The Life
Matthew was a tax-collector in Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. His Hebrew name was Levi. Tax-collectors in his day were despised — they worked for the Roman occupiers, they cheated their own people, and they were considered traitors and idolaters. To even speak with one was thought to be defiling. One day Matthew was sitting at his customs booth when a young rabbi walked past. Two words: “Follow me.” Matthew got up, left everything, and followed. The same evening he threw a great feast for the Lord and his disciples, with all his old colleagues invited. The Pharisees were scandalized. The Lord said: I have come not for the righteous but for sinners.
It happened in Capernaum. Matthew was at his usual place — the customs booth where he collected duties on goods crossing the border into Galilee. The Lord came past with the disciples. He looked at Matthew. He said two words: “Follow me.” Matthew got up, left the money on the counter, left the booth, and walked away after the Lord. He never went back. The whole thing took less time than it takes to read this paragraph. There was no debate. No conditions. No request for time to put his affairs in order. The Lord called; Matthew followed.
Matthew did not waste time. The same day he was called, he threw a great feast at his house. He invited the Lord. He invited the disciples. And he invited his old colleagues — publicans and known sinners. They came in numbers. The Pharisees were watching. They could not believe a teacher of Israel would share a table with such people. They asked the disciples why their master ate with publicans and sinners. The Lord, overhearing, answered them: “They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Matthew 9:12-13).
After Pentecost, Matthew preached among the Jewish communities of Palestine for some years. When he was about to leave for foreign missions, he sat down and wrote his Gospel — the first of the four to be written. He wrote it in Aramaic, the language his people spoke, so that they could keep the words of the Lord with them after he left. It begins with the genealogy of Christ, tracing the Lord’s human ancestry from Abraham through King David. It includes the most extensive collection of the Lord’s teachings of any Gospel — the Sermon on the Mount, the discourse in parables, the Olivet discourse on the end of the age. The whole book is written to show that Jesus is the Messiah whom the prophets had promised.
The Lord quotes the prophet Hosea twice in the Gospel of Matthew — both times against the Pharisees. The line is from Hosea 6:6: “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” The first time the Lord quotes it (Matthew 9:13) is exactly during the meal at Matthew’s house, when the Pharisees challenged him for eating with publicans and sinners. “Go and learn what that means,” the Lord told them: I will have mercy and not sacrifice. The second time (Matthew 12:7) is when the Pharisees challenged the disciples for plucking grain on the Sabbath. The Lord said: “If you had known what this means, mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.” Twice in his Gospel Matthew records the same teaching from his Master. He had heard it. He had been the recipient of it. He never forgot it.
After his Gospel was written and Palestine evangelized, Matthew traveled. He preached in Syria, in Media, in Persia, in Parthia. His final mission was to Ethiopia — a land considered remote and barbaric, inhabited by tribes who in some places practiced cannibalism. Matthew converted some of them. He founded a Church and built a temple at the city of Mirmena, with his companion Platon as bishop. While he was praying for the Ethiopians, the Lord himself appeared to him in the form of a young man and gave him a staff. The Lord told him to plant the staff at the door of the church. A tree would grow from it, bear fruit, and a stream of water would flow from its roots. Anyone who washed in the water and ate the fruit would lose their wild ways and become gentle. Matthew did as he was told. The miracle happened. Many were converted.
These are some of the most beloved words of the Lord, and they are recorded only in the Gospel of Matthew. The Lord invites everyone who is weary and overburdened to come to him. He promises rest. He promises that learning from him is gentle, because he himself is gentle. The yoke is not heavy. The burden is not crushing. The pattern of the Christian life is not the kind of religious effort that exhausts the soul. It is the meek and lowly walking with the Lord whose own meekness lifts the weight from the heart. Matthew, who had once carried the heavy burden of being a despised tax-collector, recorded these words for every soul that has ever felt itself crushed.
Matthew was martyred in Ethiopia, faithful to the end. The Tradition records that the local ruler Fulvian, angered by the apostle’s success in converting his people, ordered him executed by fire. They put him head-downwards, piled brushwood, and lit the flames. The fire did not harm him — the same wonder that had preserved the Three Holy Youths in the Babylonian furnace. According to the synaxarion, the apostle eventually gave up his soul to the Lord. Some traditions say he was martyred by sword. The location of his death is variously given as Ethiopia or as Hierapolis in Syria. What all the traditions agree on is that he was faithful to the end — a publican who had once collected money for the Roman emperor died proclaiming the King who would judge every emperor. He was buried in the land where he had preached. His relics were eventually translated to the city of Salerno in southern Italy, where they are venerated to this day.
Matthew matters to every Orthodox Christian for many reasons. He is the supreme icon of grace that does not wait for worthiness. The Lord called him at his customs booth, the place where he was most defiled by the standards of his society, and Matthew got up and followed. He is the patron of every soul that has ever felt itself too far gone to be loved by God, of every Christian whose past has weighed heavily, of every person whose work in the world has felt morally complicated. He is the patron of tax-collectors, accountants, and bankers — a quiet honor for the man who left those numbers behind. He is also the great Evangelist whose Gospel has shaped the prayers and preaching of the Orthodox Church for two thousand years. He gave us the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, the parable of the unforgiving servant, the great commission. To love Matthew is to read his Gospel with the eyes of a man who knew, in his own bones, what it meant to be called from the booth.