St. Matthias, Apostle (Remembrance Day February 24)

"You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatever you ask of the Father in My name, He may give it to you." John 15:16

The doctrine of predestination is often misunderstood, often abused, often discarded as incompatible with the notion of human free will. Often it is wrongly reduced to the almighty sovereignty of God or to the irresistible decrees of God forcing itself upon our world. But at its heart I believe it is more about how God can use earthen vessels to contain the treasure of God’s most excellent power (II Corinthians 4:7). It is the word that clearly portrays how God looks on a world at enmity towards Him and from the rebels calls forth those that are, in the words of Jesus, "chosen vessels unto Me, to bear my name..." (Acts 1:15) And that divine calling, that choosing by the Lord Jesus Christ, is at the heart of salvation. We sometimes define the moment of salvation as that point in time when we chose to acknowledge Jesus as both Savior and Lord. But what we miss in that definition is the gracious invitation that reflects the love and choosing of God while we were yet sinners. Our decision finds its fullness only through the calling of Christ. He says, "Follow Me", and then and only then can our heart reply "I will." Again, to return to the word "predestinate", it comes from a word that means to mark out beforehand. When used by God it is as if He declares "This one is Mine, and it is My purpose to accomplish thus and such through him/her." Although all of the Apostles were specifically called or chosen (see Mark 3:13-15) nowhere is that divine choice made so clear as in the calling of the apostle Matthias, chosen to take up the office of the betrayer Judas (Acts 1:20).

The account of the calling of Matthias is recorded for us by Luke in Acts 1:12-26. The setting is an upper room in Jerusalem during the ten day period that falls between the ascension of the Lord Jesus to heaven and the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. The apostles and brethren numbering about 120 are gathered together waiting at the command of Jesus Christ for the promise of the Father. They have just spent forty days with their resurrected Lord hearing those things that pertain to the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3) and are now giving themselves over to prayer as they wait for the Holy Spirit. It must have occurred to them in prayer that everything that had happened in the recent past was solely at the express purpose and command of the Father. God ordains not just the end, but also the means to the end. And in that meditation they saw that those chosen by Jesus Christ to specifically be His witnesses in "Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth"(Acts 1:8b) now numbered eleven, not twelve as originally ordained. And so they set about filling out that number. But why? Why could they have not just as well accomplished the work of the kingdom with eleven as twelve?

We can endlessly speculate about that question or just accept that it was the number ordained by the Father and for that reason was the first order of business taken up by the followers of Jesus. Christ had, after all, spoken of twelve, not eleven thrones in Matthew 19:28-30, and Revelation 21:12-14 reveals to us that the New Jerusalem has twelve, not eleven, foundations, each one bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, considering this question in the early 5th century A.D. said that twelve was a divine number. "The number remained a sacred number, a number containing twelve; because they were to make known the Trinity throughout the whole world (see Matthew 28:19), that is throughout the four quarters of the world. That is the reason of the three [Trinity] times four [world].

But, let’s return to the upper room. Peter and the brethren are gathered to fill out the apostolic number ordained by Christ and he lays out the qualifications that must be met in Acts 1:21-22. The replacement was to be taken from those "men who have accompanied us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto that same day that He was taken up from us". Such a man, Peter explained, would be a witness with us (the eleven) of the resurrection of the Lord (see the reasons for this as explained in II Peter 1:12-21 and I John 1:1-4). From the 120 gathered in that upper room, two men were put forth, Joseph called Barsabbas who was also surnamed Justus (that is the righteous or just one) and Matthias. Both fulfilled the raw requirements to be an apostle, they only lacked the calling. Thus what follows is not a democratic vote by those gathered, nor an authoritative declaration by Peter as one of the leaders of the Church, but a specific and intentional acknowledgment that the apostolic choice was reserved to Christ alone. They cast lots therefore, praying "You Lord, who knows the hearts of all men, show which of these two you have chosen." And Luke simply records that the lot fell to Matthias and he was numbered with the eleven remaining apostles.

The postscript to that whole event might be "and he was never mentioned again in any of the scriptures." One commentator wrote that "As soon as Matthais was chosen as an apostle, he fell back into obscurity. He experienced with the others the fiery and joyful grace of Pentecost. And with the others he suffered arrest and scourging by the Jewish leaders and rejoiced that he had been counted worthy to suffer disgrace for the name of Jesus. He journeyed and preached and healed, but not a single word more was dedicated to him in the Holy Scriptures. He was simply one of the Twelve. In fact, it is a matter of record, that in the first ten centuries of the Church’s ministry only two sermons celebrating his ministry have survived to the present day.

A bit more of background can be gleaned from other Church writings. In Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, Book 1, Chapter 12 he writes "Matthias, who was numbered with the apostles in place of Judas, and he who had been honored to be a candidate with him [i.e. Justus] were also said to have been deemed worthy of the same calling with the seventy."(see Luke 10:1-12). From his "qualifications" of having been with Jesus from the very beginning we can conclude that Matthais left everything behind, that he followed after Jesus, that he heard Jesus preach, that he saw Jesus minister, and that he did not leave the Lord when many of the other disciples were offended by Him (John 6:66). Tradition says that he ministered first in Judea, then into Egypt, Ethiopia and Cappadocia (Asia Minor). There is a consensus that he was martyred in Colchis, a district of Asia Minor on the eastern Black Sea.

So what does the brief biographical record that we have of the apostle Matthias bequeath to us in our spiritual walk? I believe that it must be this. The calling of Jesus Christ is the very heart of our relationship with Him and ministry through Him, and this calling cannot be simply communicated through a third party to us. Oh, others may tell us of Jesus and what He has done for them, and even what He could do for us if we would just let Him. But until we hear the Lord Himself call us by name and bid us follow we can have no real relationship with Him. We must hear Him for ourselves, we must see Him work, we must receive His invitation, we must follow. In short, a true Christian must be an eyewitness to the reality of the resurrected Lord. This is what Matthias was, this is what we must be. Nothing changed in Matthias’ heart when the lot fell to him (God already knew what was in his heart), only his gifting and authority. Yet he remains for us an example of the work of God’s predestinate grace in conforming a man to the "image of his Son" (Romans 8:28-30). Those whom God predestinates He calls, those He calls He also justifies, and those He justifies these He also glorifies. This is the high calling of God in Christ. May we allow it to have its way in our life so that we might be numbered among those found to be faithful witnesses to God’s gracious work in our world.

The Collect for his remembrance day runs thus:
O Almighty God, who into the place of the traitor Judas didst choose Thy faithful servant Matthias to be of the number of the twelve Apostles; grant that Thy Church, being always preserved from false Apostles, may be ordered and guided by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.