Eventide & Altar

Matthew was not a young man discovering his purpose for the first time. He had a career, a routine, a way of making money that worked well enough to keep doing it. Two words interrupted all of that in a single afternoon - follow me - and he got up from a life he had already built and walked away from it without negotiating terms. Scripture does not tell us his age, but nothing about the story suggests he was a boy. He was a man who had settled into something, and he unsettled himself completely, in an instant, for someone he had likely only heard about.

That matters regardless of how settled your own life has become. It is tempting, at this stage, to treat major reversals as belonging to the young - the years for changing course have their season, and yours has passed. Matthew's story does not support that. His call did not come with a warning that he still had time to weigh his options. It came while he was sitting at his desk doing exactly what he had done every other day, and it asked for everything at once.

The line Jesus quotes to defend himself is the one to carry past today: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Go and learn what that means, he tells the Pharisees, which is itself an admission that the meaning takes real effort to understand. A long life gives you ample opportunity to confuse the two - to believe that what God wants most is your discipline, your sacrifice, your years of faithful service, rather than mercy freely given and freely received. Both matter. But if you have spent decades measuring your worth by what you have sacrificed, tonight's feast asks you to consider whether mercy was the actual point all along, and the sacrifice only ever the means.

The Joyful Mysteries tonight, since it is Monday. Offer the third mystery, the Nativity, for anyone whose life took an unexpected turn late and never regretted it.

• For the grace to be interrupted, even now, by a call we did not see coming, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who believe their years for major change have passed, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have died, that mercy rather than merit would be the measure God applies to them, we pray to the Lord.

Name one place in your own long life where you have quietly confused sacrifice with mercy - where you believed what was owed to God was your discipline rather than your willingness to receive what he freely gives. Sit with the difference tonight.