We celebrate today the Feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. He was among The Twelve:

First, we have the uncanny analogy of the man of Israel, the Levite, who charges a tax and the Roman official, the publican, who charges a tax. Like the Romans, the Levites had no "native soil" in Palestine as the other tribes had. Like the Romans, the Levites were rulers after a fashion (whose seat of government was the Temple), and they received a tithe, that is 10%, imposed as a tax on their countryman:

As far as we can tell, the Roman tax was accepted by the people. Consider the following exchange between the Lord Jesus and the Pharisees, recorded in St. Matthew's Holy Gospel:

As to the Romans being an occupying power, well, yes, they were. But we must understand this in context. Beginning with the troops of Alexander the Great during the 330s B.C., Jewish Palestine had been under Greek or Roman occupation continuously for more than three centuries. Military occupation had been a fact of life for more than fifteen generations. This was no Nazi occupation of France with its Free French and hated Nazi collaborators. Palestine had long since become a Hellenized society thanks to Alexander in which Jesus and the Disciples quoted from the Greek Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint (Werner Jaeger), not the Hebrew-language Torah and Prophets.

A foremost population center of Jews was in Alexandria, Egypt. These men were revered for their learning and cultured life. The tax collector anywhere in the Roman Empire was not seen as some reptilian figure skulking about, being hissed at by the people in the street. Far from it. He was a member of the societas publicanorum (called publicans). This was part of the Equestrian Class, the level in Roman society just below the Senatorial Class. His duties included tax collection as well as administration of various public works projects. And you ought to see the "colosseums" (I should say, "circuses") and temples and amphitheaters in the Holy Land. He was a respected government official holding a place of public honor .... though, without question, despised by Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes as an unclean "outsider."

Judea, however, was not the homogeneous, cultic Jewish lifeworld that Hollywood has depicted in its "Biblical epics." Judea was also a classical world of Graeco-Roman culture — with beautiful colonnaded agoras, gymnasiums, large white temples not unlike the Parthenon, and Graeco-Roman sports, such as wrestling and other classical "Olympic" competitions, enjoyed by athletes from Jewish families. Many young Judean competitors, wanting to fit in to this classical world, sought to have their circumcisions reversed. For many citizens of Jerusalem, membership in the Equestrian class was not something to be despised or disdained but rather sought after and coveted. Visit the ruined cities of the Decapolis in Israel and Jordan today, and you will see what I mean. Roman citizenship was prized by first-century Judeans. Did not the Pharisee of Pharisees, the Apostle Paul, articulate his own Roman citizenship with a sense of dignity and aplomb (Acts 16:37; 22:25-28)?

To be sure, Levi the Roman official would not have been accounted as being just or righteous before the Law and the Prophets. But that would have held true for many affluent and publicly respected people in Judea including the Roman client king, Herod the Tetrarch (Lu 3:19).

As we try to bring Levi into focus, we should compare him to the rich man who burned in Hades unable to attain to the Bosom of Abraham (Lu 16:19-31) or to the affluent men who could sooner pass through the eye of a needle than enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt 19:24) or, more to the point, to the wealthy young ruler who let discipleship under Jesus slip through his fingers because he could not part with his riches (Mt 7:13). Indeed, this last example, written by Levi himself, might be a tiny fragment of autobiography. We read that the wealthy young official was "sorrowful" .... perhaps so sorrowful that Jesus later returned to him:

When Jesus holds aloft the "tax money" and says, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's," the Pharisees and the people marvel. For set before them are two gravely consequential choices: the world or the Kingdom of Heaven. The man Levi, the government official, and the man Matthew, the future Apostle and Evangelist, stand at this crossroads. It is not very different from the crossroads before which the Pharisees also stand .... or many religious people today stand. For we all have been, who still are, two people, having two wills, each struggling with the other to gain the upper hand. And need I say that many religious people lead double lives, secret lives?

It is no stretch to say that this is the story of the Twelve Tribes of Jacob, always facing the same choice: God or the world, faithfulness or apostasy? This is the story of Levi-Matthew and not the tale of a Roman collaborator who in the end returned to his own faithful, God-fearing people.

If we should protest that the first-century tax collector was able to abuse his office charging the people much more than 1%, then we must remember that abuse of office was not unknown in the Temple either. Whether the subject is Levi-Matthew the publican or the Judean or Benjamite Pharisee, the story is one and the same: godliness versus worldliness. We see that both publicans and Pharisees are rulers; both impose their power with troops; both aspire to public honor and respect. Most important, we see that in both cases, indeed, in all cases, that the major point is not "publican vs. Pharisee" but rather the general apostasy of everyone. Jesus brings this major point into sharp focus with the call of Levi-Matthew:

Wherein resides their faithlessness? They have lapsed from spiritual worship and communion with YHWH, which was the purpose of the Tabernacle and the First Temple, into mechanical ritual, idolatry, as if animal sacrifices could be a substitute for transformation of the mind and soul.

The word mercy points to being just or righteous as we discussed last Sunday. These are stages in spiritual transformation and cannot be achieved through the physical-mechanical means of sacrifice. Whether the context is the Book of Hosea or the Holy Gospels, the Lord Jesus says that knowledge of God is the desire of the Almighty. This phrase, επι'γνωσιν Θεου (epignwsin Theou) does not mean "awareness of" or "intellectual apprehension of." But rather the knowledge implied by epignwsis is limited to religious or moral things (Arndt & Gingrich, 291). The operative root here is gnosis, that deep, spiritual knowledge. St. Paul's use of the word in his Letter to the Colossians makes this point with crystal clarity:

The charge Jesus lays before the Pharisees is that they, along with the Twelve Tribes, in general, have abandoned spiritual worship. And this is the point of Levi's call: metanoia, the turning away from the world, giving up worldly prestige and empty honors. As Jesus charged the young ruler: let go of worldly riches that you may have the spiritual riches of Heaven's Kingdom.

Is this not a question we ought pose to ourselves as we enter the Nativity Fast? Yes, perhaps our bodies do perform the right rituals. Perhaps we have knowledge of God in the sense of an intellectual grasp of what He requires of us. But can we say that our hearts are in it? Do we love Him and adore Him and think of Him minute by minute, hour by hour, ever seeking to do His will and please Him in newnness of life? And do we know to a certainty (thinking of that old country music song) that "Satan is Real" (Louvin Brothers)?

This is the struggle revealed by Levi-Matthew's call:

In the space of our own lives, and especially as we enter the Nativity Fast, let us embrace our patron and the struggle he represents. Yes, we cannot be Evangelists, for the Canon of Scripture is closed. We cannot be Apostles, for they all have been sent. But in our humility, perhaps we will not be last. For "citizen of Heaven" has a nice ring, far above "citizen of Rome" .... and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.