St Matthew’s Manifestations: A Sermon for St. Matthew 9/21/2025
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
I regaled you last time I preached with a story from my days of relative poverty as an adjunct professor. Today I have another story. As I am not by nature a morning person, to teach my 8am classes I would usually have music playing from my phone to get myself ready for the day. There was this little shelf by the shower that was a perfect place to set my phone, where its acoustics would fill the room as I got ready. One day, I accidentally knocked the phone off of the shelf, and even though it was in a case, the screen was totally smashed. Of course my heart sunk. My stepdad and I had plans to get lunch, and he said he would bring me to Verizon so I could get a replacement. When I saw the cost on the screen my heart sunk again. But without saying anything, my stepdad reached in front of me with his card, and blink, that number that was making my heart race disappeared. Covered.
Famously, it is known that Matthew was a tax collector, and as such he would know something of the financial distress I mentioned. He would have seen, and perhaps had even had to enforce, the penalties of an unrepayable debt. So he would bring a tax collector’s imagination to the comforting words he heard from Christ in today’s Gospel: “But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” St. Matthew would see in Christ’s ministry a manifestation of grace here that could be seen as a higher and spiritual manifestation of the aid my stepfather gave me. Beyond how my stepfather paid a price I simply could not have afforded without distress, Jesus Christ steps in between us and our sin and, blink, the number of our transgressions which make our heart race disappear in the covering provided by Christ’s blood. This was a great manifestation of truth for St. Matthew, I am sure. Of course, this does not mean that St. Matthew believed we should not preach against sin – he manifested his commitment to do so when, some records seem to suggest, he preached against a king’s desire to marry a Christian woman against her will, and so St. Matthew was executed as a martyr for standing against the sin of lust.
Another manifestation of St. Matthew is his immediate response of obedience to his Lord and Savior. He doesn’t dawdle but responds decisively to what Christ calls him to do: “AND as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.” St. Matthew did not insist upon himself or think, well, I am a tax collector, not a very popular role then as today, and yet his focus was not on himself but on Christ, just as Paul teaches in today’s epistle: “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Matthew was of the same profession as the publican whom Christ compares with the Pharisee in the parable Deacon Kenyon preached on so beautifully last week, and like that man Matthew did not dwell on the debt of his transgressions but on the sufficiency of Christ to cover them. You might imagine if England invaded today and took over the IRS, and an American IRS agent you knew started auditing you to help fill the coffers of the British government. That is sort of how the Jews felt about tax collectors, as working for King Herod and for Rome. Matthew’s ministry was a manifestation of grace and a lived example of an individual who might be judged for his mistakes but who was nonetheless affirmed as one of the penitent faithful.
A final point about St. Matthew’s Manifestations is that His Gospel teaches us not only who Jesus was, but also how to read Scripture in a godly way. He was a model of Paul’s teaching for how to properly share the Gospel, when he wrote in today’s epsitle, “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Not only did Matthew show us how to do this, but how to avoid what Paul warns us about in the same Epistle, “THEREFORE seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” Putting his gift of attention to detail as a tax collector to work, St. Matthew modeled how to read Scripture, how to interpret it in light of other Scripture, as he directly cites the Old Testament about 60 different times and included probably many more allusions than that, to demonstrate that Christ was indeed the promised Messiah of the Old Testament – here is a prophecy, here is how Christ fulfilled it. This shows us that our response to Scripture should not only be to believe the content of what it says, but to absorb how it was written as a model for how we should govern our minds when we read Scripture.
There are supernatural forces at work attempting to stop us from sharing the true Gospel, not merely the rebellious heart of man. Paul warns us, “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” Elliott’s Commentary explains, “The word [god] sounds somewhat startling as a description of the devil, but it has parallels in “the prince of this world” (John 14:30), “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2). The world which “lieth in wickedness,” perhaps in the evil one (1 John 5:19), worships the spirit of hate and falsehood and selfishness, and in so doing it practically deifies the devil. And the work of that god of this world is directly in antagonism to that of God. He seeks to lead men back from light to darkness.” The Pulpit Commentary likewise agrees, writing that Paul is referencing “the present dispensation of things as it exists among those who refuse to enter that kingdom in which the power of Satan is brought to nought.” How do we apply Matthew’s manifestations, to banish these clouds of confusion that the glorious Gospel of Christ can shine to the lost? By recognizing that Christ is the author and finisher of our faith who has canceled our debt, by following Jesus without dragging our feet and without excuses about guilt for our past mistakes or judging others for having a past just like we do, and by being transformed by the renewal of our minds by steeping it in the Word of God, by asking the Holy Spirit to shine into our hearts and banish the darkness there, so that we can shine into the world with “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Amen.