Today, we celebrate the feast day of an important early Church Father and the Bishop of Poitiers in France in the 4th century. He was named as a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius IX in 1851. A convert to Christianity as an adult, he was very gentle and courteous man. Hilary’s writings on the Trinity and on Christ’s divinity were important in the development of these doctrines in the Early Church and in combating the Arian heresy that denied Christ’s divinity. At one point, Hilary was sent into exile for refusing to back down from his beliefs.
As St Hilary was called to be a disciple of Christ as an adult, we hear of the call of another disciple of Christ in the Gospel today, the call of Levi, called Matthew in other Gospels. Levi was a tax collector on behalf of the Romans, which would have made him an outcast in the eyes of the Jewish people. When the Lord calls anyone of us to a life of discipleship, he asks us to respond with thankfulness and gratitude. All of us have inadequacies and weaknesses, but God calls us to trust in him, to serve him by the power of God’s grace.
Jesus befriended the outsiders and those on the margins. Yet, often in their humility, these outsiders recognized their weaknesses and their sinfulness, in contrast to the pride and arrogance of the scribes and the Pharisees. In this same spirit, Jesus calls us of us to reach out to those who are oppressed and on the outside, to invite them to a life of discipleship, to call them to repentance and renewal. May we invite others to gather with us around the Lord’s table.
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