Naming Rights

Phrases that spoke to me today:
Follow me
He got up and followed him

Applying the Word to My Life:
Matthew gets one of the most famous call stories in the Gospels, and then his own story becomes surprisingly hard to follow.

We know he was one of the Twelve. We know the Church has handed one of the four Gospels down under his name for nearly two thousand years. Ancient Christian tradition connects him with collecting and handing on the words of Jesus, although exactly how his own preaching relates to the final Greek Gospel we have today is harder to reconstruct.

His later life is even less clear. Different traditions send him preaching in different directions. One remembers him founding a church in a city called Mirmena and leaving a man named Platon there as bishop.

I had never heard of Mirmena, and I had never heard of Platon either.

Apparently Matthew didn't need me to.

He went where he believed he was supposed to go, preached what he had been given, built something, handed it to somebody else, and kept moving. Even the Gospel attached to his name works that way. Matthew himself barely occupies any space in it. The tax collector who once spent his days keeping track of what everyone owed eventually became associated with a book almost entirely concerned with telling people what God had given them.

There's something in most of us that wants good work to come with a receipt. We want to know it mattered. We want somebody to notice. If we build something useful, teach somebody something important, help someone through a hard season, or leave something better than we found it, there's a part of us that would prefer our name stay attached.

We like naming rights.

That's not always vanity. Sometimes it's just the very human desire to know our lives counted for something. But very quietly, "I want this to matter" can become "I want people to know that I mattered."

Matthew gives us another picture.

He started in a profession where everything was counted, recorded, and assigned to somebody. Then Jesus called him into a life where much of what he did disappeared into the fog of history. A church in a city most of us can't locate. A bishop almost nobody remembers. Preaching we don't have transcripts of. A Gospel bearing his name that has spent centuries pointing past Matthew toward Christ.

And somehow that was enough.

Matthew's life was never supposed to be the point. He didn't make it the point either.

Maybe that's part of what holiness asks of us too. Do the work God puts in front of us. Love the people at our table. Hand on what we have received. Build something another person may eventually get credit for. Let somebody else carry it farther than we ever could.

We don't have to keep the naming rights for our lives to matter.

We just have to be faithful enough that what God gives us keeps moving after we step out of the frame.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll help someone around me without seeking credit for it.

ABOUT ST. MATTHEW

• Name: St. Matthew (called Levi in Mark's and Luke's Gospels)
• Lived: 1st century, Galilee — a tax collector at Capernaum before his call
• Feast Day: September 21
• Patron of: accountants, bankers, bookkeepers, tax collectors
• Title: Apostle and Evangelist
• Read more: Franciscan Media, Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent)