Acts 11:24

CHARACTERISTICS OF ST. BARNABAS

‘He was a good man, and full of the holy Ghost and of faith.’

Acts 11:24

No better man could be sent to Antioch to ascertain the truth or otherwise of what the Apostles had heard. The writer of the Acts describes his characteristics.

I. ‘He was a good man.’—‘Good,’ not in the common acceptation of the term, but in the Divine. If a man lives morally; if he pays that which he owes; if he bestows his goods to feed the poor; if he conforms to the rules of society and the forms of religion, whatever his motives for so doing, by universal consent he is denominated ‘a good man.’ Now the goodness of St. Barnabas involved all this. He was of the tribe of Levi; a son of consolation as his name signifies, and as he was surnamed by his fellow-Apostles; and so kind and charitable that he sold all his lands at Cyprus, and laid the money at the Apostles’ feet at Jerusalem, that they might distribute to the necessities of the poor. But the goodness of St. Barnabas was Divine—the creation of the Holy Spirit; for He makes all really good men (John 1:12).

II. He was ‘full of the Holy Ghost.’—Not that he was with the Twelve, when, on the Day of Pentecost, ‘they were all filled with the Holy Ghost’; but it has been surmised that he was one of the converts made on that glorious day. Be this as it may, the same Divine privilege was granted to him. And it had the same sanctifying effect in him, though not accompanied by the gift of tongues.

III. He was also ‘full of faith.’—He was ‘strong in faith, giving glory to God.’ And because he believed in God he had faith in his mission. He knew and felt that Christianity was God’s living remedy for the world’s deadly ills, and therefore must ultimately prove efficacious in healing them. With this firm conviction, the offspring of his faith, he laboured most abundantly to spread it.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE MEANING OF GOODNESS

The immediate marks of goodness which are mentioned in connection with these words are, first of all, brightness and gladness. St. Barnabas is spoken of as being good, and as encouraging the people to persevere. The second mark had this for its result, that many were turned unto the Lord in consequence of St. Barnabas’s life and work. Both these points we may do well to pay attention to; for we often fail to have a hopeful spirit, and often fail to convince people when we are talking with them, because we are not as St. Barnabas was. Some pride, some jealousy, some envy, some vanity, that still smouldering ember of an early sin not quite quenched, these take the brightness out of us, and prevent its being said of us as often as it ought to be that we are good. Although we may be clever and in earnest, yet still it cannot be said of us in any true degree, as it was said of St. Barnabas, that many people have been turned unto the Lord through our conversation; and the reason is because, although it may be said of us that we are what St. Paul calls ‘righteous,’ yet we have not attained to that mysterious mark of influence which is called here being good.

I. What is meant here by being good?

(a) There must first of all be self-knowledge—a thing from which most of us flinch and fight shy of. What was one of the difficulties which must have beset Abraham when he was called? The difficulty is a very common one, and it frightens not a few from considering the fact of their call. Abraham was called while his father was still alive, and it would seem that God spoke to the son in a way in which He did not speak to the father. Now here arises at once a kind of horror in our minds that we should know more than our parents. But every generation as it proceeds along its way has some peculiar work to do, which the passing generation was not formed to do. And so it is with individuals; we have each a particular work to do, some steps to take which our parents could not mark out for us by their own footsteps going before. Many and many a son and daughter are driven from the realising of his or her personality and individuality because of this thought, ‘I shall then have to say and do some things which my parents never said or thought.’ But more or less every life is a separate voyage of discovery, and more or less we must make it alone. Certainly, in speaking to Christian people we can fall back on this comforting thought, that our parents have prayed for us again and again, they have asked God to show us His Will and to enable us to do it. Well then, if one feels called by God to take some step in advance of those who have gone before, one can feel that it is made in answer to the prayers of our parents, who in this way have raised us above their own reach.

(b) Then comes the thought of self-mastery. Everybody who knows himself finds a lower and a higher self perpetually at war with each other. The pity of it is that this war is carried on so halfheartedly; the pity of it is that people do not realise quicker than they do the necessity of self-mastery; and it puts a man in a nobler position when he resolves step by step to gain it.

(c) And then must come self-culture. Not at once will you reach perfection. You find out that you have certain capacities; yes, but these will want improving, and the best and most powerful gifts that we have depend for their full efficiency, not so much upon our working at them, as upon our working upon the lower gifts that we possess. It is here that so many people fail; they will not patiently work, so to say, at the background of the picture. There are gifts that we have, perhaps gifts of real genius, but if they are to reach their full efficiency, we must work hard at certain lower powers that we have, even though they will bring us no credit, in order that the higher gifts may not be dimmed.

And when there has been this self-knowledge, when there has been this self-mastery, this self-culture, what should follow?

(d) Self-devotion, self sacrifice. These powers are not merely to be self-built towers up which we are to mount in order that we may look down upon and despise our neighbours. No; the object of attaining all these things is not for our own self-exaltation, but for a nobler end, using what gifts we have for God’s glory and the good of others.

If this is some answer to the question, it is not all, it does not touch the position of St. Barnabas.

II. ‘A good man, and full of the Holy Ghost.’—This does not mean simply that he had something of the influence of the Holy Ghost as it had been in the world ever since the brooding over the surface of the waters, but St. Barnabas had a great measure of that peculiar and special indwelling of the Blessed Spirit which our Saviour promised to those whom He left, and yet would not leave as orphans. There are some people who wish to be good, who are willing to entertain the idea of individuality, of personality, of self mastery, self-culture, and even of self-devotion, but who keep outside, more or less, of the special gifts of the Holy Spirit. ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost.’ ‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.’ Ask yourselves whether in your anxiety to be good there is within you a humble and full acceptance of all those powers of the Holy Spirit in the way in which our Blessed Lord appointed them to be used.

And yet that was not all.

III. St. Barnabas was also ‘full of faith.’—This was, of course, in one sense, the outcome and result of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling. Faith is a gift of God not only in the object but in the act. It is also the cause and the support of the goodness of life. Here we need a caution. As there are those outside the Church who are trying to be good, and yet have not that obedience to accept the assistance of the Holy Spirit in the way in which Christ has appointed; so there may be some who are members of the Church, and who yet may be tempted to be content more or less with a religion which consists of good-heartedness, a religion which is chiefly based on the feelings and the sentiments, called out either by witnessing the miseries of the poor or by the splendour of ritual and high musical services. In both cases the real object of our faith as Christians might be left very much in the background, and practically treated as indifferent, almost as useless. It becomes us as members of a Church for which God has done great things to reflect whether we are truly accepting the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and, if in the Church, whether we are looking in the right and true direction to see what is the fountain from which these gifts flow.

—Bishop Edward King.

Illustration

‘Whatever good natural qualities a man may have, before they can be turned to good account for God they must be elevated, improved, transfigured, as we may say, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, and by genuine faith in God. Natural good qualities are like all the rest of our nature. They are damaged by sin and by the Fall. There is no steadfastness in them. They are tainted by self. We see this constantly in men who are naturally good-natured as we say, but who are weak in Christian principle. Their good-nature takes a tinge of selfishness as they grow older, unless it grows to be something better than mere good-nature by the operation of the Holy Spirit. It must either grow better or grow worse. If it does not grow up to be something better than mere good-nature, it degenerates into that sort of easy good-nature, which never really gives up anything for others, but only seems to do so, and wins a cheap popularity by never contradicting anybody.’

(THIRD OUTLINE)

‘GOOD, BUT WEAK’

St. Barnabas was good, but he was not on that account perfect. He was good, but as a famous preacher said of another character in the Old Testament, ‘He was good, but weak.’ This, perhaps, will not surprise many people. To them, there is always a sort of connection between goodness and weakness, whereas there is no connection at all. Yet men may be good and weak.

I. St. Barnabas would certainly seem to have an element of weakness in his character, which came out in two ways:—

(a) First of all, in the matter of eating with the Gentiles. You will remember how at Antioch he and St. Peter, with others, forgot their own prejudices and customs and had boldly sat down to eat with the Gentile Christians; but when there came certain Jewish Christians, we are told that first of all St. Peter (who in many respects was notoriously weak) silently and gradually withdrew himself, and ate no more with them; and even St. Barnabas, says St. Paul with some indignation, ‘was carried away with their dissimulation.’

(b) And, secondly, his weakness came out in another and still more famous episode in his life—that which was connected with Mark. On one lonely journey, St. Paul and St. Barnabas determined to take with them Mark, the young cousin of Barnabas, who may have had a soft training, being the only son of a rich widow, living, perhaps, in a villa of Gethsemane outside Jerusalem. This young man, who had been brought up in considerable luxury, when the crisis of his life came, when he found himself face to face with the robbers and other unpleasant accompaniments of travel in Asia Minor in those days, losing heart, returned to Jerusalem. Then, later on, having, perhaps, gone through some silent struggle of his own, he offered himself again for the service, and St. Barnabas wished to take him, but St. Paul refused, and the quarrel waxed hot between them. Here St. Barnabas was weak. The young man had forfeited their confidence, but St. Barnabas said, like many others, peace at any price. So we even have here the beginning of a system known as nepotism, or the favouring of relations—the preference of kinsmen for this place or for that. So there came that great apostolic quarrel. And they parted, those two Apostles, and after this parting from St. Paul, St. Barnabas disappears altogether from the pages of sacred history, or remains the good-natured man.

II. Yet these are the important words which remain; ‘He was a good man.’—And his goodness was shown in more ways than one. There are three instances I would give you:—

(a) It was shown in the recognition of the work of the Holy Ghost among the Gentiles. It was a sign of goodness in St. Barnabas that he was able to put by his own prejudices; when he saw ‘the grace of God’ he was glad. It was all he cared about, ‘for he was a good man.’ There is one sign of his goodness, in letting his prejudices die before the grace of God.

(b) His goodness is seen in this—that he was a peacemaker. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Twice St. Barnabas saved St. Paul for the Christian Church. It was this gentle, good man, ‘full of the Holy Ghost,’ a peace-lover, who, in the first instance, when all were suspicious of this terrible persecutor, took him by the hand and brought him into the apostolic band. Let that be written down for St. Barnabas, that he served the Church by saving a greater man to serve it.

(c) There is the love of the brethren shown by a capacity for self-sacrifice. It is one of the earliest marks of the infant Church. It was one of the first acts which seems to attract the attention of the writer of the Acts of the Apostles. When he was speaking about the early days of the Church, he picked out one man: ‘And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.’ No cheap religion for this Barnabas. The love of the brethren had to be shown by self-sacrifice. And by self-sacrifice the history of the Church began, as with self-sacrifice it must go until the end. Here is always a sign of the love of the brethren, and of sincerity. Are men ready for any measure of self-sacrifice?

—Rev. H. R. Gamble.

Illustration

‘The merely good-natured man does very little, and, on the whole, gets very little thanks for what he does. It is the men who have principles to which they must stick, and for which, if necessary, they are prepared to die, who make a mark on their contemporaries and on history. Principles must prevail. Mere good-nature is no good in the end. The first thing is to do justice. You may remember some very notable words of a Psalm which says, “Thou, Lord, art merciful, because Thou rewardest every man according to his work.” The general notion of mercy is to reward men not according to their works. The better view is, “Thou, Lord, art merciful, because Thou art just.” ’