Today the Church celebrates the Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. Fittingly, our Gospel reading is Jesus calling Matthew to follow him. In doing so, the Lord invites this tax collector to join his core followers: the Twelve.
Our reading from Ephesians, referring to spiritual gifts, insists, “grace was given to each of us.”1 It is a grace to follow Christ, who calls everyone. I say he calls everyone, even though in our Gospel he says, “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”2 Like Matthew, none of us are called because of our own merits. And some the Lord calls, like Matthew, like Paul, are surprising, to say the least.
What Saint Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth, I believe, still applies today: “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…”3
Jesus Calls Matthew To Be His Disciple
Both the call and the response are grace. Grace is a word we hear, read, and perhaps use a lot. Like a boat too long at sea, words used too often can acquire barnacles, taking on so many meanings that the core meaning is muted or even lost.
In his recent novel Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar provides a stunning “take” on grace:
What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with reward. Goodness never enters the equation4The economy of salvation is non-transactional. Its structure is “gift-return-gift.” This exchange is not about redistributing goods or services. Rather, it’s about imitating God’s self‑gift and living out that gift concretely.
Grace begins with the reward. Christian life begins with the reward. The rest is living in loving gratitude for the gift given and received. This is what Saint Matthew did, transforming from a tax collector into an apostle and evangelist. This is how “to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received.”5
1 Ephesians 4:7.↩
2 Matthew 9:13.↩
3 1 Corinthians 1:26-27.↩
4 Kaveh Akbar. Martyr! Vintage: New York: 2024, page 279..↩
5 Ephesians 4:1.↩
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