When the Lord calls forth and exalts Matthew the publican to the summit of the apostolate, He gives a hand to the fallen, restores hope to the despairing, gives back to life those whom death was already holding bound to itself. 'As He was passing by,' it says, 'Jesus saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the toll-booth' (Mark 2). He was sitting indeed, he who could not stand, oppressed by the weight of cupidity, and bent wholly by the very conscience of his fraud. Gold, heavy by nature, becomes heavier by excessive avarice. Hence it depresses the one who has more of it more than the one who merely carries it, and weighs down hearts more violently than bodies. It is born in the deep earth, follows the very foundations of the mountains, and runs through the lowest veins with blind windings, and while it ever returns to its own nature, it lays low heavenly minds to the depths below:
it ever darkens the senses, ever plunges the heights of the mind into earthly things. To disburse gold is good, to hoard it is evil, to despise it is strength, to flee it is safety: for as to conquer it is a mark of virtue, so to have escaped it is a mark of felicity. The frenzy of gold burns more ardently in the human breast than any furnace glows with the fires of its blaze, and it dissolves men on earth more keenly than the sun melts in the heat of the flames. A lord of cruelty, a savage enemy, it wounds by loving, it strips by enriching; it captivates even the very gaze, breaks faith, violates affection, wounds charity, disturbs quiet, takes away innocence, teaches theft, counsels frauds, commands robbery. And what more? This is what the Apostle said: 'Avarice is the root of all evils' (1 Timothy 6).
There is indeed one sound exchange: if a prudent man sends it on ahead to heaven, before he himself, like a fool, be sent by it into Tartarus. Let him send it by the hand of the poor, because whatever he has given to the poor for God's sake, he transmits to heaven without delay. Deservedly, then, the Lord, wishing to loose Matthew who was fettered by such bonds, raises him up, saying: 'Follow Me.' That is, follow Me as I tend from things above to things above, and not gold as it sinks from the depths below into the depths below. 'Where thy treasure is, there also will thy heart be' (Matthew 6).
Gold so corrupted the stock of the patriarchs, the holy progeny, that singular crown of brotherhood, and made it so wholly an exile from all piety, that they handed over Joseph to the Egyptians, a brother to barbarians, an innocent to the guilty, freeborn nobility to servitude (Genesis 37). Thus it dried up their minds, thus it depressed their hearts, thus it changed whatever had been of human feeling in them into a beastly rage, so that it permitted them to remember neither the offense of God, nor the grief of their holy father, nor the feeling of their own blood. Consider what is heavier than gold, which, when it destroys the morals of men, destroys also their nature. Gold so held the Jewish people captive by its appearance, conquered them by allurements, utterly deceived them by its beauty, that they believed it to be God, and denied the true God, the God known by so many benefits;
it so turned men into beasts of burden, that they believed a calf's head to be their own head, and preferred the head of a brute to the head of all things (Exodus 32). Consider how this destruction is to be fled, which, when it has destroyed the morals, the honesty, and the life of men, wished also to take away even God Himself from man and strove to do so. This is what made Judas a betrayer, so that it forced a man to deny his God, to sell the brother of his own blood, to trade away his Creator, and to appraise at a price that very blood which the Lord was freely about to bestow as the price for us (Matthew 26). But lest many examples on this matter breed weariness, let us pass on to what remains.
'Follow Me,' and rising up he followed Him. Often a useful virtue is read of even in an enemy, often it is proven in an adversary. Matthew is not withdrawn from work, but changed, and he takes up the toll-booth rather than leaves it, so that he may gather what abides for God, not what will perish for man; that he may reduce, as a sad reckoner, not the thirtieth into the fortieth and fiftieth coin; but that he may joyfully store up the thirtieth into the sixtieth and hundredth fruit of joy, to profit for divine gains. 'Rising up, he followed Him.' A noble soul, who thus easily, and as if they were nothing, despised the things he had thought great: it appears that through ignorance he had procured the present gains, from which, as soon as he perceived himself free and saw himself so, he was caught away to divine things.
'And it came to pass, as He reclined at table in his house, many publicans and sinners were reclining with Jesus and His disciples.' Jesus was reclining more in Matthew's mind than at the couch, and He feasted not on food, but on the sinner's return, that He might call back by the banquet, by the fellowship, by the affection of His humanity, by His most sweet converse, those who were reclining—those whom He knew could be dissolved by the recognized power of the Judge, struck down by the terror of His majesty, laid low by His bare presence—though He was veiled in a human body, He who willed to come to the aid of man. He concealed the Lord, who deigned not to deny confidence to servants; He veiled His majesty, who was zealous to embrace the frail with a parent's love.
But the Jews are offended, saying: Why does your Master eat and drink with publicans and sinners? Dost thou marvel, O Jew, why He mingles in the banquet of sinners, who for the sake of sinners even willed to be born, and did not refuse to be slain? Dost thou bark that He drinks the wine of sinners, who for sinners poured out His own blood? And if thou wouldst be able to say more: He Himself took up sin, lest He should lose sinners; upon Himself, as Judge, He turned back His own sentence, that He might prove that He loved sinners more by paying the debt than by remitting it. But let it suffice that the Lord Himself answered such men: They that are in health have no need of a physician, but they that are ill; for I came not to call the just, but sinners. And who was not sick, when the very nature of the human race was so sick?
To all, therefore, He came, who found all men ill that He might cure them; but plainly he deserved to die, who despised the physician lest he should accuse himself, or confess himself sick. But the Lord soon lays open the figure of His saying, saying: For I came not to call the just, but sinners. Here the Lord does not spurn the just, but the proud; and He marks out those who, though they are not, boast themselves to be just. And where were the just, when, according to the prophet, 'There was none that did good, there was not even one' (Psalm 13)? That they may understand their sickness, may admit the physician that they may be cured, may confess themselves sinners, so that now Christ, as parent and table-companion, may grant pardon, lest afterward, as Judge, He bring against the obstinate the due sentence without end.