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Good morning.

St Matthew is the patron saint of bankers. I don’t know how he got the job – the matter seems lost in the mists of time – but if he applied for it, he is surely regretting it now. Yesterday five banks were fined 2 billion pounds by UK and US regulators for attempting to manipulate the foreign exchange rate. And this impropriety comes on top of the scandal relating to the manipulation of Libor, and another last year to do with the mis-selling of protection against credit-card fraud. That left the UK banks facing bills of £1.3bn in compensation. Another month, another banking scandal.

However Matthew was appointed, I can’t help thinking that that he probably wasn’t the best choice. Matthew appears in the Gospel that bears his name as a publican – that is, as a tax gatherer – and he is perhaps most memorably depicted in one of Caravaggio’s very greatest paintings being called by a magisterial Christ to leave his counting table and follow him. It is a great and powerful story and a great and powerful picture – but the fact is that we need bankers not to give up their work, but to do it ethically.

Samuel Johnson of dictionary fame once remarked that men are rarely as innocently employed as when making money. Put another way, we might say that trade between nations, corporations and individuals is a vital contribution to fostering and building international, national and local relations – and that those who are making deals with one another are better occupied than in making war on each other. So rather than abolishing the banking system, we should want to ensure that we have a reliable and trustworthy one – a system which will encourage cooperative trading and dealing and relations across the globe, within and between communities.

Had I been on the committee appointing a patron saint of bankers, I would have offered the job to a less prominent candidate, Zacchaeus – another tax collector mentioned in another gospel. For when Jesus calls him down from the tree which Zacchaeus has climbed to get a better view of the celebrity visitor, there is no mention of his giving up his job. Instead, he promises to approach it in a new way. ‘Behold’ he says, ‘I give half my goods to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone, I will pay them back four fold.’ Bankers may not be forming a queue to give half their goods to the poor any time soon, but surely they could give up defrauding their customers tomorrow. Lurching from one scandal to another seems to have gone on a bit too long – it may take some work, but banks ought to have the will and the wit to create a culture within banking which includes an expectation of simple honest dealing.

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