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Pastoral Letter

Get a life!
 
The American novelist Margaret Mitchell when penning Gone with the Wind  wrote ‘Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never a convenient time for any of them.’ Probably because they are all potentially painful experiences.
 
You would expect me to argue [as a former accountant] that the tax system is in principle a fair system but when it comes to writing that cheque or seeing that deduction marked tax on the payslip none of us likes parting with our hard earned money. For the whole, most of the tax collectors I came into contact with were ordinary people just doing their job, but the genus tax collector does not court popularity. Our patron saint, St Matthew, was one of those, a tax collector sitting in the customs house collecting money from all who passed by when Jesus called him. To become a tax collector in those days you bought the rights at auction to collect taxes in a particular place and kept all you collected. Unsurprisingly, therefore, tax collectors became very rich and very unpopular.
 
Jesus passed along the particular road that Matthew (or Levi as most of the gospels call him) held the collecting rights to, a number of times with his followers. Matthew was able to sum him up quickly: an honest man, who had no money at all but seemed far happier than those who had. Then much to his astonishment, one day he saw Jesus approaching his customs booth. Jesus stopped outside and spoke to Matthew, quietly but challengingly. He uttered just two words but these were two words that would change the tax collector’s life forever: ‘Follow me!’. St Luke’s Gospel tells us the response to this was that ‘he got up, left everything, and followed him’.
 
And this is exactly what Matthew did. He left everything. He left the customs house, never to return. It was the end of the cosy job with the secure income. The money that he had collected that day, left behind. The secret stash kept safe in his house, left behind. He left his house, his comfortable lifestyle, ample meals. He left his old friends behind. The challenge that Matthew had been given by Jesus was enough to make sure the ties with the old life were permanently severed, there was no going back to the old way of life. For there can be no compromise for the followers of Jesus: love God, or love money; nobody can love them both. That does not mean that to be a follower of Jesus that a Christian has to live the life of a penniless preacher like Matthew; but money can no longer be your priority. It is a means to an end and not the end in itself.

When we see someone whose days are the boring repetition of a dull routine, we sometimes encourage  them: ‘Oh, go out and get a life!’ And that is just what Matthew did, he left everything and he got a life. And what a life he got, one full of excitement because following Jesus to heaven knows where. He got a life of self-respect, knowing that he was being useful to others. His was now a life full of purpose, sharing the good news with all he met, first by speaking it and later by writing it down in his Gospel. Yes, he had left his money behind but now he had a life full of wealth. Worldly wealth which would run out one day was exchanged for heavenly treasure that would last for eternity. He got a life – an eternal life which is ‘the gift of God’. (for Matthew means that)
 
Jesus warned us that we must calculate the cost of discipleship. There are some things that a Christian has to be ready to give up. For when we do we shall receive much more in return.
 
Through our baptism we have received the challenge from Jesus to ‘follow me’. What can I do, what can you do, what can we do together, to hope to go and ‘get a life’, an eternal life which is the ‘gift of God’.
 
Happy St Matthewstide!
 
With love
 
Father Paul