Judas and Matthias--23 May 2009

23 May 2009--Judas and Matthias

The great wheel turns through the four seasons. And with the wheel of the seasons, the great wheel of the church year turns us through the six seasons from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter, to Pentecost, which he church calls ordinary time. Helpfully, our church arranges its lessons to accompany us through the seasons. As we stand on the eve of Pentecost, our lessons are anticipatory. To prepare us for Pentecost, the lessons talk about people preparing. 

John 17:6-19—Christ preparing to leave, preparing to send the Holy Spirit

Acts 1:15-26—Disciples choosing the 12th apostle, filling in the gaps, preparing (though they do not know it) to receive the Holy Spirit. 

 In acts, we find two people: Judas and  Matthias. Judas has something to tell us about Biblical interpretation; Matthias has something to tell us about chance. 

Our lessons actually discourage us from talking about Judas, by omitting the passage that tells about his death. But I have taken the liberty of reinserting it--which I don’t do very often--and the further liberty of putting into the bulletin the other passage that tells about Judas’death, from Matthew 27. I do this not because I think our church erred in omitting this passage, but  because I think there are interesting things to think about Judas.

 You are familiar with how Judas got into trouble—betrayingJesus for 30 pieces of silver. Movie makers like to think about Judas’motivation. They think Judas may have been among the zealots--who wanted a Messiah who would lead an armed revolt against Rome. When it became clear that Jesus was not going to do that, Judas betrayed him, out of anger and perhaps to make some money on the deal. 

 In Acts Judas takes the money, buys a field. We don’t know why, but we might assume that he is trying to move up in the world, financially or socially. But he fell down and died, and all his insides burst open. This could have been simply a bad accident, but it surely sounds like divine retribution, the kind of thing that happened to Ananias and Sapphira in the 5th chapter of Acts, who fell down dead when they withheld property from the common pool of resources the disciples were trying to provide. 

(We don’t like to think about God operating in this way. Probably this is one reason we don’t put stories like this into the lessons—so we don’t put preachers in the embarrassing position of trying to explain them. But God generally doesn’t need to operate this way. Natural processes work pretty well to punish people for their sins.)

We  read another story about about Judas’end in Matthew. There he repents and returns the money. But the temple authorities refuse to take it, calling it “blood money,” money that has been tainted by its source. (The source of a material thing can contaminate it---some people are uneasy buying furniture at a divorce auction because they don't want to benefit from someone's pain.) 

So they buy a field in which to bury foreigners, and call it Potter’s Field, probably because it was located near where Jerusalem got its clay to make pots. (The term has cometo be associated with the burial grounds for paupers. Washington Square park and Bryant Park in NYC both originated as Potter’s fields, and Hart Island off the eastern coast of Long Island still operates as a Potter’s field. Nearly 200,000 people are buried there, 2000 new ones each year.) 

Judas’ acts would seem to be a good thing. He repents, but his repentance does not seem to bring him relief. He still hangs himself. What’s up with that? What’s up is that repentance is not enough. It is not enough to say you are sorry or even to return your ill-gotten gains. You have to change your life and to do that you have to join yourself to a community that will support you in that change of life. Alcoholics who try to stop drinking on their own seldom make it. Their best hope is to join themselves to the AA community. 

Unlike Peter who also betrayed our Lord, but returned to the community of believers,  Judas isolated himself and so fell into despair.

 So each version of the story produces its own meaning: The story from Acts tells us that In the long run or short, God’s justice will triumph.  Matthew’s version tells us that repentance is only a beginning and needs to be supported by human community. The contradiction between the versions is less important than the meaning we draw from each one.

(There are many places in the Bible where a story is told twice and where the details do not agree. Some denominations expend great energy in reconciling them, but in Catholics and mainline Protestants attribute them to the editing process by which scripture came to be. We assume that the Holy Spirit guides the production of scripture, not by producing verbal inerrancy in the authorship, but more indirectly, in the editing process and in us as we seek to be guided in interpreting it.)

So what about Matthias, the one chosen to take Judas place?Unlike Judas, he does not play any significant part in the story of the early church. After he is chosen, he simply drops out of the picture and is never heard from again. His function evidently was to be the 12th disciple, so there could be the same number of disciples as there were tribes of Israel. What strikes most people about this story is the role that chance plays in it. To some people, it seems a scandal that something as important as discipleship could be decided by, essentially, a roll of  the dice.

 No one who has read the Old Testament, however, will be much surprised by the casting of lots to decide important questions. The temple priests carried in the pockets of their ephods objects called the Urim and the Thummim. No one knows what they looked like, but they were clearly used to   help decide important matters. They understood that there is always a part of every decision which is beyond our best thinking and research. If our thinking and research could be perfect, what would be left for God to do? 

This does not mean that we should make important decisions in our lives by rolling dice, or consulting one of those magic cubes we had as children—and that I suppose you can still buy at Spencers. You ask a question and then shake it, and after a time a little disk floats to the surface of a murky liquid that says yes or no. But it does mean that we should wrap all our thinking and research with prayer, and then make our best decision,  and then relax. 

It may be that we will never know whether it was right or wrong, because we cannot launch a duplicate self into an alternate universe to see how things would have turned out if we had decided the other way. It may even turn out that we have made the “wrong” decision. Well, God will make good out of it if we let Him.  God is working every day, even through what look like mistakes, to prepare us for eternal life in His kingdom.  

Perhaps Matthias did a good job; perhaps he was mediocre; perhaps he got sick and died shortly afterward. "How it turned out" was less important than how they thought about it. And that is as true for us as it was for them. What was important was that the disciples had a decision to make, that they used their best judgment, and then put their trust in God. We have a lot to learn from that 

Amen