For this morning’s message, I thought we could consider Matthias. Not the biggest or most important name among disciples. For every Matthias you’ll meet, you’ll probably meet a hundred men named Matthew these days. He’s not critically important to most people. Ask even people who know their Bible pretty well to list off the Twelve after Judas died, and many of them won’t be able to name Matthias.
He comes out of nowhere, gets his special job, then fades into oblivion. We know he’s around, but we know precious little else about him. Tradition indicates he might have gone to be a missionary to the cannibals in Africa, that he might have been a rich man before becoming a disciple of Jesus, and that he might have been a vegetarian. As far as actual fact about Matthias—this passage in Acts 1 is his lone hurrah in the Scriptures. He gets the nod to be one of the twelve, and that’s it. Wherever you see the “apostles” referred to, you can assume he’s in the group, but there’s not much more than that to really say about him.
Matthias is the forgotten disciple. Faithful to his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ from the start to the end and beyond, he was given the honour of being one of the apostles. He preached and taught the Word of Christ faithfully. That we know, or we would have heard of him. And this needs to be noted as well. We hear so little of Matthias because he didn’t do anything exciting, he didn’t do anything particularly noteworthy, whether positively or negatively. And then he fades into history.
Do you ever wonder whether you’ll leave some sort of lasting legacy or whether you’ll be forgotten by the mists of time? At least Matthias, being the last of the Twelve, has his name preserved even if his deeds and teaching were not.
But it’s hard sometimes not to feel like you don’t really matter, like you are the least important of all the disciples. Being a follower of Jesus is hard. There’s a reason that Jesus spent some time praying for his disciples shortly before He was betrayed, suffered, and was crucified for us. He knew that His disciples would face struggles and challenges and difficulties, and, more than that, He knew there would be times when you simply fail to see yourself as the Father in heaven sees you, as His own precious, chosen, and called child, washed in the blood of Christ and made eternally clean.
You see, the devil doesn’t just work at you by open and obvious temptations. Indeed, his more powerful and devious work is done in getting us to despair and feel defeated. Think of Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus. He certainly could have received mercy and grace from his master, Jesus, if he had returned and repented. But in his despair and in his self-pity he instead saw no way to face up to what he had done and committed suicide. That’s how Matthias ended up with his special calling in the first place.
The devil would work on you in various ways to make you seem either less or more important than you are; whatever it takes to turn your eyes from Jesus and onto yourself, that’s what the devil wants to do. There are lots of things which would have us turn our eyes off of Christ and His Word. There’s the allure of sports, that constant pressure to put sporting events and tournaments ahead of church. It starts with just special occasions, but soon becomes a habit where even the slightest conflict of sporting schedule with church ends up in the favour of the schedule. There’s the allure of money, where you start out just wanting that little bit more to be comfortable, but over time the little bit more becomes all-consuming, and no matter how much more you have, it never seems to be enough. There’s the allure of pride, wanting to get recognition for everything that you do, shining the light on yourself so much that gradually your Lord, who has given you all that you have and all that you are, gets pushed into the background in favour of all me, all the time.
Matthias is our example here, too. Quietly, without any big to-do, he simply followed Jesus. He didn’t put himself forward to be more than he was, nor did he shrink away from his position once it was given to him. He simply did what he was called to do—follow the Lord and testify to what he had seen and heard.
That’s really all we are called to do, and like the disciples then, we simply have to do it. On Thursday night I talked about our mission as Jesus’ disciples being to wait. That’s all that Matthias and the other disciples were called to do–until Pentecost came. Not only are we called to wait, but we are part of the commission to bring Jesus’ Word and His name to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.
But most of this mission is not going to be exciting. We like to hear the big stories and the exciting reports. We hear of the churches with thousands of members and sometimes wish we could be one of them. Wouldn’t it be great to be a big and important church, with multiple staff and programs galore? Something we could be proud of because everyone else would know about it. Pride is a sneaky sin. It’s very easy to confuse being famous or being big with being faithful. On the other hand, when we hear of a day like the first Pentecost with 3000 being baptized and realize we go some years without even three being baptized, this is something we need to also repent of—we’re so comfortable with how things are running that we aren’t as concerned with speaking the good news to the lost as we should be.
Yet we need to remember that we haven’t been called to be flashy, nor to be self-content, but to be faithful. The church, as a whole, has always been called by her Lord to be a church made mostly of Matthiases, or even Joseph Justuses. The unknown disciples who don’t want the spotlight on them but who would much rather just hold onto Christ and His Word.
It’s hard to be an unknown disciple. Very hard. It’s hard because, as we learn in the catechism, it involves death. It involves Jesus’ death and your own death. Without Jesus’ death, where He took your sins away, there would be no hope, no chance for any of us. Because He died, we must die also—die to our selves, die to our pride. As the fourth question under Baptism indicates, “The Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.” Our natural way is to seek for ourselves and our own good. Our natural way is not to do things God’s way. But our new nature, our nature we receive in Baptism, is called to be part of Christ’s kingdom, to have Jesus increase and us decrease.
As St Paul notes in Romans 6, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.” (Romans 6:3-13 ESV) You don’t belong to the kingdom of death and the devil anymore. You were bought and brought into Christ’s kingdom through His death applied to you in Baptism. You need to live and stand guard with your life accordingly. There is no room in the Christian life for continuing in habitual sins just because you always have. There is no room in the Christian life for clinging to sinful ways just because they are easier. The old kingdom is no longer our kingdom. Like Matthias, we have a new position in this world. You belong to God’s people now and are sent to be a kingdom of priests, praying for the world around you, showing God’s mercy and grace to those who need it.
St. Peter also described the life that results from belonging to Christ in Baptism as being one which involves suffering and difficulty and trials of every kind. Suffering and trials will, and indeed, must come to those who are in Christ. For the devil is firmly set against all who would follow Christ, who would cling to His holy name. The devil prowls constantly, looking for the unwatchful souls, those who would allow other things and relationships to get in the way of serving Christ. He wants you to get caught up in the ways of this world, to change your priorities just that little bit so that Jesus is not at the centre of them any more. He knows he can’t snatch you from Jesus’ hand. After all, Jesus promised that none of whom the Father had given Him would be taken from His hand. Even so, the devil will do his worst to entice you to leave of your own will. He wants you to be ruined. He wants you to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, so that you can suffer with him for all eternity.
So again, we need to hear the Word of Christ regularly, to make that Word the heart of who we are and what we do. As Lutherans, we have the best key to unlocking the Scriptures—Jesus Christ Himself—so why do we not make more use of it in our day-to-day lives? We have the treasure of forgiveness, life, and salvation in the Lord’s Supper—why do so few of our congregation regularly come to the Lord’s Table? We have what we need—and our call is to use it in order to be able to withstand the attacks and trials of the devil, to stand strong in Christ, and, unknown or not, simply to cling to Christ whatever may come, that at the end He may say, “Well done, you good and faithful servant.”
God grant us steadfastness in His Word and gifts that He may find us faithful in Him every day! In Jesus. Amen.
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