sets his face firmly on Calvary, we walk with him along that way of the Cross.
• There are two types of people with different standard reactions to Jesus’ command. Some people are in Matthew’s circumstance, where it’s obvious to them and everyone else that they have been going in the opposite direction of the Lord. These words come as nothing short of a revolution. Many will stubbornly continue to go their own way. Others, like St. Matthew today, will seize the summons as a once in a lifetime opportunity. We’ll return to him in a moment.
• The second main group of people hear Jesus’ words, “Follow me!” as nothing revolutionary at all. They think that, even if they might have some diversions here and there, from time to time, they “basically” follow the Lord. They believe, for example, that they’re devout Christians and yet are indifferent to the slaughter of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in the womb, or turn hardened hearts to Jesus’ brothers and sisters at the border, or respond with a shoulder shrug to the mass murders of innocents in Ukraine, northern Nigeria or the Middle East. They assert they follow Jesus but don’t really make time for him each day in prayer or come to be with him and receive him worthily in the Holy Eucharist. They say they follow him but they think he’s going the wrong way on various issue controversial to our enlightened or woke age. This latter group is somewhat like St. Peter after Jesus had revealed Peter’s vocation to be the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church. When Jesus announced for the first time that he would be betrayed, tortured and crucified, Peter said, “No such thing will ever happen to you, Lord!,” and Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do.” After having changed his name from Simon to Peter, Jesus changed it again to Satan, because, like Satan in the desert, Peter was trying to lead Jesus, not follow  He was thinking according to worldly logic, not divine. He was not interested in the Lord’s teaching him how to walk in the truth, but in his own instructing the Lord the way things should go. And many are in this category: they believe they’re following the Lord — and, like Peter, they’ve made various big choices to follow him — but they don’t follow him yet fully. They still want to be in charge of the relationship, at least some or most of the time. Even after the Resurrection, when St. Peter was asking Jesus what would happen to St. John, Jesus simply said to Peter, basically, “Peter, mind your own business. Stay focused. Your job is to follow me!”
• So whether we’re in the first category, that of Matthew, who needs to turn around almost 180 degrees to follow Jesus, or whether we’re in the second, that of Peter, who may be blind as to how much he needs to change to think as God thinks, to learn his ways and walk in them, Jesus meets us all today and renews his powerful, life-changing invitation, “Follow me!” He makes that appeal insistently during the Lenten season.  To convert does not mean just making minor course corrections in our life like cleaning up our speech, being more patient with the family members or work colleagues who drive us crazy, giving up a bad habit like an addiction to the internet or social media. Conversion goes much deeper than that. Jesus’ call to us three days ago as ashes were being imposed, “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” is much more profound. The Greek word to convert — metanoete— means to turn our head around, to question the path we’re on, to make a choice to try to think as God thinks and live by his ways, consciously choosing not to live everyone else lives, to think as everyone else thinks, to prioritize what everyone else finds important. To convert means ultimately to seek to adopt Christ’s own life as our own, to enter into a deep friendship with him, to die to the old Adam in us so that we can share, full-time, the New Adam’s risen life.
• We see the beauty of this process and gift of conversion in the life of St. Matthew. He was a despised tax collector who used to extort money from his own people to give it to the occupying Romans. The way the Roman tax system worked was that the Romans needed to get a set fee from a given territory; everything the tax collectors got beyond that was theirs to keep. Because of this system, many tax collectors, filled with greed, would begin greedily to rip off their own people with the help of the Roman army. They were like modern mafia dons who extort neighborhood small businesses and even families to pay “protection fees” lest an “accident” happen to their businesses or loved ones. For Jesus to go after Matthew at his customs post then would be as dramatic as his going into the Playboy Mansion and calling Hugh Hefner from his vixens, or entering into Al Capone’s speakeasy and calling him from his booze and hundred dollar bills. Jesus desires mercy and he came to call sinners to repentance — and he was going to show that by going after one of the most notorious sinners of his day. By this point, because of all the miracles Jesus had been working in Capernaum, Matthew must have heard about Jesus. Perhaps he had even stood at a distance to hear him speak or known someone who had been healed. But just like someone in prison would never expect a phone call from the Pope, so he never would have thought Jesus would want him to be among his associates, not to mention friends. Yet in today’s Gospel Jesus enters the place where he was working and says to him, “Follow me!”
• Matthew’s response was two-fold. First, he immediately left everything to follow Jesus. He left all his money on the table, all his ledgers, everything. That’s how powerful the summons of Jesus really is. Matthew responded far more quickly than the great prophets up until then, like Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or certainly Jonah. A few days ago, on Ash Wednesday, St. Paul implored the Christians in Corinth not to receive the grace of God’s gift of conversion in vain, and Matthew certainly didn’t! St. Paul also reminded the Corinthians and us, “Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!,” and Matthew responded with the urgency befitting the offer.
• But his response didn’t end there. The second part of it was to celebrate his conversion. He called together his friends for a party with Jesus, presumably so that they not only could share in his unbelievable turnaround but experience a similar one. When the Scribes and the Pharisees saw Jesus in a notorious public sinner’s house eating with him, they took scandal. There’s an aphorism that we become like the company we keep and the Pharisees and Scribes totally avoided notorious sinners lest they become like them. They asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” They didn’t think that it was possible that Jesus could lift sinners up toward God’s level; rather they were convinced that company would drag him and his followers down.  Overhearing them, Jesus said, “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have come not to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”
• What Matthew intuitively grasped, and the Scribes and Pharisees obstinately didn’t, was that he was sick. He knew his sins were a terrible cancer of the soul and, even though he was surrounded by money, he was slowly dying unhappy and unfulfilled. When Jesus the divine Physician appeared and said he wanted to treat him, Matthew immediately responded and rejoiced. The problem for the Scribes and Pharisees is that, like St. Peter in Caesarea Philippi, they didn’t recognize that they, too, were sick, that they, too, were sinners. One of their most self-injurious characteristics is that they didn’t recognize they needed Jesus because they didn’t think they needed saving. Lent is a time in which Jesus the Doctor gives us the diagnosis of a death sentence — “Temember that … unto dust you shall return” — but then tells us that he will cure us. We must, however, recognize both that we’re sick and then follow his treatment regime. Will we do so? Or will we be like those patients who, for whatever reason, never go to the doctor or take the medicine the doctor prescribes? Jesus tells us at the end of today’s Gospel, “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” Therefore, if we’re called by Jesus to be his disciple, we’re called, like Matthew, precisely as sinners summoned to repentance. And our response to that call will involve receiving the gift of Jesus’ mercy in the Sacrament of Conversion (about which we’ll talk more this morning) that Jesus established on Easter Sunday night and sent Matthew and the other reconciled sinners among the apostles to bring to the world.
• As we continue to pray for the Holy Father, now more than three weeks into his hospitalization, it’s important to ponder the role today’s Gospel had in his life and is meant to have in ours. Back on the feast of St. Matthew in 1953 — September 21, the first day of Spring in Argentina and a national holiday — the 16-year-old Jorge Bergoglio was planning to spend the day at a picnic 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. Young Jorge decided to approach him and asked him to hear his confession. We don’t know what the boy said to the priest or how the priest replied. But we know that that confession totally changed not only the teenager’s plans for the day but for the whole course of his life. Pope Francis said a few years ago, “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. I do not know what happened. … 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 finishing 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.” 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 he realized could also be said about his vocation and every Christian vocation: Jesus “saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him.” The Lord wants us to recognize that, just like he did with St. Matthew, just like he did with Jorge Bergoglio, so 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.
• Today the Church celebrates someone who had a conversion as profound as Matthew’s and went on, like the evangelist, to become a great saint. João Duarte Cidade, whom we now call St. John of God, was born in Portugal in 1495 and at 27 became a soldier in Castile. Like many in the military throughout the centuries, he gave himself over to vice, became thoroughly licentious and left the practice of the faith. Eventually the army was disbanded and he worked as a shepherd. At the age of about 40, stung with remorse for his past sins, he resolved to be healed and to give himself over to God’s service. He tried first as a martyr among the Christian slaves in Morocco, but that plan didn’t work. Then he began to care for the poor and eventually for the sick. He heard a sermon by now doctor of the Church St. John of Avila and was so affected that he filled the sanctuary with his cries, beating his breast and loudly imploring God’s mercy. St. John of Avila gave him God’s mercy and set him straight. From that point forward, until he would die at 55, he immersed himself in the care for others out of love for God. He founded a hospital to care for those whom everyone was neglecting and allowed himself to be surrounded by a group of men who would eventually be called the “Brothers Hospitallers,” popularly called the Fatebenefratelli, the “Do Good Brothers.”  In a letter he wrote that the Church presents to us in the Office of Readings this morning, he describes how to receive God’s mercy, we must be prepared to receive it and want to share it, something that the Church in her wisdom grasps as she insistently summons us to almsgiving in this Lenten season of conversion. “If we look forward to receiving God’s mercy,” St. John of God wrote, “we can never fail to do good so long as we have the strength. For if we share with the poor, out of love for God, whatever he has given to us, we shall receive according to his promise a hundredfold in eternal happiness. What a fine profit, what a blessed reward! Who would not entrust his possessions to this best of merchants, who handles our affairs so well? With outstretched arms he begs us to turn toward him, to weep for our sins, and to become the servants of love, first for ourselves, then for our neighbors. Just as water extinguishes a fire, so love wipes away sin.” He did it in such a Christ-like way that his contemporaries simply called him “John of God.” Today he is interceding for us to learn to love God and others like he did.
• What’s the conversion the Lord concretely is asking of us? During Lent the Church focuses with resolve on three interrelated ways that Jesus is calling us to reorder our relationship to him, to ourselves and to others. Jesus said them to us in the Gospel on Ash Wednesday. The first is, “When you pray….” Jesus seeks to lead us apart, like he did Matthew and the apostles, from the crowds to pray with him, as we resolve to do on this Day of Recollection. The second is, “When you fast,” and leads us into the desert of Lent for 40 days, where, apart from distractions, we can learn how to hunger for what he hungers. The third is, “When you give alms,” as he desires us to go with him to care for those who are in need. In anticipation of Jesus’ own actions, Isaiah tells us in the first reading that we must, among other things, bestow bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted, remove from our midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech, all of which are rampant today. We must repair the breaches that have been made in society and restore the ruined homesteads and broken families. In all of these we follow Jesus, and seek to unite ourselves to him, in his praying, fasting and giving of himself down to the last drop of his Precious Blood.
• Today at Mass the same Jesus, the Divine Physician, who called and chose Matthew through his mercy, comes here with his healing power to call and choose us anew again. He comes to have another meal with sinners, not in Matthew’s house, but in this Church dedicated to him through the intercession of St. Agnes. 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 beg the Lord for the grace to grasp that we are sinners who desperately need him each day to heal us. And let us, through the intercession of St. Matthew, respond to that help to leave our old habits, our old “customs” on the table, and immediately get up to follow him wherever he leads so that, having learned from him his way, we may walk in his truth all the way to the eternal banquet with Matthew, John of God and all the saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download