The Feast of St. Matthew

The Very Rev’d Joy Rogers

Sept 21 2025

We observe this major Feast of the Church today, in part because the

Church’s calendar lets us preempt the lessons for the 15^(th) Sunday

after Pentecost with this commemoration of Matthew, apostle and

evangelist (both of them). The apostle puts in a cameo appearance in the

gospel that bears his name. One of those despised Jewish tax collectors

who worked for Rome and enriched himself at the expense of ordinary

folk. When Jesus said ‘follow me,” he did, to the dismay of proper folk.

The fact that Matthew is the patron saint of Bankers might be relevant

to whoever made the choice to celebrate this feast today. That he is

also the patron saint of taxi drivers is likely not.

I am happy to seek Good News from both aspects of Matthew. If you ask

folk what their favorite Gospel is – well the answer might depend on who

you ask. When you tell your fifth grade Sunday School class to read

their favorite gospel in its entirety by next Sunday, they will all read

Mark. Short has its charms.

Luke gives us everyone’s favorite Christmas story – angels and shepherds

and the baby in the manger. Our favorite parables – like the prodigal

son and the good Samaritan, and those amazing canticles. Church

musicians have been setting them to music for two millennia. You can’t

have too many settings of Magnicat. Then he provides an Ascension story

and the Pentecost event that move Jesus along to new possibilities.

I think John is the gospel for preachers and poets and mystics.And then there is Matthew – he has a Christmas story of his own, but

those enigmatic wise men are blabber mouths and babies die. Matthew

confronts us with the hardest parables, ones with a lot of weeping and

gnashing of teeth and mostly located within the tensions of Holy Week.

Mattew’s Jesus seems teachy and preachy, and full of rules and

judgments. Oddly this most Jewish of Christian writings have given rise

to 2000 years of Christian antisemitism.

But there is more to say. Matthew is the first Gospel found in the New

Testament – not because it was written first, but in the Church’s

earliest centuries, it was the most widely disseminated, most often read

and most often cited by other Christian writers. They were still

figuring out what it meant to be Christian, and this Gospel gave them

lots of foundational truths. And if Matthew’s Jesus is prone to lengthy

sermonizing, well some of it is quite beautiful and precious even now.

The Beatitudes – blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the

peacemakers, etc. we hear of a world turned upside down in terms of whom

God honors.

Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is the one we still pray and

love.

Matthew’s infancy narrative is from Joseph’s point of view, the troubled

fiancé of a woman pregnant with a child he knows is not his. A dreamer,

asked first to receive this child as his own, and become his link to the

heritage of ancient Israel, then to escape to Egypt with mother and

child when Herod threatens murder. Matthew offers a Joseph who is an

actor in the Jesus story. Like Luke’s Mary, here Joseph is privy to the

angelic message:

Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.

And then there is Matthew’s Resurrection Extravaganza – arguably the

most dramatic of all the Gospel accounts.

Matthew 28:2 And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of

the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat

on it.

Matthew’s tale of Jesus’ death and resurrection is full of earthquakes.

The first one came at a Cross. And tombs in the city opened and bodies

of dead saints were raised. An amusing scene to ponder.

Now bring on a know-it-all angel, showing off for the silent women,

showing up the story's bad guys. Seal the tomb? Hah! Look Ma, no hands!

Just try to keep a good man down. Just try to keep a good man dead.

Look, folks, no body either!

In the aftermath of anguish, Matthew overwhelms us with special effects

and potentially silly results. No matter how awesome the earthquake, how

angelic the messenger, how absent the body, Matthew’s oh so serious

gospel moves to its finale with our gleeful imaginations opening to

grace and to God.

In our tradition, a new Christian year begins on the first Sunday in

Advent. This Advent and beyond, most of our Sunday Gospels will come

from Matthew. I hope that our celebration of Matthew today might open

our imaginations to how Matthew’s Jesus has his own unique qualities,

and how Matthew’s gospel was written to address the circumstance of

particular Christians and their church. And perhaps, it will help us see

some of our concerns in theirs.

This evangelist and his community were Jewish-Christians. His people

were not rejecting Judaism; in the aftermath of the destruction of the

Temple in the 70’s CE, they believed that the continuing existence of

the religion of ancient Israel would be found in faithful Jews who came

to embrace Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah.

Not surprisingly, in the chaos of the first Christian century, there

were other opinions. The Judaism of the Temple and its priesthood and

sacrifices, now gone, was also finding new expression in what we know as

rabbinic Judaism – a Judaism of study and learning, of the Law and the

Prophets. Rabbis were not like priests – they were teachers and

preachers.

It is tempting for Christians to believe that we have replaced an older

religion with our new and better version. It is more accurate to think

of us as sister expressions that evolved in different directions out of

a common heritage. We might also note that as that evolution continued

over the early Christian decades, even centuries, there would be growing

tensions between the two communities.

At some point, Jewish Christians began to find themselves unwelcome in

some synagogues because of their reverence for Jesus. Then the Jewish

Christian synagogues began to experience various modes of discrimination

by the others.

Matthew’s apparent anger at Jewish leadership like the Pharisees whom he

portrays as Jesus’ adversaries makes sense in the context of his church.

Relationships between communities, relationships within communities and

families and friends, were becoming increasingly hostile and in the end

coming apart. Matthew was writing for folk who were feeling threatened

and diminished because of their faith in a Jewish Messiah.

Jesus is the new Moses, like Moses a lawgiver, and he does a lot of

preaching on a mountain. The gospel cites more Hebrew scripture than any

other in the NT. Matthew traces Jesus genealogy from Abraham, the

patriarch, the archetypal Jew. Unusually, he includes four women, in

Jesus’ lineage – all praiseworthy in the tradition, yet some of Jesus’

grandmothers are somewhat suspect in their ethnicity and their

relationships.

For most of Matthew, Jesus restricts his mission to the ‘lost sheep of

the House of Israel, even as he is deeply hostile to those who opposed

Jesus. Some of Matthew’s language became the scriptural basis for

Christian violence against Jews. It hasn’t disappeared. We must

understand the context of his anger and affirm an underlying truth. To

separate Christianity from its Jewish roots invariably leads not only to

a diminishment of Judaism, but to a serious distortion of Christianity.

Matthew’s gospel makes me grapple with my own anger and resentment. I

once believed that most American citizens and American Christians shared

my values about both faith and citizenship. It is so hard to come to

terms with the fact that so many believe that I am neither a real

Christian or a real American.

Like Matthew’s communities, Episcopalians like us are coming to terms

with having our public voice silenced and with deep issues around

survival and sustainability. What does it mean to respond faithfully to

those who threaten our Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech?

Many scholars contend that Matthew’s gospel was intended both as an

elaboration and even a corrective on Mark.

Mark’s gospel ends with an angel promising the women at the empty tomb

that Jesus would appear to his disciples in Galilee. Matthew gives us

the fulfillment of the promise.

It is an amazing finale: Like Moses on Sinai, the Risen Christ speaks on

the mountain.

Jesus is Lord; the restricted mission to the Lost Sheep of the House of

Israel is now a universal mission; and the promise of Emmanuel, God is

with us, is reaffirmed by Jesus himself.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the

name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ²⁰ and teaching

them to obey everything that I have commanded you.

9am:

So once again, Christians obey their Lord.

Sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.

We endow young Sarah with a heritage of two testaments and the ongoing

story of a Church, in all their messiness and all their beauty.

We promise to be for her a community of love and forgiveness and faith

and hope.

We offer her a future filled with God and us, and a mission to welcome a

world into God’s realm.

Mathew and his Lord would approve.

If this overview of Matthew’s seems a bit preachy and teachy, well so

does this gospel. Maybe it isn’t our personal favorite, but for 2000

Christian years, it has formed the faithful with its emphasis on love

and forgiveness as the foundation of Christian life even in the face of

persecution, and internal conflict.

Matthew’s world is very different from our own.

Matthew’s Jesus opens still our imaginations to the grace filled

possibilities of the Kingdom of heaven.

And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”