The Feast of Saint Bartholomew
Preached at Saint Saviour’s Church, Pimlico, London
August 24, 2025
O Almighty and everlasting God, who didst give to thine apostle Bartholomew grace truly to believe and to preach thy Word: Grant, we beseech thee, unto thy Church to love what he believed and to preach what he taught; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Isaiah 43:8-13
Psalm 145.1-7
Acts 5:12-16
Luke 22:24-30
I was so excited that Saint Bartholomew’s Day fell this year on a Sunday and that I would be able to preach and celebrate the feast – doubly when we arranged that I would here with you today. For some reason, the idea of Saint Bartholomew and his feast is very appealing to me and, indeed, he has so many interesting associations in my imagination.
For example, we have the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when mobs of Parisian Roman Catholics ignited a series of violent attacks on Protestant Huguenots that lasted several weeks as it swept across France. Indeed, as towering a figure as Catherine de’ Medici herself may have started it all by encouraging her son Charles IX, after the his sister, Margaret, wed the protestant King Henry III of Navarre, later known as Henry IV of France – you know, the one who later became a Catholic on the principal that “Paris is worth a Mass.” And yet, for all that, we have drifted far from the subject at hand, Saint Batholomew, himself.
Let’s see. Yes! Saint Bartholomew is one of the principal figures right at the centre of Michelangelo’s monumental Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. There he is, just to the right below Our Lord himself, opposite Saint Lawrence, forming an anchor of the triangle that forms the heart of the whole painting. Here, Bartholomew looks up at Christ, holding a knife in his right hand and his own flayed skin in his left – the instrument of his martyrdom and its result. It is curious, however, that the presence of the saint can not be explained as a part of the thematic programme of the fresco, and it does not appear to have been specially requested by either Pope Clement VII, the original patron, or Paul III, the pope who saw its completion. The inclusion of Saint Lawrence, on the other hand, makes perfect sense on account of his significance to Clement’s family, the Medici, but we can find no such justification for Bartholomew’s appearance.
In fact, when examined carefully, Bartholomew’s presence can really only be explained by his martyrdom’s resonance with the story of Apollo and Marsyas, as told by Ovid, and the face on the saint’s husk bearing a striking resemblance to the artist himself. In the Renaissance, Marsyas was associated with “audacia, or daring,” a quality that Michelangelo embraced throughout his life, and yet he portrays his face not on the body of the handsome saint, but on that heap of flayed flesh. The painter both embraces the image of Marsyas as the one who created daring art – he was a musician who challenged Apollo – and of the one who paid a great price for it. There is also a whole literary connection with Dante’s Divine Comedy, that I won’t get into because, well, none of it has anything to do with Saint Bartholomew himself.(1)
And yet, my mind still swims with associations to the saint. One of my favourite artists and draughtsmen of the High Renaissance, Fra Bartolommeo, is named after him; ... but that only gives us another association with the saint’s name and Medici Florence. There are also great churches named for him, both here and in New York. These are important institutions that stand at the heart of the life of our two great cities – here, for about a thousand years, up at Smithfield by the Barbican, and in New York right on Park Avenue next to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. These facts, however, like all the others do not get us any closer to the question of why we celebrate Saint Bartholomew. And now all I have done is fill your head with images from history, art, and religion without getting to the man himself.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Bartholomew is an enigma. Even the authors of the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal feel this way. In the saint’s stanza of the hymn “By all your saints still striving,” the editors could only think to write, “Praise for your blest apostle / surnamed Bartholomew / we know not his achievements / but know that he is true.” (2) And I am beginning to think that this is, perhaps, the point.
So what do we know about Saint Bartholomew, really? He is mentioned by name four times in Scripture. He appears in each of the three Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke – at the point when, as Luke put it, Jesus “called his disciples and chose twelve of them whom he also names apostles” (Luke 6:14). Bartholomew is on the list every time, but without any comment, or epithet. We find his name again only in Acts when the apostles “returned to Jerusalem [after the Ascension, and] to the room upstairs where they were staying.” Here, Luke lists their names again, and tells us that they “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women...” (Acts 1:13). From a reading of the text, it is clear that the author intends for us to understand that he was among those present at Pentecost.
John makes no mention of a Bartholomew among the disciples. Some commentators, however, believe that he is to be identified with the Nathaniel who appears in the first chapter of John at the time Jesus is calling the disciples (1:42), and who is included in the list of apostles who witnessed the Risen Christ “show himself again to the disciples by the sea of Tiberias.” (21:2). (3)
The early Church Fathers add little to our understanding. The great historian of the Constantinian era, Eusebius tells us no more of his life, other than that he went to India and that, sometime between 150 and 200, a certain Panateus of Alexandria found there an Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew that the apostle had left behind (HE, 5.10.3). Bartholomew was also said to have been flayed alive at Albanopolis in Armenia. From there, many unhelpful legends arose, which you can find in the late medieval compendium of saints lives, The Golden Legend. Here we read a fanciful account of Bartholomew’s missionary activity in India; his martyrdom, which was said by some to have encompassed crucifixion, flaying, and beheading; and the miracles wrought by his intercession after his remains had been brought to Italy.
This, too, is all very interesting, but we are little further along. What then, can I say to you about Saint Bartholomew and what he might mean to us today? As I suggested above, though perhaps the point about him for us is that we do know very little of what precisely he did, and yet we remember him as one of the most prominent among the apostles. In today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus say to the disciples
The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table? But I am among you as one who serves.
The greatest servants of Our Lord are not the most famous, or wealthy or powerful. They are not kings or princes. “Let the greatest among you become the youngest, and the leader as one who serves,” Jesus tells them, as he is, himself, “among you as one who serves.”
On All Saints Day, we read that famous passage from Ecclesiasticus that begins, “Let us now praise famous men,” and that goes on for quite some time to tell us that among them, “there were those who ruled in their kingdoms, and were men renowned for their power, ... and proclaiming prophecies; leaders of the people ... wise in their words of instruction; those who composed musical tunes, and set forth verses in writing; [and] rich men furnished with resources.” We hear these words, and imagine all those saints whose lives have been catalogued, recorded, extolled at length, from apostles Peter, and James, and John, to Saint Paul, Catherine of Alexandra, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, and more.
I think, however, that we sometimes forget the last part of that reading. Here, the author continues,
And there are some who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived; they have become as though they had not been born, and so have their children after them. But these were men of mercy, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; their posterity will continue for ever, and their glory will not be blotted out. Their bodies were buried in peace, and their name lives to all generations.
Perhaps Bartholomew is the saint for these men and women, the details of whose specific deeds and accomplishments have been forgotten. Bartholomew was with Our Lord from the beginning. He went out and preached in Jesus’ name. He was present during the time of Our Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection, and stayed with his fellow apostles even after Jesus left them again at the Ascension. He was there when the Holy Spirit came to them at Pentecost, and he went out again to preach and teach, perhaps even to the ends of the earth, as he is remembered by Eusebius.
In the end, it does not matter whether or not he went to India, or if his remains somehow miraculously drifted across the Black and Mediterranean Seas all the way to the Island of Lipari off the coasts of Sicily. In the words we heard from Isaiah this morning, Bartholomew is one of those that the Lord proclaims as “my witnesses, ... / and my servant whom I have chosen, / that you may know and believe me / and understand that I am He.” He is counted among those by whom Luke in Acts said “signs and wonders were done among the people, [and who] the people held ... in high honour,” and through whose ministry “more than ever believers were added to the Lord.” This is how the Church remembers him, as one of the first to come to know who Jesus was, and to do his work in the world in the age after the Resurrection and Ascension.
Bartholomew stands for all those whose names we do not know, and the details of whose work is lost to time, yet who were faithful to the end, who performed the works of love even when there was no one to write about it. Because of him, and so many others, we know that God looks with favour on the works of love we do every day and that are not seen or accounted for, for which we do not receive a pat on the back or words of thanks. Bartholomew is Great because even though we know little of his deeds, we know that because of his life of service to God in Christ, service to the working out of the Kingdom of God, he is counted among the greatest of the Saints. Bartholomew gives us hope and courage and reassurance as we continue to live out our lives as the Body of Christ in the world.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
The Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, 15 August 2025
Barnstable, Massachusetts
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume
1. These questions are explored at length by Bernadine Barnes in her Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: The Renaissance Response, The Discovery Series, 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 106-107.
2. The Hymnal 1982, H-232.
3. For example see the entry on Bartholomew in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church.