May 14, 2026
Feast of Saint Matthias, Apostle
Lectionary: 564
Reading I
Peter stood up in the midst of the brothers and sisters
(there was a group of about one hundred and twenty persons
in the one place).
He said, “My brothers and sisters,
the Scripture had to be fulfilled
which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand
through the mouth of David, concerning Judas,
who was the guide for those who arrested Jesus.
Judas was numbered among us
and was allotted a share in this ministry.
For it is written in the Book of Psalms:
Let
his encampment become desolate,
and
may no one dwell in it.
and:
May
another take his office.
Therefore, it is necessary that one of the men
who accompanied us the whole time
the Lord Jesus came and went among us,
beginning from the baptism of John
until the day on which he was taken up from us,
become with us a witness to his resurrection.”
So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas,
who was also known as Justus, and Matthias.
Then they prayed,
“You, Lord, who know the hearts of all,
show which one of these two you have chosen
to take the place in this apostolic ministry
from which Judas turned away to go to his own place.”
Then they gave lots to them, and the lot fell upon Matthias,
and he was counted with the Eleven Apostles.
Responsorial Psalm
R. (8) The
Lord will give him a seat with the leaders of his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise, you servants of the LORD,
praise the
name of the LORD.
Blessed be the name of the LORD
both now and
forever.
R. The Lord will give him a
seat with the leaders of his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
From the rising to the setting of the sun
is the name
of the LORD to be praised.
High above all nations is the LORD;
above the
heavens is his glory.
R. The Lord will give him a
seat with the leaders of his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Who is like the LORD, our God, who is enthroned on high
and looks
upon the heavens and the earth below?
R. The Lord will give him a
seat with the leaders of his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
He raises up the lowly from the dust;
from the
dunghill he lifts up the poor
To seat them with princes,
with the
princes of his own people.
R. The Lord will give him a
seat with the leaders of his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I chose you from the world,
to go and bear fruit that will last, says the Lord.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jesus said to his disciples:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.
“I have told you this so that my joy might be in you
and your joy might be complete.
This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.”
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/051426-Thursday
Commentary on Acts
1:15-17,20-26; John 15:9-17
The First Reading is taken from the Acts of the Apostles and
recounts the choosing of Matthias to fill the vacant place left by the treachery
and death of Judas. This took place soon after the ascension of Jesus,
but before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (following the timetable
of Luke in Acts).
Matthias (who may have been one of the 72 disciples
mentioned by Luke in his Gospel) then took over with the other Eleven the
responsibility of an Apostle, which was to hand on, with accuracy and in its
entirety, the message of Jesus’ life, teaching, suffering, death and
resurrection as the Incarnate Son of God. This is what we now call
‘Tradition’ with a capital ‘T’. There were, of course, later traditions
which became part of the life of the Church which did not have the status of
Apostolic Tradition.
Perhaps the very heart of that Tradition is expressed in the
Gospel reading. It is part of the long discourse at the Last Supper which
is recorded for us in John. It begins with Jesus saying:
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in
my love.
The word for ‘love’ throughout the passage in the original
Greek is agape. This is a very special kind of love. It
is not a grasping, clinging love. On the contrary, it is an outreaching
love, unconditionally wanting the well-being of the other. This is the
love which the Father extends to Jesus and it is the love that Jesus extends to
us. And we are to “abide” or remain (a favourite Johannine word) in
that agape-love.
And how are we to stay in that love? We do it by
keeping the commandments of Jesus, just as Jesus himself remains in his
Father’s love by keeping his Father’s commandments. And what are these
commandments? They are not the Commandments of the Old Testament; in
fact, there is only one, and it is all-embracing:
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I
have loved you.
The whole of the Gospel, the whole of the teaching of Jesus
is there. If that was all we had of the Gospel, it would be enough.
And Jesus goes further:
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life
for one’s friends.
This is the degree of agape-love which Jesus
will soon show. And who are his friends? He says:
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
That is, friends are all those who unconditionally
extend agape to their brothers and sisters. And if that
is the measure of Jesus’ love for us, it is also to be the measure of our love
for others. If we all kept this commandment, our world would be
transformed! We would become a world of people who spend their lives
caring for each other’s needs.
But there is another definition of Jesus’ friends:
…I have called you friends, because I have made known to
you everything that I have heard from my Father.
And the most precious thing he has told us is that central
command of agape-love. To have heard that message is a huge
privilege, but also a huge responsibility, because it is a message that the
whole world needs to hear. As Jesus put it himself:
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if
you have love for one another.
This is to be the distinctive mark of our communities.
Would it describe mine?
This is the message that Matthias and his fellow-Apostles
inherited and which they passed on. It is for us to spread the same
message and it is done most effectively, not by words, but by the witness of
how we live our lives and interact with one another.
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https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/f0514r/
Feast of St. Matthias
/ Ascension celebrated on Sunday
Opening Prayer
Lord God,
Your apostle Matthias was a witness to the life and death of
Jesus Christ and to His glorious resurrection.
May your people also today bear witness to the life of Your
Son by living His life as best as they can, and radiating the joy of people who
are rising with Him to a new and deeper life.
We ask this through
Christ our Lord.
Gospel Reading - John 15: 9-17
Jesus said to his disciples: "As the Father loves me,
so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will
remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in
his love. "I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your
joy might be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you
who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that
will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another."
Reflection
• John
15: 9-11: Remain in My love, the source of perfect joy. Jesus remains in the
love of the Father observing the commandments that He received from Him. We
remain in the love of Jesus observing the commandments that He has left for us.
And we should observe them in the same measure in which He observed the
commandments of the Father: “If you keep My commandments you will remain in My
love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and remain in His love. In
this union of love of the Father and of Jesus is found the source of true joy:
“I have told you this so that My own joy may be in you and your joy be
complete.”
• John
15: 12-13: To love one another as He has loved us. The commandment of Jesus is
only one: to love one another as He has loved us! (Jn 15: 12) Jesus surpasses
the Old Testament. The ancient criterion was the following: “You shall love
your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 18: 19). The new criterion is this: “Love one
another as I have loved you.” It is the phrase that we sing even today, and
which says, “There is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s
brother!”
• John
15: 14-15: Friends and not servants. “You are My friends if you do what I
command you,” that is, the practice of love to the point of total gift of
oneself! Immediately Jesus presents a very high ideal for the life of His
disciples. He says, “I shall no longer call you servants, because a servant
does not know his master’s business. I call you friends because I have made
known to you everything I have learned from My Father!” Jesus no longer had any
secrets for His disciples. He tells us everything that He has heard from the
Father! Behold the wonderful ideal of life in community: to reach a total
transparency, to the point of not having any secrets among us and to have full
trust in one another, to be able to speak about the experience of God that we
have and of life, and thus, be able to enrich one another. The first Christians
succeeded in reaching this ideal after many years: “they had one only heart and
one only soul” (Acts 4: 32; 1: 14; 2: 42-46).
This statement of Jesus is also a reminder of what it means
to believe in Him and be saved (Jn 3: 16). To believe is not an idle thought or
a wish. It is an action – many actions. “You are My friends if you do what I
command you” means action. Some communities think that one is saved by just a
thought on their part and not doing what Jesus commanded. Love not only
describes a relationship, it is also an action verb!
• •
John 15: 16-17: Jesus has chosen us. We have not chosen Jesus. He met us,
called us, and entrusted a mission to us to go and bear fruit—a fruit which
lasts. We need Him, but He also chooses to need us and our work in order to be
able to continue to do today for the people as He did for the people of
Galilee. The final recommendation: “This is My commandment: to love one
another!”
•
For Personal Consideration
• To
love our neighbor as Jesus has loved us. This is the ideal of every Christian.
What are my concrete and real actions that show this?
• Do
I make distinctions and only love some, and others not so much?
• All
that I have heard from the Father I make known to you. This is the ideal of
community: to attain total transparency. How do I live this in my community,
including family?
• Using
concrete examples, what does Jesus command me to do? How much do I really do?
• Is
Jesus’ commandment only for certain people or certain parts of the day or week,
or is it for all day, every day?
Concluding Prayer
Praise, servants of Yahweh, praise the name of Yahweh.
Blessed be the name of Yahweh, henceforth and for ever. (Ps 113:1-2)
There is only one mention of Matthias in the whole of the
New Testament and that is in chapter 1 of the Acts of the Apostles, whose
author is always understood to have been Luke, the author of the Gospel bearing
his name.
According to Acts, after the ascension of Jesus to his
Father, the Apostles returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. They
gathered in a ‘room’ together with the women who had accompanied Jesus, along
with Mary his mother and other relatives. This room was a refuge because, as
friends and companions of Jesus, they were afraid that the authorities might
come to arrest them. We are told they gathered there frequently as a group to
pray.
A few days later, about 120 ‘believers’ gathered together
and Peter spoke to them. He wanted to address the problem of choosing someone
to replace the traitor, Judas, and keep the number of the Apostles at twelve, a
number of significance, for these were the ‘patriarchs’ of the New Israel.
Peter cites two passages from the Psalms:
Let his house become desolate,
and let there be no one to live in it… (Ps 69:26)
and
Let another take his position of overseer. (Ps
109:8)
The main qualification for the candidate to replace Judas
was that he would be someone who had:
…accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus
went in and out among us…
Two possible candidates were then chosen—Joseph, called
Bar-Sabbas, and Matthias. The gathering prayed that God would indicate which of
the two was his choice. They then cast lots, leaving the outcome to God, and
the choice was Matthias, who was now included among the Twelve Apostles. And
that, basically, is all we know about Matthias because there is no other
mention of him in the Gospels or in any other New Testament writing.
Given such sparse information, it is not surprising that
many stories and legends grew around Matthias. He has been identified with a
number of other people or even given a different name. St Clement of Alexandria
says some identified him with Zacchaeus, the tax collector from Jericho (Luke
19:1-10), while other sources identified him either with Nathanael (John 1:45,
21:2) or with Barnabas (the companion of Paul in Acts).
A legend holds he first preached the gospel in Judaea and
later in Ethiopia or Colchis (now Caucusian Georgia) and that he was crucified
in Colchis. A marker placed in the ruins of the Roman fortress at Gonio
(Apsaros) in the modern Georgian region of Adjara claims that Matthias is
buried at that site. Another legend, according to Nicephorus (in
Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History), says Matthias preached the
gospel to “barbarians and meat-eaters in the interior of Ethiopia, where the
sea harbor of Hyssus is, at the mouth of the river Phasis,” and that “he died
at Sebastopolis, and was buried there, near the Temple of the Sun.” Still another
tradition says that he was stoned in Jerusalem by Jews and then beheaded. But
then again, according to Hippolytus of Rome, he died of old age in Jerusalem.
There is record of a Gospel of Matthias, which is now lost.
It is claimed that the Apostle’s remains are interred in the oldest German
town, Trier, at the Abbey of St Matthias and were brought there through Empress
Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine I (the Great). However, according to
Greek sources, the remains of the Apostle are buried in the castle of
Gonio-Apsaros, Georgia.
The Latin Rite celebrates his feast on May 14, while the
Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates it on August 9.
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