For Saint Bartholomew

A sermon for the feast of Saint Bartholomew from Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock.

I was speaking to one of the members of this congregation the other day, about the saint who we celebrate today. He was somewhat vexed. “I can’t quite get a hold of St Bartholomew,” he told me. “I don’t know where to begin with him.” If he had been hoping that this morning’s homily would solve his problem, then I must offer my apologies: for Bartholomew does insist on remaining, maddeningly, ever somewhat out of focus.

The problem is not that Bartholomew is somehow historically dubious: his inclusion in the records of the Apostles in unambiguous. His name is listed in the roll-call of the twelve apostles in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and again in the Acts of the Apostles. The frustration is that there are no narratives attached – no stories of Bartholomew’s background, his calling by Jesus, or of his ministry, any sense of what his challenges and triumphs were in the life of faith; no glimpse of his character and his personality. We simply have an inclusion in a list of apostles – four times.

The larger conversation of the Church gives us a little more to work with. There is a fairly strong scholarly consensus, and has been since the ninth century, that Bartholomew is the same person as Nathaniel, whose story is recounted in the first chapter of John’s Gospel – the Israelite in whom Jesus said there was no guile. There also exist various traditions about where Bartholomew may have travelled to proclaim the gospel after the Resurrection of Jesus: the oldest and most widely-held tradition being that he went to India, but other claims also being made for Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia. There exist a number of different accounts of how he was martyred: most famously and gruesomely, by being flayed – this is, skinned alive, as shown in the etching on the front of today’s pew sheet and in many other grisly pieces of art; but also by being beaten, drowned, or crucified. A multiplicity of images of Bartholomew’s life and death are laid over each other, and rather than bringing more clarity, they add to the opacity of this figure.

The very ambiguity of the details of Bartholomew’s life is, itself, eloquent. We know almost nothing, and yet we know enough. The appearance of his name in those lists of apostles in the gospels tells us all we need to know. We know that Bartholomew was someone who made the decision to respond to Jesus’s invitation to be his follower and his friend, to accept the love offered to him, and to chose to accept the call to be an apostle: one who is sent out to share the love of Jesus with the world.

The obscurity of the details of the details of Bartholomew’s life is on one hand rather frustrating – as though we can only glimpse him through shadows, at the end of a very long distance. And yet this very obscurity is, itself, instructive. Bartholomew dances out past the edge of where he can be pinned down. He refuses to allow himself to become the focus of our attention, redirecting our eyes from his personal story and merits and back to the larger picture of what the saintly life is: the life which of necessity is uninterested in shoring up a good reputation on earth, but rather delights in being more and more drawn into the life of God, united to Christ, and sharing that unity of love with all the members of the body of Christ – the Church. The call to follow Christ is an invitation to be freed from concern about status, and the morass of fear, anxiety, and fatigue which attend it. The saints, Bartholomew among them, know that the meaning of their lives is found not in reputation, but in love and service. Such is the life of holiness – a life which points away from ego, and towards love for God and for neighbour.

The life of holiness is the opposite of the jostling for power and prestige which Jesus’s disciples had been engaging in on the road, described in today’s gospel, as they “argued with one another about which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest.”  Jesus addresses his followers’ worldly-minded disputes and love for power by presenting them with a different model of how to live together. The disciples have not, at this pre-Easter stage of their faith, understood the heart of God which Jesus is revealing to them, and that lack of understanding shows itself forth in how anxiously they relate to one another and to the world – the fact that they would still choose power over sacrifice. The greed for power seems to be an ancient faultline in the human heart with which we must contend in every generation. We are all still on the road to understanding and embracing the cross. The good news is that we have the remedy available, we have been given the gift of the same lesson as the disciples receive, and we are given it, partly, in the lives of those who, under whatever circumstances, were willing to take the path of humility, of generosity, of sacrifice for the sake of their love for the Lord and for his people: a path shown forth in the person of St Bartholomew, who united his life with the One who came to be among his people as one who serves, and to teach them that this is the way which leads to true greatness, true life.

Another remedy to the frustration of Bartholomew’s vanishing act is something which lies at the heart of what we mean when we speak about saints: that they are not distant from us – they are not separate. The saints are our friends and our companions, not merely inspirational figures from history who we can only access by learning biographical data about them.  In the beautiful mystery of the church, we know ourselves to be in relationship with Bartholomew. We know that he is a sharer in the life of God, we know that we are assured of his fellowship, we know that he, along with all the numberless saints around the throne of grace, is praying with us and for us, even now. And we can look forward with longing and hope that one day we too may come to take our place in that great company of God’s holy ones, in that heavenly city which the scriptures tell us has the names of the apostles graven on its foundation stones, one among them reading ‘Bartholomew’. And on that great day, when all shadows are finally dispelled, and all truths unveiled, we can hope to have all our questions answered, all ambiguity resolved.

But until that day, we know more than enough about St Bartholomew, because we know that he is a friend and follower of the Lord, that he is our friend and our brother. May he pray for us: that we may might be given the grace to live our lives in such a way that two thousand years after our own deaths, when all precise details of our biographies have faded from the record, we, too might merit to be known as those who loved and followed the Lord, and came to share in his life, in the company and friendship of St Bartholomew and all the holy ones of God. Amen.