_THE ELECTION OF MATTHIAS._
"They prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of
all men, shew of these two the one whom Thou hast chosen, to take
the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas fell
away, that he might go to his own place. And they gave lots for
them; and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with
the eleven apostles."--ACTS i. 24-6.
We have selected the incident of this apostolic election as the
central point round which to group the events of the ten days'
expectation which elapsed between the Ascension and Pentecost. But
though this election is a most important fact, in itself and in the
principles involved therein, yet there are numerous other
circumstances in this waiting time which demand and will amply repay
our thoughtful attention.
I. There is, for instance, the simple fact that ten days were allowed
to elapse between Christ's departure and the fulfilment of His promise
to send the Comforter to take His place with His bereaved flock. The
work of the world's salvation depended upon the outcome of this Divine
agent. "Tarry ye in the city till ye be endued with power from on
high;" and all the time souls were hurrying on to destruction, and
society was becoming worse and worse, and Satan's hold upon the world
was daily growing in strength. God, however, acted in this interval
according to the principles we see illustrated in nature as well as
in revelation. He does nothing in a hurry. The Incarnation was
postponed for thousands of years. When the Incarnation took place,
Christ grew up slowly, and developed patiently, till the day of His
manifestation to Israel. And now that Christ's public work on earth
was done, there is no haste in the further development of the plan of
salvation, but ten days are suffered to elapse before His promise is
fulfilled. What a rebuke we read in the Divine methods of that
faithless unbelieving haste which marks and mars so many of our
efforts for truth and righteousness, and specially so in these
concluding years of the nineteenth century. Never did the Church stand
more in need of the lesson so often thus impressed upon her by her
Divine Teacher. As Christ did not strive nor cry, neither did any man
hear His voice in the streets, so neither did He make haste, because
He lived animated by Divine strength and wisdom, which make even
apparent delay and defeat conduce to the attainment of the highest
ends of love and mercy. And so, too, Christ's Church still does not
need the bustle, the haste, the unnatural excitement which the world
thinks needful, because she labours under a sense of Divine guidance,
and imitates His example who kept His Apostles waiting ten long days
before He fulfilled His appointed promise. What a lesson of comfort,
again, this Divine delay teaches! We are often inclined to murmur in
secret at the slow progress of God's Church and kingdom. We think that
if we had the management of the world's affairs things would have been
ordered otherwise, and the progress of truth be one long-continued
march of triumph. A consideration of the Divine delays in the past
helps us to bear this burden, though it may not explain the
difficulty. God's delays have turned out to His greater glory in the
past, and they who wait patiently upon Him will find the Divine delays
of the present dispensation equally well ordered.
II. Then again, how carefully, even in His delays, God honours the
elder dispensation, though now it had grown old and was ready to
vanish away. Christianity had none of that revolutionary spirit which
makes a clean sweep of old institutions to build up a new fabric in
their stead. Christianity, on the contrary, rooted itself in the past,
retained old institutions and old ideas, elevating indeed and
spiritualising them, and thus slowly broadened down from precedent to
precedent. This truly conservative spirit of the new dispensation is
manifest in every arrangement, and specially reveals itself in the
times selected for the great events of our Lord's ministry--Easter,
Ascension, then the ten days of expectation, and then Pentecost. And
it was most fitting that it should be so. The old dispensation was a
shadow and picture of the higher and better covenant one day to be
unfolded. Moses was told to make the tabernacle after the pattern
shown to him in the mount, and the whole typical system of Judaism was
modelled after a heavenly original to which Christ conformed in the
work of man's salvation.
At the first Passover, the paschal lamb was offered up and the
deliverance from Egypt effected; and so, too, at the Passover the true
Paschal Lamb, Jesus Christ, was presented unto God as an acceptable
sacrifice, and the deliverance effected of the true Israel from the
spiritual Egypt of the world. Forty days after the Passover, Israel
came to the mount of God, into which Moses ascended that he might
receive gifts for the people; and forty days after the last great
Paschal Offering, the great spiritual Captain and Deliverer ascended
into the Mount of God, that He, in turn, might receive highest
spiritual blessings and a new law of life for God's true people. Then
there came the ten days of expectation and trial, when the Apostles
were called to wait upon God and prove the blessings of patient
abiding upon Him, just as the Israelites were called to wait upon God
while Moses was absent in the mount. But how different the conduct of
the Apostles from that of the more carnal Jews! How typical of the
future of the two religions--the Jewish and the Christian! The Jews
walked by sight, and not by faith; they grew impatient, and made an
image, the golden calf, to be their visible Deity. The Apostles
tarried in patience, because they were walking by faith, and they
received in return the blessing of an ever-present unseen Guide and
Comforter to lead them, and all who like them seek His help, into the
ways of truth and peace. And then, when the waiting time is past, the
feast of Pentecost comes, and at Pentecost, the feast of the giving of
the old law, as the Jews counted it, the new law of life and power,
written not on stony tables, but on the fleshy tables of the heart, is
granted in the gift of the Divine Comforter. All the lines of the old
system are carefully followed, and Christianity is thus shown to be,
not a novel invention, but the development and fulfilment of God's
ancient purposes.[36] We can scarcely appreciate nowadays the
importance and stress laid upon this view among the ancient expositors
and apologists. It was a favourite taunt used by the pagans of Greece
and Rome against Christianity that it was only a religion of
yesterday, a mere novelty, as compared with their own systems, which
descended to them from the dawn of history. This taunt has been indeed
most useful in its results for us moderns, because it led the ancient
Christians to pay the most careful attention to chronology and
historical studies, producing as the result works like _The Chronicle
of Eusebius_, to which secular history itself owes the greatest
obligations.
[36] See on this point Dr. John Lightfoot's _Horæ Hebraicæ_, Acts
ii. 1; and a sermon by the learned Joseph Mede of Cambridge on
Deut. xvi. 16, 17, in his _Works_, vol. i., p. 350 (London, 1664).
The heathens reproached Christians with the novelty of their faith,
and then the early Christians replied by pointing to history, which
proved that the Jewish religion was far older than any other,
maintaining at the same time that Christianity was merely the
development of the Jewish religion, the completion and fulfilment in
fact and reality of what Judaism had shadowed forth in the ritual of
the Passover and of Pentecost.[37]
[37] See this point worked out in Dr. Salmon's article _Chronica_,
in the first volume of the _Dict. Christ. Biog._, and in the
opening of his article on _The Chronicle of Eusebius_ in the
second volume of the same work. A brief extract from one of the
earliest and most learned apologists, who lived about the middle
of the second century, will show how the Christians elaborated
this argument. Tatian, in ch. xl. of his _Oration to the Greeks_,
speaks thus: "Therefore from what has been said it is evident that
Moses was older than the ancient heroes, wars, and demons. And we
ought rather to believe him, who stands before them in point of
age, than the Greeks, who, without being aware of it, drew his
doctrines as from a fountain. For many of the sophists among them,
stimulated by curiosity, endeavoured to adulterate whatever they
learned from Moses, and from those who philosophised like him,
first that they might be considered as having something of their
own, and secondly, that covering up by a certain rhetorical
artifice whatever things they did not understand, they might
misrepresent the truth as if it were a fable. But what the learned
among the Greeks have said concerning our polity and the history
of our laws, and how many and what kind of men have written of
these things, will be shown in the treatise against those who have
discoursed of Divine things."
III. We notice again in this connection the place where the Apostles
met, and the manner in which they continued to assemble after the
ascension, and while they waited for the fulfilment of the Master's
promise: "They returned unto Jerusalem, and they went up into an upper
chamber." Round this upper room at Jerusalem has gathered many a story
dating from very early ages indeed. The upper room in which they
assembled has been identified with the chamber in which the Last
Supper was celebrated, and where the gift of the Holy Ghost was first
received, and that from ancient times. Epiphanius, a Christian writer
of the fourth century, to whom we owe much precious information
concerning the early ages of the Church, tells us that there was a
church built on this spot even in Hadrian's time, that is, about the
year 120 A.D.[38] The Empress Helena, again, the mother of Constantine
the Great, identified or thought she identified the spot, and built a
splendid church to mark it out for all time; and succeeding ages have
spent much care and thought upon it. St. Cyril of Jerusalem was a
writer little referred to and little known in our day, who yet has
much precious truth to teach us. He was a learned bishop of Jerusalem
about the middle of the fourth century, and he left us catechetical
lectures, showing what pains and trouble the Early Church took in the
inculcation of the fundamental articles of the Christian creed. His
catechetical lectures, delivered to the candidates for baptism,
contain much valuable evidence of the belief, the practice, and the
discipline of the early ages, and they mention among other points the
church built upon Mount Zion on the spot once occupied by this upper
room. The tradition, then, which deals with this chamber and points
out its site goes back to the ages of persecution; and yet it is
notable how little trouble the book of the Acts of the Apostles takes
in this matter. It is just the same with this upper chamber as with
the other localities in which our Lord's mighty works were wrought.
The Gospels tell us not where His temptations occurred, though man has
often tried to fix the exact locality. The site of the Transfiguration
and of the true Mount of Beatitudes has engaged much human curiosity;
the scene of Peter's vision at Joppa and of St. Paul's conversion on
the road to Damascus,--all these and many other divinely honoured
localities of the Old as well as of the New Testament have been
shrouded from us in thickest darkness, that we might learn not to fix
our eyes upon the external husk, the locality, the circumstances, the
time, which are nothing, but upon the interior spirit, the love, the
unity, the devotion and self-sacrifice which constitute in the Divine
sight the very heart and core of our holy religion.[39] They assembled
themselves, too, in this upper chamber in a united spirit, such as
Christianity, though only in an undeveloped shape, already dictated.
The Apostles "continued steadfastly in prayer, with the women also,
and Mary, the mother of Jesus." The spirit of Christianity was, I say,
already manifesting itself.
[38] Epiphanius, _On Weights and Measures_, ch. xiv.
[39] The traditions about the upper chamber are given at length in
Fr. Quaresmius, _Terræ Sanctæ Elucidatio_, t. ii., p. 119
(Antwerp, 1639), with which may be compared Bingham's
_Antiquities_, bk. viii., ch. i., sec. 13; Mede's _Discourse Of
Churches_ in his _Works_, vol. i., p. 408; and Bishop Milles'
notes on Cyril's _Catech._, xvi. 2, in his edition of that writer,
p. 225.
In the temple, as in the synagogues to this day, the women prayed in
a separate place; they were not united with the men, but parted from
them by a screen. But in Christ Jesus there was to be neither male nor
female. The man in virtue of his manhood had no advantage or
superiority over the woman in virtue of her womanhood; and so the
Apostles gathered themselves at the footstool of their common Father
in union with the women, and with Mary the mother of Jesus. How
simple, again, this last mention of the Blessed Virgin Mother of the
Lord! how strangely and strongly contrasted the scriptural record is
with the fables and legends which have grown up round the memory of
her whom all generations must ever call blessed. Nothing, in fact,
shows more plainly the historic character of the book we are studying
than a comparison of this last simple notice with the legend of the
assumption of the Blessed Virgin as it has been held since the fifth
century, and as it is now believed in the Church of Rome. The popular
account of this fabled incident arose in the East amid the
controversies which rent the Church concerning the Person of Christ in
the fifth century. It taught that the Holy Virgin, a year or so after
the ascension, besought the Lord to release her; upon which the angel
Gabriel was sent to announce her departure in three days' time. The
Apostles were thereupon summoned from the different parts of the world
whither they had departed. John came from Ephesus, Peter from Rome,
Thomas from India, each being miraculously wafted on a cloud from his
special sphere of labour, while those of the apostolic company who had
died were raised for the occasion. On the third day the Lord descended
from heaven with the angels, and took to Himself the soul of the
Virgin. The Jews then attempted to burn the body, which was
miraculously rescued and buried in a new tomb, prepared by Joseph of
Arimathea in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. For two days the angels were
heard singing at the tomb, but on the third day their songs ceased,
and the Apostles then knew that the body had been transferred to
Paradise. St. Thomas was indeed vouchsafed a glimpse of her ascension,
and at his request she dropped him her girdle as a token, whereupon he
went to his brother Apostles and declared her sepulchre to be empty.
The Apostles regarded this as merely a sign of his customary
incredulity, but on the production of the girdle they were convinced,
and on visiting the grave found the body was gone.[40]
[40] See, for a fuller account, Salmon's _Introduction N. T._, 4th
ed., pp. 384-86, and the references there given.
Can any contrast be greater or more striking between the inspired
narrative, composed for the purpose of ministering to godly life and
practice, and such legendary fables as this, invented to gratify mere
human curiosity, or to secure a temporary controversial triumph? The
Divine narrative shrouds in thickest darkness details which have no
spiritual significance, no direct bearing on the work of man's
salvation. The human fable intrudes into the things unseen, and revels
with a childish delight in the regions of the supernatural and
miraculous.
What a striking likeness do we trace between the composition of the
Acts and of the Gospels in this direction! The self-restraint of the
evangelical writers is wondrous. Had the Evangelists been mere human
biographers, how they would have delighted to expatiate on the
childhood and youth and earlier years of Christ's manhood. The
apocryphal Gospels composed in the second and third centuries show us
what our Gospels would have been had they been written by men
destitute of an abundant supply of the Divine Spirit. They enter into
the most minute incidents of our Lord's childhood, tell us of His
games, His schoolboy days, of the flashes of the supernatural glory
which ever betrayed the awful Being who lay hidden beneath. The
Gospels, on the other hand, fling a hallowed and reverent veil over
all the details, or almost all the details, of our Lord's early life.
They tell us of His birth, and its circumstances and surroundings,
that we might learn the needful lesson of the infinite glory, the
transcendent greatness of lowliness and humiliation. They give us a
glimpse of our Lord's development when twelve years old, that we may
learn the spiritual strength and force which are produced through the
discipline of obedience and patient waiting upon God; and then all
else is concealed from human vision till the hour was come for the
manifestation of the full-orbed God-Man. And as it was with the
Eternal Son, so was it with that earthly parent whom the consensus of
universal Christendom has agreed to honour as the type of devout
faith, of humble submission, of loving motherhood. Fable has grown
thick round her in mere human narrative, but when we turn to the
inspired Word, whether in the Gospels or in the Acts,--for it is all
the same in both,--we find a story simple, restrained, and yet
captivating in all its details, ministering indeed to no prurient
curiosity, yet rich in all the materials which serve to devout
meditation, culminating in this last record, where the earthly parent
finally disappears from out of sight, eclipsed by the heavenly glory
of the Divine Son:--"These all continued stedfastly in prayer, with
the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus."
IV. And then we have the record of the apostolic election, which is
rich in teaching. We note the person who took the first step, and his
character, so thoroughly in unison with that picture which the four
Gospels present. St. Peter was not a forward man in the bad sense of
the word, but he possessed that energetic, forcible character to which
men yield a natural leadership. Till St. Paul appeared St. Peter was
regarded as the spokesman of the apostolic band, just as during our
Lord's earthly ministry the same position was by tacit consent
accorded to him. He was one of those men who cannot remain inactive,
especially when they see anything wanting. There are some men who can
see a defect just as clearly, but their first thought is, What have I
to do with it? They behold the need, but it never strikes them that
they should attempt to rectify it. St. Peter was just the opposite:
when he saw a fault or a want his disposition and his natural gifts at
once impelled him to strive to rectify it. When our Lord, in view of
the contending rumours afloat concerning His ministry and authority,
applied this searching test to His Apostles, "But whom do ye say that
I am?" it was Peter that boldly responded, "Thou art the Christ, the
Son of the living God." Just as a short time afterwards the same Peter
incurred Christ's condemnation when he rebuked the Saviour for the
prophecy of His forthcoming death and humiliation. The character of
St. Peter as depicted in the Gospels and the Acts is at unison with
itself. It is that of one ever generous, courageous, intensely
sympathetic, impulsive, but deficient, as impulsive and sympathetic
characters often are, in that staying power, that capacity to bear up
under defeat, discouragement, and darkness which so conspicuously
marked out the great Apostle of the Gentiles, and made him such a
pillar in the spiritual temple of the New Jerusalem. Yet St. Peter did
his own work, for God can ever find employment suitable to every type
of that vast variety of temperament which finds shelter beneath the
roof of Christ's Church. St. Peter's impulsiveness, chastened by
prayer, solemnized by his own sad personal experience, deepened by the
bitter sorrow consequent on his terrible fall, urged him to take the
first conscious step as the leader of the newly-constituted society.
How very similar the Peter of the Acts is to the Peter of St. Matthew;
what an undesigned evidence of the truth of these records we trace in
the picture of St. Peter presented by either narrative! Just as St.
Peter was in the Gospels the first to confess at Cæsarea, the first to
strike in the garden, the first to fail in the high priest's palace,
so was he the first "to stand up in these days in the midst of the
brethren," and propose the first corporate movement on the Church's
part.
Here again we note that his attitude at this apostolic election proves
that the interviews which St. Peter held with Christ after the
Resurrection must have been lengthened, intimate, and frequent, for
St. Peter's whole view of the Christian organization seems thoroughly
changed. Christ had continued with His Apostles during forty days,
speaking to them of the things concerning the kingdom of God; and St.
Peter, as he had been for years one of the Lord's most intimate
friends, so he doubtless still held the same trusted position in these
post-resurrection days. The Lord revealed to him the outlines of His
kingdom, and sketched for him the main lines of its development,
teaching him that the Church was not to be a knot of personal
disciples, dependent upon His manifested bodily presence, and
dissolving into its original elements as soon as that bodily presence
ceased to be realized by the eye of sense; but was rather to be a
corporation with perpetual succession, to use legal language, whose
great work was to be an unceasing witness to Christ's resurrection. If
Peter's mind had not been thus illuminated and guided by the personal
instruction of Christ, how came it to pass that prior to the descent
of the Spirit the Apostles move with no uncertain step in this matter,
and unhesitatingly fill up the blank in the sacred college by the
election of Matthias into the place left vacant by the terrible fall
of Judas? The speech of St. Peter and the choice of this new Apostle
reflect light back upon the forty days of waiting. No objection is
raised, no warm debate takes place such as heralded the solution of
the vexed question concerning circumcision at the council of
Jerusalem; no one suggests that as Christ Himself had not supplied the
vacancy the choice should be postponed till after the fulfilment of
the Master's mysterious promise, because they were all instructed as
to our Lord's wishes by the conversations held with Christ during His
risen and glorified life.
Let us pause a little to meditate upon an objection which might have
been here raised. Why fill up what Christ Himself left vacant? some
short-sighted objector might have urged; and yet we see good reason
why Christ may have omitted to supply the place of Judas, and may have
designed that the Apostles themselves should have done so. Our Lord
Jesus Christ gifted His Apostles with corporate power; He bestowed
upon them authority to act in His stead and name; and it is not God's
way of action to grant power and authority, and then to allow it to
remain unexercised and undeveloped. When God confers any gift He
expects that it shall be used for His honour and man's benefit. The
Lord had bestowed upon the Apostles the highest honour, the most
wondrous power ever given to men. He had called them to an office of
which He Himself had spoken very mysterious things. He had told them
that, in virtue of the apostolic dignity conferred upon them, they
should in the regeneration of all things sit upon thrones, judging the
twelves tribes of Israel. He had spoken, too, of a mysterious
authority with which they were invested, so that their decisions here
upon earth would be ratified and confirmed in the region of heavenly
realities. Yet when a gap is made by successful sin in the number of
the mystical twelve who are to judge the twelve tribes, He leaves the
selection of a new Apostle to the remaining eleven, in order that they
may be compelled to stir up the grace of God which was in them, and to
exercise the power entrusted to them under a due sense of
responsibility. The Lord thus wished to teach the Church from earliest
days to walk alone. The Apostles had been long enough depending on His
personal presence and guidance, and now, that they might learn to
exercise the privileges and duties of their Divine freedom, He leaves
them to choose one to fill that position of supernatural rank and
office from which Judas had fallen. The risen Saviour acted in grace
as God ever acts in nature. He bestowed His gifts lavishly and
generously, and then expected man to respond to the gifts by making
that good use of them which earnest prayer, sanctified reason, and
Christian commonsense dictated.
St. Peter's action is notable, too, in another aspect. St. Peter was
undoubtedly the natural leader of the apostolic band during those
earliest days of the Church's history. Our Lord Himself recognised his
natural gifts as qualifying him to fulfil this position. There is no
necessity for a denial on our part of the reality of St. Peter's
privilege as contained in such passages as the verse which says, "I
will give unto thee (Peter) the keys of the kingdom of heaven." He was
eminently energetic, vigorous, quick in action. But we find no traces
of that despotic authority as prince of the Apostles and supreme head
over the whole Church with which some would fain invest St. Peter and
his successors. St. Peter steps forward first on this occasion, as
again on the day of Pentecost, and again before the high priest after
the healing of the impotent man, and yet again at the council of
Jerusalem; for, as we have already noted, St. Peter possessed in
abundance that natural energy which impels a man to action without any
desire for notoriety or any wish to thrust himself into positions of
undue eminence. But then on every occasion St. Peter speaks as an
equal to his equals. He claims no supreme authority; no authority, in
fact, at all over and beyond what the others possessed. He does not,
for instance, on this occasion claim the right as Christ's vicar to
nominate an Apostle into the place of Judas. He merely asserts his
lawful place in Christ's kingdom as first among a body of equals to
suggest a course of action to the whole body which he knew to be in
keeping with the Master's wishes, and in fulfilment of His revealed
intentions.
V. The address of St. Peter led the Apostles to practical action. He
laid the basis of it in the book of Psalms, the mystical application
of which to our Lord and His sufferings he recognises, selecting
passages from the sixty-ninth and the one hundred and ninth Psalms as
depicting the sin and the fate of Judas Iscariot;[41] and then sets
forth the necessity of filling up the vacancy in the apostolic office,
a fact of which he had doubtless been certified by the Master Himself.
He speaks as if the College of the Apostles had a definite work and
office; a witness peculiar to themselves as Apostles, which no others
except Apostles could render. This is manifest from the language of
St. Peter. He lays down the conditions of a possible Apostle: he must
have been a witness of all that Jesus had done and taught from the
time of His baptism to His ascension. But this qualification alone
would not make a man an Apostle, or qualify him to bear the witness
peculiar to the apostolic office. There were evidently numerous such
witnesses, but they were not Apostles, and had none of the power and
privileges of the Twelve. He must be chosen by his brother Apostles,
and their choice must be endorsed by Heaven; and then the chosen
witness, who had known the past, could testify to the resurrection in
particular, with a weight, authority, and dignity he never possessed
before. The apostolic office was the germ out of which the whole
Christian ministry was developed, and the apostolic witness was
typical of that witness to the resurrection which is not the duty
alone, but also the strength and glory of the Christian ministry; for
it is only as the ministers and witnesses of a risen and glorified
Christ that they differ from the officials of a purely human
association.[42]
[41] Peter may have learned this mystical mode of interpretation
from our Lord Himself in His conversations. See Luke xxiv. 44-9.
[42] The intimate connection between the Christian ministry and
the miraculous facts of Christianity has been powerfully argued by
Charles Leslie in his _Short and Easy Method with the Deists_. He
contends that the existence of the Christian ministry is a
standing evidence of the supernatural facts of the gospel which
can alone explain that existence. If the facts never happened, how
did the Christian ministry arise? Hence he concludes the perpetual
character and obligation of the ministry for Christians, or, to
quote his own words, "Now the Christian priesthood, as instituted
by Christ Himself, and continued by succession to this day, being
as impregnable and flagrant a testimony to the truth of the matter
of fact of Christ as the sacraments or any other public
institutions; besides that, if the priesthood were taken away, the
sacraments and other public institutions which are administered by
their hands, must fall with them: therefore the devil has been
most busy, and bent his greatest force, in all ages, against the
priesthood, knowing that if that goes down, all goes with
it."--Leslie's _Works_, vol. i., p. 27.
After St. Peter had spoken, two persons were selected as possessing
the qualifications needful in the successor of Judas. Then when the
Apostles had elected they prayed, and cast lots as between the two,
and the final selection of Matthias was made. Questions have sometimes
been raised as to this method of election, and attempts have been
sometimes made to follow the precedent here set. The lot has at times
been used to supersede the exercise of human judgment, not only in
Church elections, but in the ordinary matters of life; but if this
passage is closely examined, it will be seen that it affords no
justification for any such practice. The Apostles did not use the lot
so as to supersede the exercise of their own powers, or relieve them
of that personal responsibility which God has imposed on men, whether
as individuals, or as gathered in societies civil or ecclesiastical.
The Apostles brought their private judgment into play, searched,
debated, voted, and, as the result, chose two persons equally well
qualified for the apostolic office. Then, when they had done their
best, they left the decision to the lot, just as men often do still;
and if we believe in the efficacy of prayer and a particular
Providence ordering the affairs of men, I do not see that any wiser
course can ever be taken, under similar circumstances, than that which
the Apostles adopted on this occasion. But we must be careful to
observe that the Apostles did not trust to the lot absolutely and
completely. That would have been trusting to mere chance. They first
did their utmost, exercised their own knowledge and judgment, and
then, having done their part, they prayerfully left the final result
to God, in humble confidence that He would show what was best.
The two selected candidates were Joseph Barsabas and Matthias, neither
of whom ever appeared before in the story of our Lord's life, and yet
both had been His disciples all through His earthly career. What
lessons for ourselves may we learn from these men! These two eminent
servants of God, either of whom their brethren counted worthy to
succeed into the apostolic College, appear just this once in the
sacred narrative, and then disappear for ever. Indeed it is with the
Apostles as we have already noted in the case of our Lord's life and
the story of the Blessed Virgin, the self-restraint of the sacred
narrative is most striking. What fields for romance! What wide scope
for the exercise of imagination would the lives of the Apostles have
opened out if the writers of our sacred books had not been guided and
directed by a Divine power outside and beyond themselves. We are not,
indeed, left without the materials for a comparison in this respect,
most consoling and most instructive for the devout Christian.
Apocryphal histories of all the Apostles abound on every side, some of
them dating from the second century itself. Many of them indeed are
regular romances. The Clementine Homilies and Recognitions form a
religious novel, entering into the most elaborate details of the
labours, preaching, and travels of the Apostle Peter. Every one of the
other Apostles, and many of the earliest disciples too, had gospels
forged in their honour; there was the Gospel of Peter, of Thomas, of
Nicodemus, and of many others. And so it was with St. Matthias.[43]
Five hundred years after Christ the Gospel of Matthias was known and
repudiated as a fiction. A mass of tradition, too, grew up round him,
telling of his labours and martyrdom, as some said in Ethiopia, and as
others in Eastern Asia.
[43] The literature of the apocryphal Gospels is very extensive.
Those who wish to pursue this subject will find abundant materials
in an article on "Gospels, Apocryphal" in the second volume of the
_Dictionary of Christian Biography_, written by Professor Lipsius
of Jena; or in Dr. Salmon's _Introduction to the New Testament_,
Lect. XI. Origen mentioned the Gospel of Matthias, while again
Eusebius (_H. E._, iii., 25) describes it as heretical. See
Fabricius, _Cod. Apoc. N. T._ p. 782. The apocryphal Acts of
Andrew and Matthias may be seen in Tischendorf's _Acta Apoc._, p.
132. Nelson's _Fasts and Festivals_ tells, in a convenient shape,
the traditions about St. Matthias and the other Apostles.
Clement, a writer who lived about the year 200, at Alexandria,
recounts for us some sayings traditionally ascribed to St. Matthias,
all of a severe and sternly ascetic tone. But in reality we know
nothing either of what St. Matthias did or of what he taught. The
genuine writings of apostolic times carry their own credentials with
them in this respect. They are dignified and natural. They indulge in
no details to exalt their heroes, or to minister to that love of the
strange and marvellous which lies at the root of so much religious
error. They were written to exalt Christ and Christ alone, and they
deal, therefore, with the work of Apostles merely so far as the story
tends to increase the glory of the Master, not that of His servants.
Surely this repression of the human agents, this withdrawal of them
into the darkness of obscurity, is one of the best evidences of the
genuineness of the New Testament. One or two of the earliest witnesses
of the Cross have their story told at some length. Peter and Paul,
when compared with James or John or Matthias, figure very largely in
the New Testament narrative. But even they have allotted to them a
mere brief outline of a portion of their work, and all the rest is
hidden from us. The vast majority even of the Apostles have their
names alone recorded, while nothing is told concerning their labours
or their sufferings. If the Apostles were deceivers, they were
deceivers who sought their rewards neither in this life, where they
gained nothing but loss of all things, nor in the pages of history,
where their own hands and the hands of their friends consigned their
brightest deeds to an obscurity no eye can pierce.[44] But they were
not deceivers. They were the noblest benefactors of the race, men
whose minds and hearts and imaginations were filled with the glory of
their risen Redeemer. Their one desire was that Christ alone should be
magnified, and to this end they willed to lose themselves in the
boundless sea of His risen glory. And thus they have left us a noble
and inspiriting example. We are not apostles, martyrs, or confessors,
yet we often find it hard to take our part and do our duty in the
spirit displayed by Matthias and Joseph called Barsabas. We long for
public recognition and public reward. We chafe and fret and fume
internally because we have to bear our temptations and suffer our
trials and do our work unknown and unrecognised by all but God. Let
the example of these holy men help us to put away all such vain
thoughts. God Himself is our all-seeing and our ever-present Judge.
The Incarnate Master Himself is watching us. The angels and the
spirits of the just made perfect are witnesses of our earthly
struggles. No matter how low, how humble, how insignificant the story
of our spiritual trials and struggles, they are all marked in heaven
by that Divine Master who will at last reward every man, not according
to his position in the world, but in strict accordance with the
principles of infallible justice.
[44] The dignified self-restraint of the Acts is nowhere more
manifest than in its reference to Judas Iscariot. The only notice
bestowed upon him is connected with the election of Matthias.
Papias was a writer of the beginning of the second century. He
knew some of the Apostles and early disciples, and gathered
diligently every tradition about the Church's early days. Papias
made an attempt to harmonise the account of the death of Judas
given by St. Peter with that told in St. Matthew, which has been
preserved for us by two Greek commentators, Œcumenius, who
lived in the tenth, and Theophylact, who flourished in the
eleventh century. The difficulty is this. St. Matthew says that
Judas hanged himself; St. Peter says that he burst asunder. Papias
harmonises the two by telling that Judas first of all hanged
himself on a fig-tree, but the halter broke. He was then seized
with a terrible dropsy, and swelled up to an enormous size, so
that when endeavouring to pass where a waggon could go he burst
asunder. The narrative of Papias is given in Theophylact on Matt.
xxvii., and Œcumenius on Acts i. Dr. Routh, in his _Reliquiæ
Sacræ_, vol. i., pp. 9, 25, points out that the horrid details of
the story, which cannot be here printed, are due to the Greek
commentators enlarging on the simple facts stated by Papias.
Origen, with characteristic daring, suggests that Judas committed
suicide as soon as he saw that our Lord was condemned, in order
that he might arise in the region of the dead before Him, and
there seek His forgiveness. There is a curious Latin book,
published in 1680, which gives all the traditions about the
traitor. Its title is Kempius, _On the Life and Fate of Judas
Iscariot_.