Sermon for the Feast of St. Matthias
“For without me me ye can do nothing”
There is something rather terrifying about the feast of St. Matthias. He is the apostle chosen by lot to go “into the place of the traitor Judas,” as the Collect puts it. The Lesson from Acts is no less clear: one is chosen “that he may take his place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell.” That one is Matthias, now numbered with the eleven, making the eleven twelve.
We know virtually nothing about Matthias. Which is fine. It is more than enough to contemplate the idea that he has been chosen to take the place of the betrayer of Jesus. Yet it must seem an uncomfortable thought. Betrayals are difficult but necessary things to behold. To take the place of the traitor, it seems to me, must mean contemplating the betrayals in our own hearts. For it has to be said that we are all the traitors of Christ. We are all like Judas.
Such is the deep and grim reality of sin. Matthias is chosen to take his place. Not to be another traitor but in the face of human treachery and deceit to be a man of faith, steadfast and sure. “There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face” Shakespeare’s King Duncan, in the play MacBeth, says about the first Thane of Cawdor who was a traitor to the King. “He was one,” the King says, “upon whom I built an absolute trust.” At just that moment, MacBeth appears, MacBeth whom the King had just appointed the Thane of Cawdor in the place of the traitor. MacBeth would prove to be the far greater traitor. And unlike the first Thane of Cawdor who confessed and repented, it will not be said of MacBeth, as it was said of him, that “nothing became his life like his leaving it,” meaning a kind of nobility achieved through repentance and confession.
No. Matthias stands in the place of the traitor Judas but not as another traitor but one who knows the treachery of human hearts and the need for heavenly grace. And that, it seems to me, is the point of the Gospel reading that accompanies the lesson from Acts. Jesus says, “for without me ye can do nothing.”
