St. Andrew’s Day Observed, Year B | Matthew 4:18-22
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 17, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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A happy St. Andrew’s Day to you all—sort of! Those in the know probably recognize that we’re holding this celebration a little early, seeing that the real St. Andrew’s Day takes place on November 30 each year. As our church’s patron saint, that means we ought to be celebrating him on the closest following Sunday. However, there’s a certain ranking to different feasts of the Church Year. Any Sunday of Advent is overrides a saint’s day. But the Sunday before November 30 is normally Christ the King Sunday, which, as a feast of our Lord, also holds greater precedence than saints’ observations. That means, unless we hold a special service on November 30th itself, we miss out celebrating our patron saint without either jumping the gun or waiting until mid-January. So, again, happy St. Andrew’s Day—about 2 weeks too early!
Andrew is one of those just-famous-enough Apostles. His name, which is Greek, despite his ethnically Jewish background, means something like “brave” or “manly.” His brother’s given name, Simon, developed independently in both Hebrew and Greek cultures. In Hebrew, Simon means “hearing” or “listening,” while in Greek its root means “flat-nosed.” Listening was never that brother’s strong point, and since Andrew’s name was Greek, I’m guessing that language is the angle his parents were leaning toward. Simon is, of course, better known by his chosen name, Peter,[1] which in our day would be the equivalent of the nickname “Rocky.” So in modern speech, the first two disciples Jesus called would have been Manny and Rocky, which to me sounds like a couple toughs from the Bronx or Jersey Shore—especially if you imagine that broken nose.
We hear little of Andrew after the Resurrection, making the post-Biblical stories more along the line of legend than recorded history. Several early sources suggest that he went on to preach the Gospel in the region north of the Black Sea and over into modern-day Bulgaria. Some say he traveled along the Dnieper River as far north as Kyiv and Novgorod, which established his connection as the patron saint of Russia and Ukraine. He supposedly founded the See (basically the Diocese) of Byzantium, making him the predecessor of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is “head among equals” of the entirety of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He appears to have been crucified around CE 60 in the city of Patras, located in present-day eastern Greece. In the later Medieval period, stories arose that he deemed himself unworthy to die in the same fashion as Jesus and was therefore executed on an X-shaped cross.[2] Despite earlier sources describing him being bound to the more familiar Latin cross, that X has become his defining symbol, appearing both in most religious artwork about him since then and in the heraldry of the many places that claim his patronage.
Andrew’s traditional connection with Scotland comes from an old legend regarding a monk named Regulus. Living in Patras in the mid-300’s, Regulus has a dream in which an angel told him to hide some of Andrew’s bones, which had been held in honor in that city where he had died. Shortly after, Church authorities confiscated the rest and took them to Constantinople. The angel then returned in another dream, demanding that Regulus take the remaining relics to safety, running even to the “ends of the earth.” Regulus grabbed the bones, hopped on a boat, and, after somehow navigating through the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and possibly the North Sea, eventually shipwrecked off the coast of eastern Scotland. Bringing the sacred objects safely to land, he founded Scotland’s first church in what is now the city of St. Andrew’s.[3]
Jumping back to the Bible itself, you might recall from our previous encounters with our Gospel that in ancient Greek the words we interpret as “fishing” or “fishers” don’t reference any sort of water-dwelling creatures at all. They would literally translate to English as “sunning” or “daylighters.” So if we take the phrase “fish for people”[4] (or the more traditional “fishers of men”) even somewhat literally as we would imagine them with our modern rods and reels, chances are we’ll end up confused about what exactly Jesus was talking about.
He wasn’t hinting at the sort of bait-and-switch evangelism concepts we might imagine today[5] or of some duty to drag people kicking and screaming from their natural habitat into whatever our human interpretations of “heaven” might be at the moment. The idea of “sunning” was that of raising a being upward, leading them from the Underworld’s darkness into the Celestial light bearing down upon the Earthly Realm, where they could become of value and use to society. Jesus was offering to teach the brothers how to lift the “dead” from the depths of oppression and need into the light of God’s love, where they could return to life and eventually contribute to those around them. And Andrew certainly seems to model that for us.
The Gospels record a few incidents where Andrew’s at the front of the crowd, but I wonder if the more bull-headed “Rocky” didn’t generally drag him up there in his own rush to be seen. Mostly Andrew shows up quietly facilitating events from the background. He starts the fourth Gospel as one of John the Baptists’ disciples who, after hearing John point out “the Lamb of God,” becomes one of the first to follow Jesus. In that account, he immediately hunts down Peter and guides his brother along. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each record Jesus calling the brothers from their boat, although Luke doesn’t mention Andrew by name until later. Andrew is the one who leads the child with the bread and fish to Jesus at the Feeding of the 5,000. He sits with Peter, James, and John as they question Jesus after he talks about the impending destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. And when some Greek people arrive at that Temple to see Jesus shortly before the crucifixion, Andrew is the one who ends up bringing them forward as well.
Unlike his brother, Andrew seems to have picked up on Jesus’ point about “daylighting” early on, becoming a model for us in his humility and consistency. Walking in love—revealing one’s dedication to God by serving others, by treating them how we would wish to be treated—doesn’t need to be showy. Proclaiming the Gospel doesn’t need to be loud or abrasive. It certainly doesn’t hurt to speak, but our words need to be backed up with solid actions. In a culture where the loudest “Christian” voices clamor for power and echo with greed and whose behaviors brazenly oppose Jesus’ every word and example, maybe the only way for the Gospel to truly infiltrate our age is for us to follow Andrew’s example, patiently leading and guiding those who seek something more than empty words and self-centered hubris, quietly directing people toward Jesus in gentleness, kindness, and love.
[1] Also Greek
[2] Called a “saltire”
[3] Historians think that a bishop brought the relics to the British Isles during a missionary effort in the mid-600’s and that they were finally settled in Scotland about 100 years later.
[4] Matthew 4:19 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[5] Or the fact that, pressing the metaphor, “daylighted” fish become food.