DAILY- HOMILY

Jesus goes up a mountain to spend the entire night in communion with God. He was to choose twelve of his disciples the next day and make them apostles. It was a serious decision he had to make and he needed to draw on his Father's wisdom. He was dead serious about picking the right men.

When you look with hindsight at some of the men he chose, you have to wonder did he actually make contact with his Father that night or was it that the Father not listening to him. Think about these men. Peter denied he ever knew Jesus. James and John: Jesus nicknamed them "sons of thunder." They wanted God to zap and incinerate a whole town with a thunderbolt, because the villagers refused to accept Jesus among them. And then there was doubting Thomas. Nathanael who figured nothing good could ever come out of Nazareth. And Judas, who, today's gospel says, turned traitor. A businessman would probably ask Jesus, "did you ever interview anyone in this crowd?"

The amazing thing in all this is that, with one notable exception, all the men Jesus chose, repented their misdeeds, changed their lifestyles, proclaimed the risen Lord and the kingdom, and testified to the Lord and the kingdom with their blood. Extraordinary!

So Jesus, it seems, made the right choices . . . except for one. Why did God allow Jesus to choose Judas? I guess we'll never be able to answer this question with certitude. None of us has gained admission into God's mind. But we can speculate.

Certainly God offered this position to Judas, hoping he would respond to it as would the rest of the apostles. For all the apostles the call proved to be a grace. They accepted the grace, but ultimately only eleven lived faithful to it. Each of the eleven chose to be faithful, just as Judas chose to be unfaithful. The mystery is not rooted in the swirling mystery that is God, but in the mystery that is the human will, the human soul.

God has called us. Each of us makes decisions day after day after day. We ourselves choose to make these decisions. Our day to day decisions will mark us as faithful or as unfaithful.