Praised to be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
As in the case of some other Apostles, St. Matthew is at work when we first hear of him.
St. James and John were fishermen when, like St. Peter and St. Andrew, Jesus asked them to follow him.
St. Matthew was a tax collector, a member of a particularly despised group of sinners.
Even today, taxes are not popular, but in Galilee, at Jesus' time, they were hated because they supported a foreign and pagan government, and because the tax collectors were corrupt.
The Romans contracted with locals to collect taxes.
The ones who signed agreements with the Romans were the chief tax collectors, like Zacchaeus, who administered the others, or who subcontracted, that is, to two others.
These others constituted the majority of tax collectors, and St. Matthew is probably in this latter group.
They collected taxes for the Romans, plus some profit for the chief tax collector, plus some profit for themselves.
It was easy to demand more to pad their own pockets.
So the tax collectors were hated both for collaborating with a foreign power and for exploiting their position for financial gain.
But being wealthy can make ostracism tolerable, and tax collectors could at least be friends with one another.
Capernaum was a crossroads, and there were taxes to collect on all the merchandise passing through, as well as a Roman garrison to keep order.
So Matthew had a safe way to make a living.
At that time, most Jews thought that sinners like him had no hope of redemption.
They had chosen a life of sin, and that was that. They would be damned.
This would be true without Jesus.
No man can pay the price of his own soul, not even if he's the richest man in town.
This wasn't what Matthew's parents hoped he would become.
His name means gift of the Lord.
It's a name that shows their gratitude for this child, and suggests that they were sincere believers.
They must have given their son a decent education, because in order to be a tax collector, he had to be in that minority of the population who was literate.
He might have even been a scribe in the sense of having studied the Jewish scriptures.
Some interpreters take this to be implied by a passage unique to the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus says, Therefore, every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
And St. Matthew certainly does that in his Gospel, putting together the newness of the deeds of Jesus, with citations of the old scriptures of the Jews, to show that Jesus fulfills all this.
The implication would be that Jesus then is one of these scribes, but most, at least most interpreters today, are not convinced that he's implying that.
In any case, Matthew's parents probably didn't expect him to grow up to be an exactor of taxes, driven by greed to prey on his fellow Jews and serve a pagan empire.
The other Gospels call him Matthew when they list the apostles, but they call the man sitting at the customs post Levi, his other name.
They do this out of the honor and respect they owe to the apostle.
But St. Matthew humbly reveals his sin in order to show the Lord's power to save.
Not only did the tax collector do his work to become Jesus' disciple, as the other evangelists reveal, but he even became an apostle.
Jesus had been using Capernaum as a base for months before this, preaching and working miracles.
So, Matthew surely knew who he was, Jesus' miracles at least were the talk of the town, and to some extent his preaching would have been as well, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
Yet Matthew continued with his ordinary life.
He kept sitting at the customs post.
Perhaps he took no notice.
Perhaps he would have liked to change his life, but didn't think it possible.
Suppose that he had heard that Jesus said, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
What would that mean to him?
That he had to leave his job, that he was damned, that was Jesus saying the same thing that everyone else was saying about him?
Then one day Jesus gave him a personal invitation, because as he explained, I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.
He said to him, follow me, and he got up and followed him.
It seems too simple.
There's no sermon here, no discussion, just an invitation.
But that's Jesus.
He says to a paralytic, rise, pick up your mat and go home, and he does.
He says to a dead girl, little girl, I say to you, arise, and she does.
He says to a man dead in his sins, follow me, and he gets up and follows him.
It's not just an invitation, it's a command of the creator, whose word made the heavens and the earth from nothing, whose word makes possible things that were impossible before.
And it's not just his words, but it's also the way that he looked at Matthew.
St. Jerome says, surely the very splendor and majesty of his hidden divinity, which was even shining forth in his human face, was capable from the first glance of drawing those who looked toward it.
Caravaggio captures the scene in a painting.
The tax collector is seated at a table with his co-workers around him.
They are in darkness, but a light comes from Christ's direction and illuminates him.
Christ is pointing at Matthew, who seems to be surprised.
Who?
Me?
St. Matthew did follow Jesus, and he immediately began his apostolate, presenting to his friends and acquaintances the ultimate dinner guest, Jesus of Nazareth.
He shows them there is a way out of their lives of sin.
Jesus changed his life, and he can change theirs as well.
After Pentecost, St. Matthew first preached the gospel among the Hebrews, the Fathers tell us.
Then, before going further abroad, he wrote down the sayings of the Lord in the language of their fathers, so that they could continue to learn in his absence.
Thus he became the first to write a gospel.
That education that his parents gave him finally went to good use.
However, that original gospel was not exactly the same as the gospel of Matthew we have now, because that is in Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic.
St. Jerome said that he saw copies of this original Hebrew gospel, which was still being used 300 years later by Judaism Christians.
St. Matthew then went on, after having written his gospel, to evangelize Gentiles.
There are conflicting accounts of where he went, unless we take the different people mentioning different places to mean that he went to all of them.
Eventually, he was martyred, though it's unfair exactly when and where.
According to one account, it was an area south of the Caspian Sea, which was then called Ethiopia, but it's not to be confused with the other Ethiopia in Africa, so this would be more or less the region of Persia.
These relics have been venerated since the year 1080 at Salerno, a city on the coast south of Naples.
Before that, until 954, they were at Paestum, an ancient Greek city a little further down the coast, but no one knows exactly when they got there.
They must have been there for many centuries, however, because that city had been abandoned for the better part of two centuries before, or mostly abandoned for the better part of two centuries before the relics were removed, and had been in a long decline before that.
So probably they would arrive there something like in the 6th century, or something of that sort.
St. Matthew's gospel became the standard one of the Church.
It was the one most commented on and most preached on, more than the Gospels of John and Luke, and far more than the Gospel of Mark.
This despite the fact that it was clearly written for Jews.
Mark and Matthew didn't take time to explain Jewish customs that Matthew doesn't feel the need to explain.
Matthew sets out to prove that Jesus is the prophesied son of David and the Messiah, beginning with his genealogy, that the kingdom has come, the kingdom of heaven as he calls it, whereas others call it the kingdom of God, because they don't have that Jewish reserve about using God's name.
This Apostle is the most important heritage that we have right now, and as Catholics, we have the advantage of being able to pray to him, and to ask his help in understanding it.
Praised to be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.