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St Matthias: February 24, 2003
H O M I L Y G R
I T S
St. Matthias the
Apostle
February 24,
2003
© Copyright 2002
by Grant Gallup
¶ Book of Common Prayer lectionary
Acts 1:15-26 The lot fell on Matthias
Psalm 15 Domine, quis habitabit? - Lord, who may dwell in your
tabernacle?
Philippians 3:13b-21 Our citizenship is in heaven
John 15:1,6-16 I have called you Friends.
The new Roman calendar moves St Matthias to May 14 to get him out of Lent
and into Easter, emphasizing his having been a witness to the
Resurrection. The Eastern calendars honor him on August 9th. This is
the disciple who was the one chosen by lot ("cleros," from which we get
"clergy") from the two candidates (the other being Joseph Barsabbas) to
take the place of Judas, whom we call the Traitor among the apostles.
We know very little about Matthias, other than what the Greek 'new'
Testament tells us, and there are some legends, for instance that he
preached in Cappadocia and around the Caspian Sea. An Old English poem
"Andreas" tells the story that he worked among cannibal savages. One
tradition says he was martyred in Colchis, near modern Georgia in the
Caucausus, where Jason found the Golden Fleece. Some writers confuse him
with St. Matthew, and Clement quoted a second century fictitious gospel,
now lost, which was put out with his name on it. His feast day was one
of the last of apostles' days to be added to the calendar, no earlier
than the 11th century. St. Paul was also thought for a while to have
been the one chosen to replace Judas and so restore the complement of the
Twelve. The number of Twelve Apostles may have been settled on
theoretically even though the college of apostles may never have been
operative as Twelve. Accounts vary in the New Testament itself. The
whole of the Judas story may be a "pesher", some scholars suggest. That
is, a story written to explain the fulfillment of prophecies. "The
early Christian pesher, like the Qumran pesher," was intended "to furnish
biblical sanction to disturbing details in the life of Jesus and of his
associates." * "Judas" may even be an early-anti-Semitism to stand for
the whole Jewish people, libelled with betraying the Messiah. His
historicity is not clear.
The people of Ethiopia have a tradition that Matthias preached the
gospel there, and St. Clement of Alexandria tells us that "He exhausted
his body by mortification to make his spirit subject to the Crucified".
The Empress Helena had his relics brought to Rome where they now rest in
the Church of Saint Mary Major. Other than these few hints, we know
nothing. In fact, we know a good deal more about the man whose place he
took in the Apostolic college, and what we don't know we have imagined.
Judas Iscariot has had more stories written about him, more attention
given to him in and outside the Bible, and more people know of him than
of his successor. But the Church has no honor for Judas, no day in its
calendar, no words of praise or poems or songs for his memory. In our
religion, 'though, nothing forbids us from praying for him and lighting a
candle to light his way back to the heart of Love. It may serve to dispel
from our hearts that love of vengeance which we see even now in the
telling of the Passion Story, at Oberammergau or our own churches. Our
cross is related to the swastika, the crooked cross, the hakenkreuz. An
effigy of Judas is pummeled into dust and rags while hanging from a tree
in Managua every Holy Week.
Judas died by his own hand, says one tradition, and another says he died
of a horrible disease in which he swelled up and burst, in the very
parcel of land which he had bought with his 'blood money', the price he
was paid to betray Jesus. Matthew calls the place a "potter's field"
and the Acts of the Apostles calls it Blood Acre, the Field of Blood.
The Acts tell us Judas bought it himself, and died on it afterwards.
Matthew says he died first and that the chief priests and scribes then
bought the land to bury him there with the rest of the blood money he had
returned to them. In any case, the stories agree that the 'Field of
Blood" was bought with the betrayal of Jesus.
Jack Miles in his "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God" discusses "the
strange idea of the suicide of Christ" -- and cites the work of John
Donne, "Biathanatos", an essay in defense of suicide which names Jesus
himself as one of them, for if Jesus is God Incarnate then no one can
have taken his life away from him against his wishes, as he himself
claims in John's gospel. Thomas Aquinas held that Jesus was the cause
of his own death as truly as a man who declines to close a window in a
rainstorm is the cause of his own drenching. Miles asks however "Can his
death be linked with the despair that precedes 'private'suicide?' Or was
the ignominious suicide of Judas, Jesus' betrayer, added to the Gospel
story precisely as a reminder that a chasm separates ordinary human
suicide from the suicide of the God-man?". . . "Did the disturbing
eagerness of some early Christians for martyrdom perhaps express their
political rejection of the Roman empire no less than it expressed their
identification with the slain Redeemer" * * We think of the sacrificial
suicides of many who thought themselves heroes--from Fortress Massadah in
ancient times to the Waco Branch Davidians and the fanatic Muslim youth
of the Twin Towers suicide flights, as well as the
desperate Palestinian women and men who use themselves as murderous
weapons.
The poet Elder Olson juxtaposes the two trees of Jesus and Judas in his
"Ballad of the Scarecrow Christ":
"Now in a stark field without stalk
In a country of cold slag
Too poor for hour or season
Too starved for crow or hawk
O what is that on its knees
And what is that in darkling air?
A hanged man there?
No, no:
Anybody could,
Anyone can
With a rag or two and a cross of wood
Make an image of man:
It is a scarecrow.
"If for insulted suffering
Other suffering may atone,
Lie easy on your cross of wood,
I perish on my cross of bone.
'And what if all suffering be in vain?
I honor still that agony:
Christ or Judas, each in pain,
perished upon a bitter tree.' "***
Realtors were no more particular then than they are now about negotiating
a shady deal. Most of us have never seen a 'Potter's field". This
curious name is still applied to unkempt parts of some cemeteries where
the poor are buried, who have no money and no one to assume the costs.
Back in the seventies, at a burial in a suburban Chicago cemetery for
'Negroes', I remember that the chauffeur of the hearse pointed out the
barren waste at one end of the graveyard and said, "That's the potter's
field." No effort had been made to plant it with trees or shrubs and no
road had been carved out of the swampy bottom land to make a way for a
cortege. It was as if a curse were laid upon that patch, and it was a
curse that accompanied the poverty of those who slept there. They had
not been the Judases of our society, but the indigent poor who had been
betrayed by America's promises, and the Judases who had betrayed them
slept upon the well drained hillside in marble mausoleums. Cemeteries
were then among the most segregated institutions in the land. Once, a
young Black soldier from Alabama who had died 'in defense of his country'
and its way of life, was refused burial in his home town because the
cemetery was for whites only, so he was buried at Arlington National
Cemetery instead. A funeral in a Black church in Chicago still takes
most of the day, since it is often necessary to drive the hearse out to
180th Street to find a hole to which a Black undertaker can take his
client.
Judas didn't intend his land parcel for a cemetery--it turned out that
way after his own death. We can suppose he bought the land as any one
of us might do--for security. He had come up from the country with the
Lord, migrated to the city from the campo, for he wasn't a native of
Jerusalem, but of Kerioth. There were several options open to him as a
new arrival in the city: he could stay with Jesus and hope to gain from
the political power he would have when (he thought mistakenly) Jesus
would succeed in a new Jewish State with restored independence, wrested
from the Romans by insurgence. Or he could settle down in a suburb and
connive with the powers that be, and be rewarded with a casita and a
patio and a garage, and if betraying his First Friend to win the
advantages of the Second would help, he might do so. Judas' crime was
not so much that he betrayed the Lord with a kiss, but that he missed
the whole point of the gospel. He set store by the things that don't
count. He knew, as Oscar Wilde said of the ruling class, the price of
everything, but the value of nothing. He was more concerned about his
real estate than about his real life, more concerned about a good deal
than about good news.
In the midst of Lent, the most solemn season of the year, we pause to
celebrate an odd unknown nonentity who could be counted on to step in and
heal a wound in the apostolic community, Matthias the Servant of God.
Yet we cannot help but speak of the one whose place he took, and this is
so that we may be careful always to choose Matthias as our Man in
Jerusalem, the one who will heal the betrayals in our own midst.
Matthias is to Judas as the Resurrection is to the Murder of Jesus--it is
the way the Church has healed itself from is own failures and
treacheries. Perhaps the traitor Judas finally hanged himself because
he had refused to face his Friends with his shabby notion of success and
security and safety. The word "Friends" is used by Peter as a salutation
to the Church in his address at the selection of Matthias. And Jesus uses
it in today's gospel, from John, when he says "No one has greater love
than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my
friends." And even Judas, in the garden, who comes up to Jesus and
kisses him, Jesus addresses as "Friend, do what you are here to do."
(Matthew's gospel). The peaceable people called Quakers prefer to be
called the Society of Friends.
We have paused for a day from our Fast to celebrate faithfulness and
disown fraudulence. We have paused in our Fast that we may learn again
by a Feast what the Fast was for. "Is it such a fast that I have chosen,"
asks Yahweh of the Prophet Isaiah, "a day for a person to afflict their
soul, and to bow down the head as a bull rush and to spread sack cloth
and ashes under themselves? Will you call that a fast, and an
acceptable day to Yahweh?" Is Lent only a matter of going through the
motions of minor abstinences? Of rearranging the church service
schedule? " Is not this the fast that I have chosen?" (asks the 58th
chapter of Isaiah) -- "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo heavy
burdens, to let the oppressed go free, to break every shackle?
Ëvery time we speak at a block meeting or a community gathering, a union
hall or a vestry retreat, we have a chance to lighten a heavy burden for
someone. Voting seems less and less important in a nation where the
oligarchy has found ways to suborn and pervert elections, but we still
have the duty to speak and act on behalf of the poor, at every
opportunity. They shall be fewer as the jingoist juggernaut of
oppressive power grinds on and quashes dissent, but no believer can be
let off the charge to break the shackles and loose the bands of
wickedness. "Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To share your
bread with the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out into
your house and your care, and when you see the naked that you clothe
them and not hide yourself from your own flesh and blood. "
In the U.S. of A., we religious people all pretend that we are not
responsible for the poor, the hungry, the homeless--we blame them and
hate them for their in-your-face presence in our cities. We pretend
that the flesh of a poor person is not our own flesh, our own kind, our
own family. It is dispensable in the wars the rich call upon them to die
in. Their children are the menu for the "Modest Proposal" Jonathan Swift
in a cruel satire suggested for a solution to hunger in Ireland. Yet it
is this Monstrous Proposal that capitalism has made for world hunger:
consume the flesh of the poor. To so exclude the poor of Yahweh from a
human history is to think and speak vanity, and to fast for strife and
debate and to smite the poor with the fist of wickedness.
So it is that in the midst of Lent we have a Feast of Faithfulness, that
we may know that it is up to each of us whether we kiss Judas or Matthias
today. Jesus prays, "I thank you Lord of heaven and earth, because you
have hid these things from the learned and wise, and revealed them to the
simple. . . Now come to me, all you who work hard and carry heavy loads,
and I will give you rest and relief. Bend your necks to my yoke and
learn from me, for I am gentle and humble-hearted, and your lives will
find strength, for my yoke is good to bear, and my load is a light one to
carry."
Is our Homeland and its Security to be renamed one day Akeldama, a Field
of Blood, and Ground Zero for the destruction of the planet we will
pursue in our Kampf for security? Or will we choose to be with
Matthias, who is our special table guest today for he chose the lowest
place and has been bidden, "Come Up Higher." Matthias may bring with him
some of his converts from the holy land of Ethiopia, and their dark
faces will glow ebon amongst us and be to us a sign of the glad day when
all races and peoples of humankind shall step in to share the healing of
the nations and drink anew one cup in the Commonwealth of God.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
*Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, Viking Compass, 2001,
p.135.
**"Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God," Jack Miles. New York: Alfred
Knopf, 2001, p.170.
***Excerpted from Elder Olson's "Ballad of the Scarecrow Christ" from
"The Scarecrow Christ" copyright 1954 renewed 1982 by Elder Olson,
published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. From "Chapters Into Verse,"
Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 1993.
This homily is slightly revised from the homily presented here in 2002.