Thought for the Day - Decisions, decisions

Hugo Simberg, Tienhaarassa, 'At The Crossroads' (1896)

A Thought for the Day for Wednesday 14th May 2025 based on Acts 1.15-26

On the fourteenth of May, according to the modern calendar, the church celebrates the life of St Matthias. Virtually all we know about him is from those few short sentences in Acts of the Apostles, which tell us that Matthias had been a loyal follower of Jesus right from the start - as had another man, Justus. Faced with the task of selecting a replacement after the death of Judas, the eleven remaining apostles found they could not decide between Matthias and Justus, so they prayed to the Lord, before casting lots.

Writing in the New York Times, the psychologist Roy Baumeister said “the best decision makers are the ones who know when not to trust themselves….That’s why the truly wise don’t make major commitments during cocktail hour…and if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach.”

The apostles seemed to be well aware of their own fallibility. Whilst they had discerned, using their knowledge of the scriptures, that Matthias and Justus both fulfilled the requirements to replace Judas as the twelfth apostle, they entrusted the final decision to the Lord.

Whilst we remember that Matthias was appointed as a result of prayer followed by the drawing lots – one of the few things we do know about him – the fact that we know anything at all is precisely because the disciples had begun to develop a track-record of putting their trust in the Lord.

As James Alison reminds us in his book ‘Knowing Jesus’, they gathered together in the dangerous days after their close friend had suffered a brutal death, in a climate of fear in which both political and religious leaders looked on them with suspicion. Over the days and weeks that followed, the disciples embraced their fear and trusted in the extraordinary experiences of their resurrection encounters with Jesus. The book of Acts, from which we have just read - and indeed the whole of the New Testament – is their witness to His resurrection. Had they not put their trust in the Lord, there would be no Good News for us to share. There would be no basis for our faith. 

But not all had the strength to put their trust in God; Judas’s lack of trust is the reason there was a vacancy at the top-table for Matthias in the first place - a vacancy that was filled not only as a result of his faithfulness and trust in the Lord, but that of all his colleagues too - all of whom had doubted and deserted Jesus not that long before, one famously denying Him three times.

It’s easy for us to see St Peter as the ‘good guy’ and Judas as the ‘bad’ – but both had betrayed Jesus. The difference between Judas and Peter was that Judas failed to trust in the possibility of the Lord’s forgiveness. It was this failure to put his trust in the Lord - and not his betrayal of him - which proved to be Judas’s ‘terminal sin’.

Like Matthias, most of us will not have our full life histories recorded for posterity - but, like Matthias, perhaps it is no bad thing for us to be remembered primarily as a result of a decision. Maybe that's all anyone needs to know about us? When we think of Matthias it is tempting to think first of this selection as an apostle by the casting of lots - because we know so little else about him. But I don’t think that is the most important decision we know about his life.

Amidst the thousands, perhaps millions of decisions we’ve made in our lives, the most important was surely the decision we made at our baptism, to turn to Christ as Saviour and to trust him as Lord. To become witnesses to His resurrection.

Are we living up to that promise?

Image : Hugo Simberg, Tienhaarassa, 'At The Crossroads' (1896)