Helping our church to grow

Barnabas was one of the most amiable and life-promoting of the early Christians. Luke calls him “a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.” A trusted confidant of many, he shared much of his property with the poor, and it was he who helped the former persecutor, Saul/Paul, to gain entry to the Christian community in Jerusalem. As portrayed in Acts, Barnabas had the sort of unselfish, encouraging personality that made him a great ambassador for the Gospel. He was the perfect delegate to be sent by the apostles to support the growing church in Antioch.
Saul (later called Paul) had been too blunt in his way of presenting Christianity in the synagogues to which he once had belonged. For the sake of peace, the apostles sent him back to his native Tarsus, into virtual exile, to cool his heels until he learned to temper his speech to the volatile circumstances in Jerusalem. Fortunately, however, Barnabas did not want Paul’s great gifts to be wasted, knowing how precious they would be to the Christians in Antioch . So, as Luke relates with relish, he brought Saul to Antioch where, between them, they instructed many in the faith, integrating Jewish and Gentile converts into what  the first truly “catholic” church. It was from this dynamic community that Barnabas and Paul went out on the first foreign mission, to Barnabas’ home island of Cyprus, and then further afield up into Asia Minor. The Church later incorporated elements of their ordaining ceremony. The two missionaries were sent out BOTH by the Holy Spirit’s impulse AND by prayer, with the laying on of hands.
Our Gospel for his feast reports Jesus’ guidance to his twelve apostles, with the urgency and goodwill that their mission required. They were to be zealous with the message and in the ministry of healing, and practice a sober, purposeful lifestyle, unconcerned for the trappings of wealth and status. How well Barnabas, and later Paul, measured up to those missionary requirements is well illustrated in their story as told by Luke, and then by Paul in his letters. Today’s feast can serve to recall all of us to those qualities in Barnabas which gave such a boost to the growth of the Church in his time. With pastors like him, our Church could have a great revival.

The gift of encouragement

The kindly Cypriot, Barnabas, was admired for his gift of animating others. His given name was Josef, but Barnabas was added as a nickname which means “son of encouragement.” We see him engaged in that ministry in today’s text from the Acts. Something powerful and new was stirring within the Christian community in Antioch. In that city the gospel had for the first time been preached to pagans as well as Jews and therefore a new kind of church was emerging there, a group that included members of Jewish and non-Jewish background.
When Barnabas was sent to Antioch by the apostles to assess what was happening there, he immediately recognized it as the work of the Lord and sided with this new development. He turned out to be absolutely right; it was indeed the work of the Lord. God is always at work in new and creative ways among us and it is a great gift to be able to recognize divine inspiration wherever it is to be found, and to celebrate and encourage its effects. Barnabas had this gift of noticing where the Lord was a work because, as the narrator says, he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith (Acts 11:24). We need to be open to the Spirit, in order to recognize the work of the Spirit. As Saint Paul says in one of his letters, spiritual things are discerned spiritually (1 Cor 2:14).