LIVES OF THE SAINTS

He first found his own brother Simon, and said to him, We have found the Messiah.

John 1:41

St. Andrew

Andrew was a fisherman of Bethsaida and, according to the Gospel of John, a disciple of John the Baptist before he was called by Christ. He is called the First-Called because he was the first of the Twelve to follow Jesus, and because of what he did the moment he had: he went to find his brother Simon and brought him also, saying, We have found the Messiah. That same instinct appears wherever Andrew is named in the Gospels. It is Andrew who brings forward the boy with five loaves and two fish before the feeding of the multitude, and Andrew to whom the Greeks come when they wish to see Jesus. He is the apostle who brings others to Christ.

After Pentecost, tradition sends him north and west, around the Black Sea, through Scythia and Thrace, and to the Greek town of Byzantium that would one day become Constantinople. For founding the Church there he is honored as the first bishop and patron of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the mother church of the Orthodox world, and our own. His preaching is remembered as far as Georgia and the lands that became Ukraine and Russia, which is why so many nations honor him as their first apostle.

He was martyred at Patras, in the Peloponnese, on a cross in the shape of an X. Tradition holds that he asked to be bound to it rather than nailed, so that his dying would last longer and he could continue to preach from it to the crowd, which he did for days. That X-shaped cross still bears his name, and his relics are venerated at Patras to this day.

In the icon Andrew is shown as an old man with a high brow and windblown grey hair, holding a scroll. He is honored across the Orthodox world, and for us he is nearer still: the brother who met Christ and at once went to bring someone with him. The Church has grown that way ever since, one person finding another and saying, come and see.