LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Follow Me. So he arose and followed Him.

Matthew 9:9

St. Matthew

Matthew was sitting at his tax booth in Capernaum when Christ passed by and said two words to him, Follow Me, and he rose and went. The Gospels do not soften what that meant. A tax collector in Roman Judea had bought the right to gather his own people's money for an occupying power and kept whatever he could take above the quota. He was a collaborator and, commonly, an extortioner, and his neighbors despised him with reason. That Christ called such a man, and then went to his house and ate with him and his fellow collectors, scandalized the respectable, and drew from Jesus the answer that has consoled sinners ever since: those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

Matthew, also called Levi, left the booth and did not return to it, but he kept one instrument of his old trade, the pen. He became the first of the four to set the Gospel down, composing it, tradition says, in Hebrew or Aramaic for his own people before it passed into Greek. His account opens with a long genealogy tracing Christ through David to Abraham, for his whole purpose is to show a Jewish reader that Jesus is the one the Law and the prophets had promised, the fulfillment of the history of Israel.

After Pentecost he preached first among the Jews of Judea and then farther afield, in the tradition to Ethiopia, Persia, and Parthia. He is held to have died a martyr, in some accounts at the altar while celebrating the Liturgy, a death that joined his end to the sacrifice he served.

In the icon Matthew is shown as an older, white-bearded man holding the Gospel book. He is an apostle of the mercy he himself received, the despised man made an evangelist, a sign that the Gospel is meant for the very people the world has given up on.