LIVES OF THE SAINTS

And they cast their lots, and the lot fell on Matthias. And he was numbered with the eleven apostles.

Acts 1:26

St. Matthias

Matthias is the apostle who was chosen rather than called. He was not among the Twelve during Christ's earthly ministry, yet he had been present the whole way, one of the wider circle of disciples who followed Jesus from the baptism of John through the Resurrection and the Ascension. When the eleven gathered after the Ascension and faced the place left empty by Judas Iscariot, Peter said it had to be filled, and filled by one who had witnessed everything from the beginning, so that the Twelve might again be whole to bear witness to the Resurrection.

Two men met that standard, Joseph called Barsabbas and Matthias. The disciples did not choose between them by their own judgment. They prayed, asking the Lord who knows all hearts to show which He had chosen, and they cast lots, and the lot fell on Matthias. It is the last time in the New Testament the Church discerns its way by lot; after Pentecost the Holy Spirit would guide it more directly. Matthias stands at that threshold, chosen on the eve of the age of the Spirit.

The choosing meant more than the later biography, and the Church has always seen this. To restore the Twelve before Pentecost was to confess what the apostolic Church is: not a loose gathering of the willing, but an ordered body, twelve to answer the twelve tribes of Israel, meant to be kept whole and handed on. After Pentecost tradition sends Matthias to preach in Judea and Cappadocia and along the eastern shore of the Black Sea, and holds that he died a martyr, stoned in some accounts and crucified in others.

In the icon he is shown as a bearded man holding a scroll, an apostle like the rest, marked out by nothing but his place among them, which is the point. He is a patron of quiet and unseen vocations, the disciple who followed unnoticed through the whole story and was found ready when the Church had need of him, a sign that to be present and faithful is already to stand among those from whom God chooses.