Fifth Sunday of Easter, April 28, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Saul and Barnabas
Then Barnabas took charge of Saul.
This Levite from the island of Cyprus had been called Joseph. He made friends easily, and became a Christ-follower. When the apostles began developing their new community of new believers, Joseph was quick to come their aid.
The apostles called this man Barnabas, which means “Son of Encouragement.” He sold a field he owned, brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.
Barnabas had earned the right to be heard. He had earned, at least tentatively, the trust of the apostles. Saul had not.
When Saul arrived in Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, and they did not believe he was a disciple himself. But Barnabas took charge of him and reported to the disciples how Saul had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken out boldly in the name of Jesus. He had also debated with the Hellenists, but they tried to kill him.
This testimony was enough for the apostles. They even tried to protect Saul by helping him get to Tarsus, where Saul stayed for several years before he began his missionary journeys. Thank you, Barnabas, Son of Encouragement. And now, after Saul’s conversion, the church was at peace in all of Judea, Galilee and even Samaria.
It was built up and walked in the fear of the Lord, and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit it grew in numbers.
Sometimes I imagine Barnabas as Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s favorite encouragers. Saul, skinny and a little sour-faced, speaking little until asked to preach, walking in the marketplace with Barnabas, who stops and tastes grapes at every stand, makes jokes with the farmers and laughs at his own jokes harder than anyone. This may have been how Shakespeare pictured them, had he written a play about the disciples after Pentecost.
I will praise you Lord, in the assembly of your people.
But Falstaff mostly talked over foaming pints of bitter beer. Barnabas was a do-er. He looked for ways to help and bless those around him, most notably the man who would have had him arrested and killed – Saul of Tarsus.
John might well have been thinking of Barnabas when he wrote in his first letter:
Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.
I think of Prospero from Shakespeare’s final play The Tempest, marooned on an island, his innate goodness at last appearing through his gruff, almost-cruel shell. Prospero needed to make peace with his world, inner and outer, past, present and future.
Our revels now are ended.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
And Barnabas? Not Falstaff, not Prospero, but a man too who needed to make his own peace, after a lifetime of ministering to others who did not always receive what he had to offer. Paul himself turned away from Barnabas because of a disagreement about Mark, who was a relative of Barnabas. Heartbroken as he might have been at these divisions, Barnabas had to turn and walk away from Paul, without a soliloquy, without a standing ovation.
Barnabas, however, had learned to listen to God.
You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you. Remain in me, as I remain in you.
And so he did.
(Acts 9, Psalm 22, 1 John 3, John 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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