Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, September 21, 2026, the feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, a feast of the second class. The Gospel this morning is the one about him, and it does not open with a changed life. It opens with a man sitting in the custom house, at work, in the middle of the job his neighbours held against him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wherever you are, you are welcome here. If you came into this Monday in the middle of something you would rather not be in the middle of, the Gospel finds its own apostle exactly there, sitting in the custom house, and asks him for nothing first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No saint is commemorated alongside today’s, and nothing is displaced by it. The propers are the feast’s own from beginning to end. One of them is not new to us. The Introit is Psalm 36:30-31, the antiphon Os justi<\/em>, which has turned up in fifteen posts here since last October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was read most recently on the feast of St. Raymond Nonnatus<\/a> and first of all on the feast of St. Hilarion<\/a> last autumn. A sixteenth printing would be length, not reverence. The citation stands where the antiphon would, and everything else the day is given is printed whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps. 36:30-31; Ps. 36:1.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The antiphon of the just man’s wisdom, printed in full on St. Hilarion’s day<\/a> and most recently on St. Raymond Nonnatus<\/a>. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. The antiphon is repeated.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us pray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May we be helped, O Lord, by the prayers of the blessed Apostle and Evangelist Matthew: that what we ourselves cannot obtain, may be granted by his intercession. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The prayer does not ask to be made like Matthew, and it does not ask for his courage or his example. It asks for a hand from a man who was sitting in the custom house when the hand first came to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ezech 1:10-14<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n And as for the likeness of their faces: there was the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side of all the four: and the face of an ox, on the left side of all the four: and the face of an eagle over all the four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And their faces, and their wings were stretched upward: two wings of every one were joined, and two covered their bodies: And every one of them went straight forward: whither the impulse of the spirit was to go, thither they went: and they turned not when they went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And as for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like that of burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps. This was the vision running to and fro in the midst of the living creatures, a bright fire, and lightning going forth from the fire. And the living creatures ran and returned like flashes of lightning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This is the first time Ezechiel has been read in this archive. The four faces are the man, the lion, the ox and the eagle, and the Catholic Encyclopedia<\/a> says that Matthew is represented under the symbol of a winged man. So the vision of the four faces is read over the apostle whose own face is the human one in it. Whatever else that arrangement does, it does not propose him as anything other than an ordinary man sitting in the custom house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps. 111:1-2.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord: he shall delight exceedingly in his commandments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2123. His seed shall be mighty upon earth: the generation of the righteous shall be blessed. Alleluia, alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2123. The glorious choir of the Apostles praiseth Thee, O Lord. Alleluia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Alleluia verse is not scripture but a line of the Te Deum, which is why it carries no citation. Psalm 111 has been here twice, both times inside a Gradual, most recently in July<\/a>. Its second verse is new this morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matt 9:9-13<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time, Jesus saw a man sitting in the custom house, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he rose up and followed him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it came to pass as he was sitting at meat in the house, behold many publicans and sinners came, and sat down with Jesus and his disciples. And the Pharisees seeing it, said to his disciples: Why doth your master eat with publicans and sinners?<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Jesus hearing it, said: They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. For I am not come to call the just, but sinners.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Read the first sentence again and stop on the posture. Jesus saw a man sitting in the custom house, named Matthew.<\/em> Not walking, not praying. Sitting. In the chair, at the table, in the middle of a working morning, and the Gospel spends its first clause telling us he was sitting in the custom house before it tells us his name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Catholic Encyclopedia is plain about what that chair was. As tax-gatherer at Capharnaum, it says, he collected custom duties for Herod Antipas, and, although a Jew, was despised by the Pharisees, who hated all publicans. The place we are calling the custom house was a booth on a road, taking money from his own neighbours for a ruler they had not chosen, and the town knew exactly what the arrangement was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the address the call was sent to. Christ does not summon him out of it first and speak to him afterwards in some cleaner room. He comes to the booth. The man is sitting in the custom house when the sentence arrives, and the sentence arrives anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to hold that longer than is comfortable, because most of us have been taught the other sequence. Leave the thing. Sort yourself out. Come back when there is less to explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then we can discuss what God might want with you. The Gospel this morning runs the sequence in the opposite direction, and it does not apologise for doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing in the text says the booth was quiet. It is a working day. There is no suggestion that trade was slack, that he had been having doubts for months, that he was on the point of giving it up anyway and only needed a push. A man sitting in the custom house is a man doing the job, and the call lands on the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an interruption of an ordinary working day, on a man who was, as far as the text lets us see, going to be sitting in the custom house again the next morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the grammar, because the grammar is the argument. And he saith to him: Follow me. And he rose up and followed him.<\/em> Two words spoken, and what answers them is an action. One moment he is sitting in the custom house and the next he is on his feet, and the text puts no clause in the gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at what is missing. No interview. No undertaking about the money. No probationary stretch during which the man sitting in the custom house demonstrates that he means it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No sentence establishes whether he is sorry, or how sorry, or for how long he has been. The Gospel had room for every one of those and supplies none of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set that beside the order of operations most religious rooms actually run. First the change, then the welcome, and the welcome held back until the change has been documented to somebody’s satisfaction. That is not a scandalous procedure; it is how most institutions of any kind behave. It is simply not the one in front of us, where a man sitting in the custom house is called without a single term attached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Encyclopedia adds a detail here worth having. Levi was the original name, from Mark and from Luke, and the article takes the view that Mattija<\/em>, gift of Iaveh, was probably the name conferred on the tax-gatherer by Jesus Christ. If that is right, then the name on the calendar this morning, the name of the Gospel itself, is not the one he was using while he was sitting in the custom house. It is the one he was handed on the way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here is what the Church did with the rest of him. Of his later career, the Encyclopedia says, we have only inaccurate or legendary data. It will not say where he preached. It states outright that it is not known whether he was burned, stoned, or beheaded. There is a second-class feast on this calendar for a man whose death the tradition cannot describe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not the achievements, which are not recoverable, and not the martyrdom, which no one can describe. What came through the centuries intact is a man sitting in the custom house, and two words, and a chair pushed back from a table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The getting up is the part the Church kept. Everything that might have made him impressive has fallen off the record, and what is left on the feast day of an apostle is the moment before he was anything. Whatever else he was, the liturgy this morning remembers him sitting in the custom house, and remembers that he stood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second half of the Gospel is an objection, and it is not addressed to Christ. And the Pharisees seeing it, said to his disciples: Why doth your master eat with publicans and sinners?<\/em> The question goes round Him to the people standing nearest, which is where this kind of question is usually put. No one asks the man who had been sitting in the custom house anything at all; he is discussed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His answer is what I want to spend the rest of the morning on, because it is not an answer. Go then and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice.<\/em> That is homework. He does not rebut them, and does not produce some new principle. He sets a reading, in the same economy of words he used on the man sitting in the custom house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the reading he sets is one they already have. The sentence is Osee’s, in the sixth chapter<\/a>, and in the Douay it runs: For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice: and the knowledge of God more than holocausts.<\/em> These are men who could have finished the verse for Him. They were not short of the text. They were holding it, quoted correctly, and using it to arrive at the opposite of what it says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See which half He leaves off, too. He quotes the mercy and stops, and the clause He does not say aloud is the one about the knowledge of God counting for more than the offerings. The instruction only works if they open the book themselves, which is the same courtesy, in a colder key, that He paid the man sitting in the custom house by saying two words and leaving him to stand up on his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having the verse is not the same as having understood it. A man can carry a sentence of scripture accurately for forty years, produce it at precisely the right moment, and be told by its author to go away and learn what it means. That is said over a table, and it is harder to hear than anything said to the man sitting in the custom house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put the fruit test on that, the way this ministry tests everything: by their fruits you shall know them<\/a>. Ask what the have-the-verse habit has actually grown inside Christian rooms, since our own record is the one we are entitled to examine. It grew rooms where a short passage, correctly cited, closed a question that had never been opened. It grew people certain that quotation is the same as study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It grew a Church very practised at producing chapter and verse and much less practised at being sent back to it. And it grew rooms in which the person sitting in the custom house was the only one in the building anybody thought needed correcting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will name who meets that habit in the sharpest form, because the text calls for it. Trans people have a small fixed list of verses produced at them, accurately, as a closed file: here is the passage, the matter is settled, there is nothing further to read. Set that beside the Gospel. The men in this scene are quoting the law correctly, about a man whose trade genuinely is what they say it is, and the reply they get is that they have not finished reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This ministry has named that group twice this month and neither time on this ground. Two weeks ago<\/a> the question was whether an undemonstrative faith counts as faith at all. Nine days ago<\/a> it was what the liturgy does with a name once it has one. This morning it is narrower than either: whether holding the verse is the same as knowing what it says, with the sinner sitting in the custom house standing as the test case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a door in this Gospel that has to be shut before we go further, and it is opened by the line most people remember. They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill.<\/em> It is said in the same breath as the defence of the man sitting in the custom house, and it has been carried a long way from that breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That sentence has been used to make sickness the standing picture of sin, and from there it is a short step to treating a disabled or chronically ill body as an exhibit. Read it in place and it will not carry that. It answers a question about company<\/em>, about who Christ will sit down and eat with, and the comparison is about where a doctor goes rather than what is wrong with anyone’s body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second door is the one the last line opens. For I am not come to call the just, but sinners.<\/em> That can be heard as saying you are wanted for your worst feature, that the interest in you is really an interest in the failure. It is not what the sentence does. It settles where He goes, not what He thinks of you once He is there, and the man sitting in the custom house was not called because the booth was interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIntroit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
He was sitting in the custom house<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Two sentences with no condition between them<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Go then and learn what this meaneth<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The physician line is not a diagnosis<\/h3>\n\n\n\n