Lectio Divina — Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist
Day 21 of the Season of Creation
doctor
Lectio — What is God saying to me?
> “Those who are well do not need a doctor, but the sick do.”
— Matthew 9:12
On the feast of Saint Matthew, I encounter Jesus calling a man whom respectable people would rather avoid.
Matthew is sitting at the customs post. Jesus does not wait for him to become respectable, cleaned up, or worthy. He simply says:
“Follow me.”
Then Jesus does something almost as startling: he sits at table with tax collectors and sinners.
The Pharisees see contamination. Jesus sees patients.
They see people from whom a holy man should keep his distance. Jesus describes himself as a doctor who goes precisely where sickness is found.
Saint Paul tells me that Christ gives different gifts “to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry.” The Psalm declares that their message “goes out through all the earth.” Matthew himself becomes proof of this transformation: the tax collector sitting at his post becomes an Apostle whose Gospel carries Christ’s message across the earth.
Perhaps before I can proclaim that message, however, I must allow the doctor to examine me.
What within me needs healing?
And what have I labeled disgusting, dirty, useless, or diseased simply because I have never looked closely enough to understand it?
—
Meditatio — What is God saying in my life?
I finally get around to cleaning one of the water troughs here at The Glenn.
At the bottom is silt—and wriggling through it are bloodworms.
My immediate reaction is disgust.
Parasites!
Something is wrong with my water.
Get rid of them.
Yet when I look more carefully, the situation is more interesting. What I had instinctively regarded as nothing more than filth is part of an ecological process. These small organisms can consume organic material and themselves become food within aquatic food webs. What looks revolting to me can participate in the recycling of nutrients.
They are rather like little doctors working down in the muck.
And suddenly my dirty water trough begins preaching today’s Gospel.
“Those who are well do not need a doctor, but the sick do.”
A doctor cannot practice medicine while refusing to encounter blood, infection, bodily fluids, wounds and disease. The physician goes toward the very things from which I instinctively recoil because healing happens there.
Jesus does the same.
He does not practice antiseptic Christianity.
He walks into the muck of human life. He eats with sinners. He touches lepers. He receives the rejected. He calls Matthew directly from the customs post.
And then I hear the Season of Creation asking me to examine another kind of disgust.
How often do I look at creation and divide it immediately into what I consider beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, desirable and undesirable?
Butterfly: beautiful.
Bloodworm: disgusting.
Clear water: good.
Silt: filthy.
But creation was not designed according to my aesthetic preferences.
Even the mud has a ministry.
Living water is not necessarily sterile water. A healthy ecosystem teems with relationships I may never notice and organisms I may never admire. That does not mean I should neglect sanitation or allow a livestock trough to become unhealthy. Stewardship still requires me to clean it and provide safe water for the animals entrusted to me. But perhaps I can clean it without imagining that everything I find unpleasant is therefore without purpose.
Saint Matthew reminds me of something similar about people.
The man others dismissed as a sinner became an Apostle.
The creature I dismiss as disgusting may still occupy a place within creation.
And the part of myself I would rather hide may be precisely where Christ the doctor wants to begin his work.
—
Oratio — What do I say to God?
Jesus, Divine Doctor,
You did not recoil from Matthew.
You did not avoid sinners.
You came near because we needed healing.
Come near to me.
Examine those places in my heart
that I would rather keep hidden beneath the surface.
Heal my pride when I presume that
what disgusts me must be worthless.
Heal my blindness when I see creation
only according to its usefulness to me.
Give me wisdom to care for the living water
entrusted to me at The Glenn—
keeping it clean for the creatures who depend upon it
while remaining humble before the astonishing web of life
You have created within water, soil and mud.
Through the intercession of Saint Matthew,
turn whatever customs post I am sitting behind
into a place from which I can rise and follow You.
Equip me for the work of ministry,
so that through my words and actions
Your message may go out through all the earth.
Amen.
—
Contemplatio — What must not be lost?
Perhaps the bloodworms at the bottom of my trough offer an unexpectedly good image for paragraph 113 of Magnifica humanitas.
An ecosystem depends upon balance.
If I absolutize cleanliness, I might imagine that healthy creation ought to resemble a laboratory: everything controlled, categorized and sanitized. If I absolutize production, the trough becomes merely infrastructure for producing livestock. If I absolutize technology, perhaps eventually sensors and algorithms will tell me precisely when to clean it, how much water is being consumed and what organisms are present.
Those things may be useful.
But none of them alone can tell me what creation means.
Magnifica humanitas warns that the same distortion occurs when intelligence becomes the measure of everything. Intelligence is a gift, but when severed from affection, will, commitment and relationship, the gift becomes disordered.
That strikes remarkably close to today’s Gospel.
The Pharisees are not unintelligent. Their reasoning has a certain logic: if sin contaminates, stay away from sinners.
Jesus introduces something their calculation has forgotten:
mercy.
The doctor does not merely identify sickness.
The doctor desires the health of the sick.
That distinction matters profoundly in an age of artificial intelligence. A system may recognize patterns more quickly than I can. It may analyze water quality, predict heat stress, identify disease or help me manage The Glenn more efficiently. But recognizing a pattern is not the same as loving the creature represented by the data.
AI does not stand beside a water trough and experience wonder.
It does not recoil from the bloodworm and then reconsider its prejudice.
It does not look at Matthew and decide to eat dinner with him.
And it cannot hear Christ say “Follow me” and get up from the customs post.
I can.
That is something I must not lose.
The Season of Creation calls me not simply toward greater ecological knowledge but deeper ecological relationship. Living water is not merely H₂O to be measured and managed. It participates in a world of creatures, relationships, dependence and gift.
Perhaps that is today’s lesson from the bottom of a dirty trough:
I should certainly clean the water.
But before I wash away the mud, I might look into it long enough to discover that even there, life is at work.
Saint Matthew found the Divine Doctor sitting among sinners.
Today at The Glenn, I find myself looking for him among the bloodworms.
Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and evangelist on Day 21 of the Season of Creation
