THE UNIQUE AND HUMBLE HONOUR OF THE WITNESS

 

Sermon delivered on St. Bartholomew's Day, the 24th August 2003 by Fr. Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England (Cayman Islands).

Scriptures: Isaiah 43: 8 - 13    Acts 5: 12 - 16    S. Luke 22: 24 - 30

S. Luke 22: 26 Jesus said "Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves."

UNCERTAIN BIOGRAPHY

We do not know anything for certain about St. Bartholomew the Apostle. Comparing the list of the Twelve that St. Matthew gives and the list that St. John gives suggests that Bartholomew and Nathaniel could well have been one and the same, in which case Bartholomew was according to Jesus "an Israelite in whom there is no guile". Later but unverifiable accounts of St. Bartholomew's life tell of him preaching in India and in Armenia, where he is said to have been martyred. Indeed to this day both India and Armenia claim to have been influenced by Christianity from the time of the Apostles, and Armenia has a particularly strong claim to have been continually Christian from the earliest days of the Faith.

THE IMPORTANCE TO US OF AN UNKNOWN APOSTLE

The very fact that we know nothing for certain about St. Bartholomew, and little or nothing about a number of the other apostles, teaches us especially in this age a very important truth. For if a Christian is true to what he is taught, and he is asked who has been more beneficially important to the world, an unknown apostle or some famous person well exposed in the media, he cannot fail to answer "an unknown apostle". Uniquely the apostles passed on to all the following generations the truths of the Gospel, the Good News of God's grace in our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Christian cannot fail to accord to them primacy of honour, regardless of how little might be personally known of any one. The way that God has called and chosen someone and positioned him to bring his purposes to effect is truly significant. On the other hand the significance that is accorded to a prominent person or a particular event by today's electronic or print media is not fundamentally reliable. Something or someone might be lionised today and forgotten tomorrow, and the attention given or withdrawn is a function of external factors quite unrelated to the person or the event. It is important for us to know the truth that in God's scheme of things, a George Bush or a Tony Blair or a McKeeva Bush, or even a Sir Alexander Bustamante, a Sir Winston Churchill or a Queen Victoria is altogether overshadowed by a St. Bartholomew.

HONOUR ACCORDED TO ISRAEL

The lessons on St. Bartholomew's day touch on questions of honour, witness and service. The Old Testament lesson from the second part of the book of Isaiah compares Israel's witness to the Lord and His works with any witness by any other nation. The prophet says that in spite of the deafness and blindness of Israel, its witness is still completely unique, because God to whom Israel witnesses is unique in both Personhood and power. History to this day indeed accords a unique honour of sorts to the Jewish people, in spite of its peculiarities, its sufferings, and the ambivalence towards it by the rest of mankind.

HONOUR ACCORDED TO APOSTLES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The New Testament lesson from the book of Acts refers to the honour that the people of Jerusalem at first accorded to the immediate witnesses to Jesus, the apostles, reminiscent of the honour given to Jesus Himself by the people in the greater part of His ministry. In today's thinking it might seem strange to consider that some within the Christian fellowship might properly be accorded a measure of honour that others within the fellowship are not, but it is clear from the biblical account that the apostles were accorded a unique honour. The equality of our baptismal standing within the fellowship does not erase our differences, and such distinction appears as part of the divine constitution of Man and not merely a function of his fallen nature. In Jerusalem in those days it was the apostles who performed miracles of healing, and this power was not distributed without differentiation among all the members of the Church. The power of signs and wonders was linked to the honour that the people of Jerusalem accorded them. Our Lord had taught the apostles, as we see in today's gospel, that the greater the honour accorded to any of them, the more he should seek to take upon himself a role of humility and service. He pointed to himself as the exemplar of the one to whom most honour was due, being among them as the one who served. Our text today was taken from this teaching of our Lord: " Let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader as one who serves."

GODLY HONOUR

From all this we can conclude, first that in God's intention for man, honour is not something to be sought from others, nor is it available without differentiation to all. Only a small number out of all the millions of saints throughout the ages were chosen by God to be apostles, that small number including the saint of our red-letter commemoration today, St. Bartholomew. Though many of these apostles are little known as individuals to us today, they were chosen by the Lord and accorded by God an honour that was truly unique and not equalled by others in the Church, and certainly not by today's famous men or media celebrities. Of course there are many sorts of honour that God chooses to confer upon people as St. Paul also makes clear, honours that are highly differentiated. Any honour that is true to source, however, must be understood as the gift of God, and to seek honours from one another as if we were in competition for them is wrong.

HONOUR IMPLICATES THE RECIPIENT IN SPECIAL SERVICE

Secondly and following from this, just as the special honour of being a witness to the Lord was shown by Christ as involving being continually purified by service, service of God and of one another in His name, so must this be the case for all the sorts of honours that are conferred by God upon his people. God does indeed honour his people, who are all called to some kind of witness to Him, in very many different ways. What is equal about them is that they all implicate the recipients in special service. If the recipients of God's honours, all of us in one way or another, will not serve, then we abuse the honour that has been poured down upon us in abundance. St. Bartholomew was given a special honour characteristic of that granted to all the apostles, an honour which they all used apart from the one whose apostleship was withdrawn from him. Let us now, who are honoured to be the witnesses to our Lord in our own most remarkable era, follow St. Bartholomew's example with the honour that is conferred upon us.