June 11, 2001
[Anne Frank: Witness of the Holocaust, June 12]
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Isaiah 42: 5-12 Bring out the prisoners from the dungeon
Psalm 112 Beatus vir
Acts 11:19-30, 13:1-3 They sent Barnabas to Antioch
Matthew 10:7-16 The kingdom of heaven has come near
You have perhaps been taught that Karl Marx invented communism, and that it is inextricably bound up with atheism; this in spite of the fact that Karl was a confirmed Lutheran of Jewish ancestry, and preached a gospel thoroughly in agreement with the prophets of God, and congruent with the gospel of Jesus and the practice of the ancient church. And here in Saint Barnabas, Paul's senior partner and teacher, we have a corrective for your capitalist sympathies. A Cypriot and a Jew, originally called Joseph, he was canonized a saint while still alive, for he was given the name "Barnabas" because he sold his land in Cyprus and gave the proceeds to the faith community. That nickname meant "child of encouragement." He was a pre-Christian saint of the Church, and was one of "the whole group of those who believed. . . of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possession, but everything they owned was held in common." (Acts 4:32-34). To this communist cell came the Levite Joseph who "sold a field that belonged to him, then brought that money and laid it at the apostles' feet." His story is immediately counter-poised in the Acts by that of Ananias and his wife Sapphira (names that Robert Frost might have invented for them!--he named Job's wife Thyatira in "A Masque of Reason"). When Peter denounces them for welching on their pledge, they drop dead of apoplexy. I've never met the kind of wealthy welching pledgers I might have tried that on.
And it was Barnabas who vouched for Saulus-Paulus when he escaped in a basket from Damascus and sneaked into Jerusalem, where he tried to join the disciples. Barnabas was an apostle to Saul, and gave him bona fides, describing his conversion to these disciples, 'though Saul's contentious arguing made him unpopular there, too, and they "brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus."
In other words, they sent him home in exile. Saul tended to be something of an irritant. Later, the church in Jerusalem heard of believers in the Diaspora--"those who were scattered because of the persecution that took place over Stephen (who) travelled as far Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch" and spoke the word at first only to Judeans. But now some Gentiles were responding, too, in great numbers. News of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch (Acts 11:22). When he saw what was happening there with the influx of neophytes into the church, Barnabas went off to Tarsus to fetch Saulus out of exile and bring him to Antioch to help with the catechumenate--and the two of them were guests of the Antioch community for a whole year. History is what those who write it say it was, and Paul presents Barnabas as his outrider and aide-de-camp, whereas it was likely the other way around, until they split.
Saulus no doubt learned much about the true Christian "style" in discipleship to Barnabas, and we can probably read some of Barnabas in the later, more charitable Saul-become-Paul, who could write so lovingly to the Corinthian church, at least in chapter 13 of his first letter to them. In any case, it was there in Antioch "that the disciples were first called "Christians." (around 45-46 A.D.) "Christian" is the English form of the Greek form Christianoi, from the Latin Christianus. In Nicaragua, it is Cristiano, without the "h," but a man's name can be CristIAN, with the accent on the second syllable. The feminine name is Cristina. It was at first used by strangers to the faith, as Jehovah's Witnesses were sometimes called Russellites, and as members of the Society of Friends were early on slurred as Quakers, for trembling in First Day Meeting. "Protestant" is a slur in the diocese of Fon du Lac, but a badge of honor in low church venues. Fundamentalists are giving a bad name once again to "Christian." One hesitates to see a "Christian movie" or read a "Christian novel." It's a sure sign of lowbrow taste and troglodyte religion.
I went once in 1969 to Antioch, now Antakya in Turkey, and to the cave where the first Christians worshipped--it's St. Peter's Church now, and 'though in Muslim territory it's the oldest Christian church in the world, and the Christians are allowed to have a mass there once a year on St. Peter's day. Tourists from Christianity and Islam both come to revere the site. A well inside the cave bubbles up natural holy water, which Christians and Muslims alike come to drink and wash their faces in. Somewhere I have a few pebbles I gathered from the floor of the cave. Rocks from Rocky's first church.
Now some prophets come down from Jerusalem to Antioch and one of them, Agabus, warns of a severe famine coming to the known world, and this indeed happens in the reign of Claudius (46 A.D.) And so the first reported capital funds drive is mounted, not to build 815 Second Avenue, as you might have thought, but for relief and support of the Jerusalem church. One Biblical scholar {Donald Harman Akenson, "Saint Saul"} says this was the result of a deal cut by Paul with the pillars of the Jerusalem church, that they would recognize his mission to Gentiles (without circumcising them) if he would mount a capital funds drive in the wealthy diaspora (remember Lydia, the seller of purple?) to support the Jerusalem community. This was for the early Jesus community a cognate of the Temple Tax, due from every Jew in the Diaspora to support the Temple in Jerusalem. Christians looked to the Jerusalem community of believers as to the founding of a new Temple, and so were obliged to pay dues to the mother church. It took Saul nearly ten years to raise the money--doubtless Barnabas, the son of encouragement, urged them on. But he didn't welch on the pledge. This "deal" helped Paul and Barnabas carry the day at the "Council of Jerusalem" which under Jesus' brother James (Yacov), who was still in the saddle as a kind of caliph, had the last word on mission strategy, at least until the destruction of Jerusalem and the disastrous end of Jewish Christianity. Barnabas deserves as much credit as Saul for beginning the mission to the Gentiles; he in fact enlisted Saul in this campaign, as John the Baptizer enlisted Jesus in his own.
Barnabas becomes the prototype of Francis of Assisi--in his apostolate of radical renunciation of private property, and of commitment to the community's stewardship and guidance. Like Francis, he is a Utopian, and a dreamer, but nevertheless keeps his religion tied to earth-- he does not get carried away into the Seventh Heaven of mystic vision with Paul, but confines himself (and Paul) to a map of the Mediterranean, which now appears in the back pages of most Bibles, and an itinerary in which they live the model for "New Socialist Man." "They have given freely to the poor, and their justice stands for ever," sings the Psalmist today.
Eventually conentious Saulus-Paulus falls out with Barnabas, too, over whether to take John Mark along on a missionary journey, and Silas takes the place of Barnabas at Saulus' side, while Barnabas withdraws, and disappears into legend. His martyrdom is recorded as having happened in 61 A.D., some say stoned to death in Salamis in Cyprus. He is thought of as one of the seventy-two disciples (Luke 10) though not of the Twelve, and is styled an Apostle both by Luke and by the Church, following early church forebears. St. Charles Borromeo proposed him as the Apostle of Milan, where he was believed to have gone in one of his missionary tours. There is a rumor that centuries after his death, his tomb was opened and he was found holding a copy of the original Gospel of St. Matthew, written in Hebrew. (Take note, you Fellows of the Jesus Seminar; well, this has as just as much credibility as Morton Smith's Secret Gospel of Mark!)
The gospel lesson is Jesus' marching orders to the Twelve, and not specifically directed to the seventy-two disciples. But Barnabas obeyed anyway the injunction "You recieved without payment, give without payment" and the advice to "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." The great imperial Church which was to come, alas, opted not to imitate apostolic poverty, renunciation, and solidarity with the poor, except in footnoted cells. But in Barnabas and his companions in that breathless Springtime of the Church, the Kingdom of heaven indeed came perilously near to capturing the Church's mission for its own. Then the church seems to have largely shaken road dust from its feet, until Francis bid it to take off its shoes once again and walk with the poor.
Tomorrow is also the commemoration on her birthday of the witness-martyr Anne Frank, not a Christian like us, but unlike us a sister of Jesus in her Judaism, and in her self-less suffering. She was murdered in her fifteenth year, by the Christian civilization of Germany, for she died of starvation and typhus in Bergen-Belsen, in April 1945, in the German national war on the people of Yahweh, all brothers and sisters of Yeshua of Nazareth. Her diary, written in two years in a secret attic in Amsterdam, has been cited {by Robert Ellsberg, in "All Saints"} as "one of the great moral documents of the twentieth century." Today, Isaiah still calls us to bring out the prisoners from the dungeons, the stalags, the gulags, the secret attics, and the flourishing penal industry in the U.S.--yes, the prisoners in them in the United States as well as elsewhere in the world, to open the eyes of the blind who put them there.
For "a fourth reading" today, a farewell note from Anne Frank, written shortly before the hidden attic was betrayed to the police.
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. . . I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right. . . In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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