7 March 1992
Lima, Peru

My dear Sisters,

This evening's Gospel, describing the call of Levi or Matthew, suggests a question to us, and it is this: Would St. Matthew have invited you and me as his guests to that dinner which he gave to a few of his friends to celebrate his new vocation? Before answering the question, let me raise another: Would you like to be invited to St. Matthew's dinner? Our instinctive reaction is to say yes, for there is an instinct in all of us which makes us wish to be known and appreciated by important people. Matthew is certainly a very important man. He has been so ever since he published that brief work of his on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It immediately became a best-seller and will remain so until the end of time. So, as I said, our instinctive reaction is to be pleased that Matthew, an important person, invited us to his party, and we are happy to accept his invitation.

Our instincts do not always guide us honestly, and a little reflection might lead us to doubt the honesty of our reactions to Matthew's invitation. I am quite certain that I would not have accepted Matthew's invitation, if Jesus Christ had not first met him and had spoken two words which utterly changed him. "Follow me," Jesus said to him, and St. Matthew's perspective on life was totally changed.

The tax collectors in Jesus' time were notorious for their greedy appetites for money and for their injustice. Zacchaeus' confession to Our Lord tells us a little about the sins and temptations of tax collectors at that time.

So, for the reason that I would not like to be associated with unjust and unpopular people, and because of consideration of personal honesty, on second thought I would probably decline Matthew's invitation. But in doing so, I find that I am now coming into conflict with Jesus Christ, Who chose Matthew to be a close friend, even with his hardened heart and grasping fingers. Jesus chose Matthew as he was, and for what he would become. Very often I accept people for what they can become, while refusing to accept them for what they are. It is there that I come into conflict with Jesus Christ. Jesus did not overturn Matthew's money table, but He did overturn his table of values. As a result, Matthew, the tax collector, became the friend and apostle of Jesus.

Now, if I am to become a closer friend and a more zealous apostle of Jesus Christ, I must continually invite Jesus Christ to overturn my table of values. The greatest difficulty in doing so is my conviction that my table of values does not need to be overturned. It is only when someone provokes me by some word that hurts my sensibilities and I react strongly, that I will come, after some later reflection, to realize that my values are not those of Jesus Christ and that I have put my own values at the top of the list, and His at the bottom.

At times I can be frightened by my own classification of those poor whom I will help. I want the poor whom I select for helping to be respectable and to come up to my standards for them. It is possible that my standards do not correspond with those of Jesus Christ. To express the idea in another way, how much at home would I feel with those other guests at Matthew's dinner, guests who had not been invited by Jesus Christ, but with whom He willingly and lovingly sat down to eat?

To come back to that first question I raised: Would St. Matthew have invited you and me to his dinner? To judge from the list of his other guests, I hardly think so. St. Matthew might have judged us too good to be asked. That is a little frightening in the light of Our Lord's statement in today's Gospel: "I have come, not to call the righteous, but sinners." (Mt 9:13). I remember reading a scriptural commentator's observation on that sentence. He said that the point of Our Lord's phrase was this: "The only people I can call are sinners, people who genuinely recognize themselves as such. If you think yourself virtuous, then I have not come for you. Or rather, you have put yourself by your smugness outside the circle of those who can benefit from my coming." That interpretation should certainly urge us to pray for what the psalmist calls a humble and contrite heart.

Today's Gospel is very much a Vincentian Gospel, for it underlines the importance of conversion, of humility, of gentleness and of love for the poor, however difficult at times they may be.