This past Wednesday marked the feast of Saint Matthew the Evangelist, the author of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew, and one of the twelve apostles of our Lord. As I stood in the small chapel where I attend midweek Eucharist, listening to the story of Matthew, called Levi, being called by our Lord, I found myself reflecting less on Matthew as apostle and more on Matthew as person.
Matthew was a tax collector when our Lord came to him and called him to follow. Oftentimes we spend much of our work explaining how tax collectors were the outcast of Jewish society, having betrayed the people of God unto a heretic empire. Moreover, the betrayal came with an extraordinary ability to exhort and feed all manner of greed. To this we point and speak of our Lord in terms of His willingness to eat with sinners and rightly so, for this is part of the Story.
But it is only part.
What we are not as quick to consider or as quick to point out is that to be a tax collector, you had to be quite educated.
We brush over this fact.
Why?
In the Tradition that I am educated in, the medieval period, I am privileged to read the writings of brilliant, beautiful Christians. I am saturated by their words, their reverence, and their keen sense of God’s immediacy and utter holiness. Yet I often am told by those outside of the study of this period that they think the medieval world to be one in which the laity had no access to God, that the Church was a farce, and that knowledge of the Most High was placed into the hands of a few.
This is absurd and part of Satan’s clever little lie in the past two centuries.
He has sought to have us believe that the gospel is somehow a sort of everyman thing. He has tricked us into thinking that the apostles were stupid fisherman, bad Jews, and that Jesus Himself was a sort of roving, rough character who spent a lot of His time rejecting everything in the Old Testament except the parts which He found convenient.
But this is not the Christ of the Gospels, these are not the apostles of our Lord, this is not the history of Christianity.
Our Lord came to fulfill the Law. Not, as some translations render Law, a set of Rules. The Law was far more than Rules. If we take the Scripture seriously, God in Deuteronomy 6 tells His people, His chosen, that this Law, this great and mighty codification of His holiness, was to be written on the door-posts of their houses, their gates, mediated on throughout the day, sought endlessly, there when they lay down, when they rose.
Did Jesus change any of that?
The authors of Scripture, the apostles included, were not stupid men, uneducated and against Jewish teaching. If this were true, then we think of inspiration as Holy Ghost taking over their hands and forcing them to write. But I cannot believe in this. I do not see evidence for it in the Text. What I see are real people, empowered by the Holy Ghost, recording what they saw happen, bringing their unique perspective, their unique interest. So Matthew writes a Gospel that focuses on the fulfillment of the Law. Wouldn’t you, if you had been someone who had betrayed his people? Wouldn’t you show that you had still kept dear the things of God? St. John the Beloved writes a Gospel that is structured based on the Jewish festivals, divided in the first into seven signs and the second seven glories. Is there anything more fundamentally Jewish, fundamentally Law-honoring than that?
Were the apostles really a group of rough and tumble, foolish, uneducated fisherman only?
Gregory the Great, a pope in the start of the late patristic period leading into the early medieval, wrote a treatise in which he commissioned and demanded the need for stained glass windows, as the laity were often unable to read on their own, they would at least be able to learn the way of the Cross from the glass. People were converted by hearing the word and then encountering the Word in the glass. Light, pouring in, souls being redeemed.
Is this truly some picture of captivity, some time period void of evangelism?
What has happened to us as the Church?
We have feared much. We worry that to say that God is infinitely intelligent and clever means that He somehow is unable to be reached by those who are not, ignoring that all of us fall into that camp. Rather, Scripture has been stripped of all literary value, translated horribly into a kind of textbook for moral conduct, and our Christ has been paraded around as the king of fools.
At it’s core, I believe this has something to do with our consideration of holiness.
We have lost the love of the sacred. We have lost the love of the mystery. We have made Jesus easy, when Jesus is terribly hard. It is not an easy thing to pick up your cross; it is not an easy thing to ask Holy Ghost to enter your life and start rearranging everything; it is not an easy thing to call upon the Name of the Lord.
The Name. The Name that a God-fearing Jew never writes down.
Have we forgotten that it is the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom? The recognition that He is holy.
It is only recently that we have tried to make God easy, because we think we’re helping Him. We think that for too long He’s been a little too removed, He’s been a little too inaccessible, so we’re helping get Him out there, like He’s a wallflower at the dance.
Have we considered that God doesn’t much need our help? He would very much like our obedience, our devotion, our relationship.
But let us not mistake the nearness of God for a lack of holiness. Terrible, frightening holiness. For when I read in Revelation how the creatures cry out, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” I tremble.
I have no problem thinking our Lord comes and sits beside me when I read His Word and reflect upon it, that He loves me, that He assures me each day of the blessed hope I have in Him.
But I question where we all are right now as a Church. I question our motivation for all this missional and intentional serving. Have we made people who confess God and then slip into believing that Jesus came to get rid of the Rules? Or are we making devotees, disciples, people who read the Old Testament, sit back, and marvel at the holiness of God and the love of God?
And, to bring this back to the question I toyed with at the start: are we willing for there to be educated, brilliant people in the Church? Are we willing to recognize that some will see deeper into the Text than we ourselves? Are we willing to recognize that some will dare to approach God in humility but with questions?
Are we willing?
Or in our frustration that we were not so created, have we told God that He got it wrong?
For there is a parable of our Lord, you know, about workers in a field. Some come early, some late, but they all are given the same wage at the end.
Funny thing, this: we are content with this story only when it comes to the last, to eternity, but mortified when it comes to the present, when we have to journey it, when we have to be.
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
