Copenhagen – Of Rivers, Bikes, Beers and Museums, Amid the Placid Wall – A Summer of Discontent, The Lion in Winter – A rethink on living with purpose, Lessons in Societies’ Failure to Make Good Decisions. But none of those attitudes represents the mind of Christ. The figures on the right form a vertical rectangle while those on the left create a horizontal block. I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners.’, When he went out after this, he noticed a tax collector, Levi by name, sitting at the tax office, and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And leaving everything Levi got up and followed him. To see these paintings, the viewer had to make an effort to go directly to the Chapel in able to discern the specific details and subject matter of each painting. Matt D’Antuono Matt D’Antuono is a physics teacher in New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and eight children. But in the context of the first metaphor – the patch on the garment – we need to be sure that we read this correctly and not think that the new wineskin is a rejection of all that is old. St. Matthew Prayer O Glorious St. Matthew, in your Gospel you portray Jesus as the longed-for Messiah who fulfilled the Prophets of the Old Covenant and as the new Lawgiver who founded a Church of the New Covenant. New York: Schocken Books, 1969 • Gilbert, Creighton. As I move to follow Christ, some will come with me. And he finishes it by drawing on a metaphor that is very familiar to us: “No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. His misdemeanors ranged from pestering neighbors to throwing artichokes at a waiter. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995 • Hibbard, Howard. The combination of these two elements illustrates Christ’s two natures. Ironically, I think what Jesus is doing here is not calling people away from the old traditions towards the new so much as encouraging people to re-discover the true strength of the old traditions. I was impacted immediately by the painting and what I learned as I did some research about the painting’s contents. If you want to follow the story with me, it’s on page 9 in the New Testament section, which is the second half of the Bible, in the Bibles in your pew…, Verse 9: “As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax booth…” And then Jesus gives him a simple invitation: “Follow me”. He returned to the Catholic Church in 2008. However, it points in a different direction than Adam’s: from right to left, just as the hand of Michelangelo’s God the Father. Human-Divine Encounters Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, bridges this gap. Also in all three synoptic accounts Jesus is then invited to a banquet, with a crowd of tax collectors and others. It went without saying for the Pharisees that, if you eat and drink with sinners, then the sinfulness and uncleanness of those people will rub off on to the holy people. In Caravaggio’s work, Christ is about to give spiritual life to the spiritually empty Matthew. St. Matthew’s two companions to the right are looking directly at Jesus, while the other two are engrossed in the money, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the God-Man. And actually, I think this story only makes sense if Jesus was the host, because it seems that a central point of this story is that Jesus always welcomes sinners and outcasts and on every level, offers them hospitality. Dublin: The National Gallery of Ireland, 1993 • Freedberg, S. J. Circa 1600:A revolution in the style of Italian painting. The Calling is actually one of a set of three paintings. The right hand fascinates me because in the other paintings, he has moved his hand from the coin to the pen. 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