First Sunday after Trinity. St. Barnabas
The Epistle for the First Sunday after Trinity speaks of love. Love, in the sense of the Holy Scripture, is not a feeling or even good deeds by which we serve our fellow man. Love should be our nature. God is love, says St. John, and we are the children of God, created in His image and likeness. We can have no greater or nobler goal than to grow into the fullness of love so that we would see God, who is love, face to face, and reflect His love so that everyone around us can share in it.
Unfortunately, we often live quite differently. This is what the Sunday Gospel is about: a rich man who had everything his soul desired and did not see his brother at the gate. If the rich man had shared his blessings with Lazarus, his joy could have been multiplied. Joys fiercely kept only to themselves turn into bitterness and damnation, not only once in hell, but already in this life. Herman Melville expresses this harsh truth in his novel “Moby Dick” vividly: “Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.”
The Feast of St. Barnabas sets before our eyes a completely different example. The very name of Barnabas, which means “the Son of Consolation”, speaks for itself: he was a good and faithful man, dedicated to missionary work to lead as many people as possible to God and salvation.
Saint Barnabas remained faithful until his death. The Tradition tells us about the end of his life: “And there it was that upon a certain 11th of June, in or about the seventh year of the reign of Nero, Barnabas crowned the dignity of the Apostolate with the glory of martyrdom. During the reign of the Emperor Zeno, his body was found in his grave in Cyprus, and on his breast lay a copy of the Gospel according to Matthew, written by the hand of Barnabas himself.”
St. Barnabas was inspired, motivated and guided by love. We can say that he was led and filled by God, who is love and who wants to fill us all with the fullness of His love.