Thursday in the 34th Week of Ordinary Time, November 30, 2023

The Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle

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.

“As Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers.”  The story of how Jesus called his first Apostles is familiar to us, but we should note the strangeness of the Lord Jesus calling them in this place and st this time.  He does not call them while they are in the synagogue on the Sabbath day.  He does not call them while they listen to him preach.  He does not call them while they are on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover.  The Lord calls them at around sunrise, when only the fishermen on the sea are awake and about.  No crowds mill about and the light is just beginning to break so that it is still very dark.  He calls them while they are at work.  He goes to them, he seeks them out.  They are exhausted from the night’s labor and soaked with the sea.  He comes to them as they are.  He takes them as they are.  He does not choose fine-living Pharisees with their pretension of knowledge; he chooses hard-living fishermen with their strong work ethic, stamina, and simple faith.  

St. Andrew was aged between fifteen and eighteen when he accepted the Lord’s call.  We know this because he was living in his brother’s house, not his own.  He was not married, then, but approaching the age for it.  He spoke Greek as well as Aramaic, for he had been given a Greek — not a Hebrew — name.  This was not unusual given the proximity to Greek-speaking areas and the need to converse with traders who passed along that way.  His parents, at the time Jesus called him, were dead, and that was why he lived with his brother and not with them.  At some point he had gone off to Judea, evidently with John, the son of Zebedee, a fellow fisherman from Capernaum, to listen to John the Baptist, and while there, he heard John point to another Galilean and say, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”  Of all in the crowd that day, only Andrew and John followed after this man, and at his invitation they spent the day with him.  Those hours changed Andrew’s life and he knew that he had to bring others to the Lord, beginning with his older brother.

He followed the Lord over the course of three years of constant travel, little rest, uncertain, constant threats from the Pharisees, and the amazement of hearing the Lord’s teaching and witnessing his miracles.  With the other Apostles, he saw the risen Lord after the Resurrection, heard him command them to preach the Gospel to all the world, and saw him ascend into heaven.  He was with the others when the Holy Spirit came upon him at Pentecost.  And after spending a few years in and around Jerusalem, he went out to the world to spread the word of God.  Early Christian writers tell us that he worked in the region around the Black Sea, going so far as the city now known as Kiev.  Around the year 60 he was crucified for the name of Jesus in Greece.  The earliest tradition spays that he was bound to a traditional Latin cross.  A little later a tradition emerged that he was bound to an X-shaped cross.  A greeting he is said to have made to his cross has made it into the Divine Office used in the West as an antiphon: “God bless you, O precious cross, be welcome to the follower of Him who hung on you,  my Master Christ” (translated from the Latin).