The Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, November 30, 2022

Matthew 4, 18-22

As Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen. He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

St. Andrew was a young man when he met the Lord Jesus.  He followed John the Baptist at that time and took John seriously when he taught that the people should look for the one who would come after him and follow him, that he, John, as greatly as the people esteemed him, was not worthy to untie his sandal strap.  Upon hearing John gesture to Jesus and pronounce that he was the Lamb of God — a title none of the Prophets has been given — Andrew went to see him.  He spent the rest of that day with the Lord, simply talking.  His experience was that of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus three years later: “Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke” (Luke 24, 32).  As a result of his experience, he went to tell his older brother, then known as Simon, about him.  Because Andrew was the first of the Twelve to know Jesus, he is described by the Orthodox Churches as “the first-called”.  In the Gospel reading for today’s Feast, Jesus calls Andrew and his brother to follow him in a definitive way.  Both brothers get up from their boat, where they had worked all night, and followed him.  That first day was a hard one, and foreshadowed all the hard ones to follow since they had worked since sundown and they would not sleep again until the following night.  But it would be a day never to be forgotten.

We know that Andrew was younger than Peter since he is living in Peter’s house.  This fact also tells us that he was not yet married, meaning he was probably only sixteen or seventeen years old at the time he was called.  His and Peter’s parents were dead, too, for Peter has his own house and Andrew is living in it and not at his parents’s house.  After Pentecost, Andrew remained in Israel for a time, probably returning to Capernaum where Peter’s house became a church where the Galilean Christians worshipped.  After some years, he went abroad, preaching in the region around the Black Sea, and tradition has it that he was crucified there for the Faith.  His words at the time of his crucifixion have come down to us and are used as the antiphon for the first psalm of Vespers in the traditional Breviary: “Hail, O precious cross!  Receive the disciple of him who hung on you, my Master, Christ!”

The traditional prayer for this Feast:

We humbly beseech your majesty, O Lord, that as your Apostle Andrew stood out as preacher and ruler of your Church, he may always intercede for us in your presence.  Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.