Today, the feast of St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland,
is sheepishly compared to the celebration of the other Celtic patron, St Patrick.
The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary have a theme of the spreading of
the Good News. The calling of St Andrew, from the gospel of Matthew started his
lifelong mission as a fisher of people in distant lands. The evangelization of
people is ongoing and top of mind in the Western Church. The psalmist proclaims
the Nature of God which attracts the attention of people through the sheer awe
we experience in living. Our sense of the divine is stirred by the world around
us, the immensity of the cosmos and the charity, devotion, trust and self
giving of people. Paul proclaims to the Romans the two pronged experience of
faith and confession. We come to peace with God, justification, as noted by
Friar Jude Winkler through faith. We are saved as we work out our lives
confessing to the truth in which we believe by our actions. For Paul, salvation
occurs at the end time when Jesus returns for us. The passage from the Gospel
of Matthew is an image of the great attractiveness of Jesus as the person with
whom Christians grow in faith and trust. The process of this conversion,
comments Friar Jude, is transformation of the person created by God with unique
human characteristics into a person shaped and focused by the encounter with
Jesus to work out our relationship as living examples of the attractiveness of
the Good News through our uniqueness as His creatures. The life of Paul, the
Apostle to the Gentiles, transformed from zealous Pharisee persecuting the Way
to great voice of the Good News is the outstanding example of Christian
tradition. Our own transformations are the only Bible that some people may read
and our impact may not be like that of St Patrick but to the individuals we
touch we may be their St Andrew.
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