24 Aug 2017
Feast of St. Bartholomew
We know relatively little about the Apostle whose feast we
celebrate today. Even Scripture isn’t
entirely clear if his name was Bartholomew or Nathanael, or both. In the end, however, it wasn’t his mission to
make himself known; his mission was to spread the Gospel, to make Jesus known.
Tradition says that he was martyred by beheading. We could also say, however, that he suffered
a “martyrdom of obscurity.” He gave his
life for love of God; he handed over his name and his personal legacy in favor
of God’s name, God’s eternal legacy. In
that, he was like John the Baptist who said (speaking of the Lord), “He must
increase, and I must decrease.”
We may not know much about St. Bartholomew himself, but we do
know what he helped build: the foundation of the Church, our spiritual
home. That was his mission, and he
succeeded. He passed on what he had
learned. And that is our mission as
well: to live as disciples of the Lord and to make sure others know him—by our
words and the way we live our life.
May we live well so that, even if others don’t know our
names, they can at least say, “That person is a Christian.”
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