August 24 2020
Rev 21:9b-14; John 1:45-51
Feast of Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
Weekday Liturgy of the Word at St. Catherine of Siena church
Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Bartholomew, Apostle. I’d like to begin by recounting what we know about Saint Bartholomew: where scripture mentions him and what we know about him from other sources. However, there isn’t much to tell. Bartholomew is mentioned in just four passages of the Bible, namely lists of the names of Apostles in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts. That’s it. You might have noticed that he is not mentioned in today’s readings.
Today’s Gospel passage from John does talk about Jesus’ encounter with somebody named Nathanael, and it has been conjectured that Bartholomew and Nathanael are the same person. That’s possible, since many people in Jesus’ day had both Hebrew and Greek names, just as today many Asians in America take on European sounding names. We know St. Paul by his Greek name; his Hebrew name was Saul. But we don’t know if Nathanael is Bartholomew or not.
What we do know is that Bartholomew was a disciple and an apostle. Before the word “apostle” (apostolos in Greek) was applied to the Twelve who followed Jesus, it meant “one who is sent,” such as an ambassador. As a disciple, Bartholomew was a student of Jesus and as an apostle, he was a leader in the earliest church and was sent to take the good news out into the world to help prepare the kingdom of God. As today’s psalm says,
Let your faithful ones bless you.
Let them discourse of the glory of your Kingdom
and speak of your might.
Making known to men your might
and the glorious splendor of your Kingdom.
The first reading gives us an idea of why apostles were so important. It describes the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city, coming down out of heaven to earth. That is, our hope is the establishment of God’s reign here on earth. The walls of the city face in every direction, towards all the peoples of the earth. And its foundation is the twelve apostles.
This helps to explain why the Gospels tell us Bartholomew’s name but don’t tell us anything about him. Because the historical details of who these people were, where they were born, what they did, and how they died—though many of us would like to know—are not relevant to the purpose of the Gospels. The Gospels tell us the good news of Jesus Christ; they challenge us with his teaching; and they send us to do his work and spread the good news. The Gospels don’t tell us about the disciples and apostles because they want us to know more history. They tell us because we are disciples and apostles. We are students of Jesus and we are messengers sent into the world to spread the good news and build the new Jerusalem.
We haven’t always done a good job of that. Fun fact: August 24, 1572, is infamous in history for the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre. The massacre was in part the carefully planned assassination by Catholics of the aristocratic leadership of Protestant Huguenots, who were gathered in Paris for a wedding and peace negotiations, and in part violence by a Catholic mob against any Huguenots they could find and kill. Tens of thousands of Huguenots were murdered over a three-day period. In heaven, Saint Bartholomew wept.
Such terrible events remind us how important it is to be disciples first, to listen to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to avoid being inflamed by partisan anger and hatred, to be willing to suffer but not willing to injure others. And they remind us how important it is to be an apostle, to share Christ’s message of sacrificial love and forgiveness, to become small stones in the walls of the new Jerusalem, building on the foundations laid by the original disciples and apostles. In America today, we need the message of the disciples and apostles more than ever before. Peace be with you.