Following the Lessons of the Life of St. Andrew, Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, November 30, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
St. Andrew the Apostle Church
Feast of St. Andrew
November 30, 2019
Rom 10:9-18, Ps 19, Mt 4:18-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

• It is a joy today in this Church dedicated to Saint Andrew to celebrate his Feast Day. Since the Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life moved here last year, St. Andrew has been a de facto patron of your prayer and work for the same Lord of Life he knew, followed, loved and died for. Today’s feast is a great opportunity to focus explicitly on his life and see what we can learn from him as disciples and apostles of Jesus. When we examine today’s readings and what Sacred Scripture and tradition reveal about his life, we are able to learn quite a lot about how to follow the Lord more faithfully and help others to come to follow him, too.
• St. Andrew was someone who hungered for the Messiah. He longed for him. He was a disciple of St. John the Baptist, who was preparing the way for the Messiah, and as soon as the Precursor pointed to Jesus and said, “Behold the Lamb of God, he who takes away the sins of the world!,” Andrew immediately sought to follow Jesus, along with another disciple of the Baptist who was almost certainly the man who would become St. John the Evangelist, the one who would write down the details of the encounter for us (Jn 1). They were lousy private investigators, because even though they were tailing Jesus at a distance, he heard them, turned and said, “What do you seek?” In their nervousness they blurted out, “Where are you staying?” Jesus, inviting them into a dialogue and a relationship, said, “Come and see.” Because it was approaching sundown on the Sabbath — so great was the first impression of that first encounter with Jesus that St. John noted the precise time, “about 4 pm” — they needed to spend about the next 26 hours with him. What a life changing day that was.
• The second thing we learn from Andrew is about how the Lord wants to use us as new John the Baptists to facilitate the call of others. As soon as Andrew and John were able to travel again after the completion of the Sabbath, Andrew ran to his brother Simon and announced, “We have found the Messiah!” His fulfilled desire led him to try to bring others to have their same desires fulfilled. He brought his brother to Jesus because he wanted his brother to experience the same joy. When Simon came with Andrew to meet Jesus, Jesus said something extraordinary, “You are Simon, son of Jonah. You will be called Cephas (or Peter, from the word for Rock). Little did Andrew know what Jesus’ plans would have been for his brother, that he would become the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church, the one to whom he would give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. All he did was bring Simon to Jesus and Jesus did the rest. Likewise, we never know when we bring others to Jesus what he will do with them. They may become the next great saint. They may become a future Sister of Life or priest or even pope. What we need to concentrate on is simply sharing the joy of our encounter with Christ with others. Christ has come into the world for them as well.
• St. Andrew’s introducing St. Peter to Jesus the Messiah is not the only time he facilitated an encounter with Christ who had come. Later on, when Jesus had been teaching the vast crowds for hours, it was getting dark and the people had no food, some of the apostles encouraged Jesus to dismiss the crowd so that they could get something to eat, saying that even 200 days wages would not be enough to feed a multitude of 5000 men not counting women and children (Jn 6). After Jesus told them to give the crowds themselves something to eat, Andrew brought a young boy who had five buns and two fish to Jesus. Jesus took those meager gifts, thanked the Father for them, and miraculously multiplied them in a way that not only the crowd ate to satiation, but they had twelve wicker baskets left over, a tangible reminder for each of the twelve apostles of just what Jesus can do when we bring others and their gifts to him. We, too, should learn the lesson. When we can bring others to Jesus, when we can get them generously to entrust whatever they have to him, Jesus can multiply those offerings and do tremendous things.
• The third time Andrew did this matchmaking was when a bunch of Greeks came saying, “We wish to see Jesus!” (Jn 12). Philip brought them to Andrew and Andrew brought them to Jesus. As soon as Jesus got word, he exclaimed, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Jesus immediately shifted gears toward the fulfillment of his Messianic, long-awaited mission, as a grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying to bear fruit for our salvation. Little did Andrew know when he was bringing these Greeks to meet Jesus that he would be fulfilling the prophecy announced through Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah that God’s light would be brought to all the nations. He just brought them and the rest, we can say, was salvation history. Likewise we never know what the next stages are in the history of salvation of those we encounter or of the whole world. We just try to bring people to Jesus.
• In order to do this well, we have to be humble. One of the things that I always have appreciated about St. Andrew is that he never complained that of the four called from their boats in Capernaum — Peter, James, John and Andrew — it was only the first three who were closest to Jesus at the major moments of his life. Those were the three closest apostles who went with him when he healed the daughter of Jairus, when he was transfigured, when he wanted someone to accompany him and pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. It could have been easy for Andrew to say, if he put his feelings first, his ambitions, himself, “What about me, Jesus?” But he didn’t. It was about Jesus, not him. Similarly, as we see on a couple of occasions in the Gospel, there were apostles who were more walls than bridges, who tried to prevent children from coming to him, who tried to shoo away the Syro-Phoenician woman courageously and perseveringly pestering Jesus to heal her daughter. Andrew was the opposite. He was someone always taking people to Jesus, and we all have a lot to learn and imitate in that.
• Today on his feast, we can ponder our own calling to follow Jesus and our mission to help others to go out to meet Christ who has come likewise for them. Andrew has been called by the Greeks throughout the centuries the protoclete because he was the first one called, but in some ways he was also the proto-apostolos in becoming the first to call others. We are not the first called but just as much as St. Andrew was called so have we been summoned. And just as much as Andrew responded to that encounter by bringing others to Christ, so we’re sent out at the end of the Mass to seek to bring about that encounter between Christ and others. Christ seeks to make us “fishers of men” just as he made him. St. Paul words are as relevant today as when he wrote them to the Romans: “How can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach?And how can people preach unless they are sent?” Christ sends us, too — and not to do anything against the grain but with it, because when we’ve received Jesus within, we can’t help but share him. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” St. Paul tells us. When we really believe in the core of our being, we cannot restrain ourselves from confessing with our mouth.
• And this is something that St. Andrew did to the very end of his life. We don’t have any extant letters from him, or homilies. But we do have an ancient account of his martyrdom, in which we can see the way he died and extrapolate from there to how he would have lived. The passio says that he died on a decussate or X-Shaped cross in Achaia, northern Greece. It took him 38 hours to die on that Cross, and during those two days, it adds, he preached incessantly to the people. In crucifixion, people die not because of the literally excruciating pain, but because they can’t breathe. In their particular conformation on the cross, they need to move move their whole body to open up their lungs to get in enough oxygen. Eventually, their strength runs out — which can take anywhere from two hours to two days depending upon how much one is tortured beforehand — and they die by asphyxiation. We can only imagine how difficult it must have been for St. Andrew to preach under those circumstances when he could basically barely get enough oxygen to stay alive, not to mention speak. He preached the Gospel not just with words, but by his life and death up until its very end. This ultimate witness on the Cross, his two-day long martyrdom, shows us quite clearly how much he was dying to bring the Good news to others, a truth worth living for until the very end, and a truth worth dying for.
• The best way we live out these mysteries is each day here at the altar. This is the same Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world whom St. Andrew followed at St. John the Baptist’s indication. This is the same Jesus who in St. Andrew’s company during the Last Supper took bread and wine into his hands, totally changed them into himself, and gave himself to the apostles saying both, “This is my Body” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” but also “Do this in memory of me,” and St. Andrew not only celebrated the Mass but imitated Christ’s self-giving love all the way until the end. May we be strengthened by the same Lord Jesus to believe in him fully in our heart, announce him with our lips, follow him wholeheartedly, and bring others to him like Andrew in such a way that others may bless our feet that brings the good news and say about us in centuries to come, “Their message [went] out through all the earth”!

The readings for this Mass were: 

Reading 1
ROM 10:9-18