A Personal Reflection on the Feast of St. Matthias, Apostle
About 30 years ago I rather unexpectedly fell in love with St. Matthias! I was up to preach the homily at my religious community’s annual, post-academic year retreat on the feast of the apostle. I vaguely remember now preaching on the kinship I felt with Matthias. The kinship, as I recall it, was based on this sense that Matthias was selected to be an apostle of all things on what appeared to be a gamble! And I really liked the fact that Matthias is so unknown. We do not know to whom Matthias preached the gospel, what communities were influenced by his witness, where he went or how he died! He represented to me wild possibilities in the midst of what could sometimes feel like a vocation based on a random act of God! I liked both the possibilities he represented and the randomness (so it seemed) of his call!
At that point in my journey I had only been a priest for no more than 5 years! Possibilities lay before me that I could not envision, and, at the same time, my vocation felt random, unextraordinary, and unseen. I felt God had taken a gamble on me and I wasn’t yet sure if the gamble was a winner! The possibilities excited me, as the randomness made me feel “unimportant.” Like poor Matthias, so I thought!
Over the these past decades, my kinship with Matthias has remained firm. Every year this feast day comes around I feel this upsurge of connection, peace, and joy, though the reasons for the kinship itself seemed to lose significance for me. Matthias of course was not chosen by random. Decision-making by lots, as we hear in the Acts of the Apostles, in those days was seen as a legitimate way to let the Spirit speak in a way that transcends human limitations (perhaps something the Cardinals in the recent Conclave could attest to!). And Jesus firmly reminds all of us in our gospel passage today from John: “It is not you who chose me, but I who chose you!” (Perhaps something our new Pope, Leo XIV, can attest to!). No matter how random our own vocations may seem; no matter how unimportant, unextraordinary, or unseen we may feel the truth of the matter remains: Christ has chosen me! Christ has chosen you! And in that truth an abundance of possibilities unfold in ways we cannot ever foresee or imagine even in our wildest fantasies!
This year, on this special feast day, the Lord also opened my eyes to something even more significant, and fitting for who I am and where I am in my own vocation story today. Peter, in addressing the disciples, tells them: “Therefore, it is necessary that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day on which he was taken up from us, become with us a witness to his resurrection.” I pray, in whatever ways each of us are called to serve, we do so, even when it all feels unimportant, unextraordinary, and unseen with a deep knowledge that we keep doing it “the whole time” because the Lord Jesus is always coming and going among us! And we too, each in our own unique, have been called to be “witnesses to the resurrection!”
I’ve fallen deeper in love today with St. Matthias, the Apostle, not because of a kinship based on randomness of choice or wildness of possibilities, but because he too was a Witness of the Resurrection. My own religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross, states in our Constitutions (or the Rule of our lives) that “There is no failure the Lord’s love cannot reverse, no humiliation he cannot exchange for blessing, no anger he cannot dissolve, no routine he cannot transfigure. All is swallowed up in victory. It remains only for us to find how even the cross can be borne as a gift. Resurrection for us is a daily event.” (Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Constitution 8, “The Cross, Our Hope” Articles 118-19).
No matter how random it all can feel; no matter how unimportant, unextraordinary, or unseen, we have not chosen Christ, Christ has chosen us. And for what? To witness, like St. Matthias, not only to the Resurrection, but to the “resurrection as a daily event!” And somehow this witness can only occur in the unimportant, unextraordinary, and unseen because it is a daily event which breaks out especially amid that reality. I pray that you and I may continue, amid the randomness that is fertile with possibility, to witness to resurrection as a daily event. May St. Matthias, the Apostle, pray for us!
Chiaroscuro Spirituality 