Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We celebrate today the Apostle St. Matthias, and the reason we celebrate him as an Apostle is the sad fact that Judas gave up his own place. This allows us to briefly reflect on final perseverance and the importance of this virtue. When thinking of final perseverance, a good starting point is the following. Just because a person is chosen does not mean that that person will persevere in that vocation to which he’s called.
Judas, for example, initially gave a yes to our Lord and followed, but that yes then became a no. Initially, a hidden no that only our Lord knew about, then a more defiant no, and then finally an open betrayal. To persevere in any calling, we know we must not only give a yes that first time, but then subsequently every time, every day, we must renew our yes to God’s calling, whatever that calling might be: to the married state, consecrated life for us, to whatever it is that we commit to. We must continuously say yes in order to persevere. It’s not enough just to have that good intention the first time. Our Lord never changes his mind. When he calls us, we can be sure that his will remains constant.
We change our minds. We fail, but our Lord never does. The second thought is that perseverance does not mean never falling or never failing, because of the apostles, really all of them fell and abandoned our Lord. The others came back. Judas did not. We see, if we read the Gospels, the Gospels tell us that all the apostles fled. All of them ran away, including John. But John quickly came back. He was close to Our Lady. He quickly came back and was there even at the crucifixion. The others eventually came back after our Lord’s passion, with the exception of Judas. He fell away and never came back.
The key to perseverance is really coming back to God’s mercy, over and over again, perseveringly returning to God, the forgiving God, the merciful God. Again, all of the apostles reunited after the Passion. We read that in the Acts of the Apostles. It’s an amazing detail. After the passion, they’re still in Jerusalem, and what are they doing? They’re still coming together, meeting together, praying together in the upper room, all of them except Judas, of course, and they’re together around Our Lady, around Mary. All these, and I read from Acts 1:14, all these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer together with Mary, the mother of Jesus. So all the apostles who had abandoned, fallen away, yet came back, with the exception of Judas.
Again, I underscore this because the Gospels also speak these words. At the Last Supper, Judas does what? He leaves, goes out into the night, and never comes back. That’s why Peter, Saint Peter, today in the reading in the Acts, says of him, he went to his own place. Not a good place. Our Lord says that it would have been better for him never to have been born. It was not a good place where he went. He went there and never returned. He hanged himself.
Being chosen is a great grace, but not yet a guarantee of perseverance. To persevere, we must renew that yes: the first time, the second time, and every time. To do so, what must we do? If we fail, come back to God’s mercy. Reunite around Our Lady. We have to have that devotion to our Blessed Mother. Come back to her over and over again. She keeps us united to Christ, brings us back every time we stray. That’s the key to perseverance, and let us use this key to open the doors of God’s mercy over and over again, every single time we need it.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.