Saint Andrew is the patron saint of missionaries and of Scotland
Posted in Bible, Missionaries, Religion, Saints, Scotland on Tuesday, 6 August 2013
This edited article about Saint Andrew originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 360 published on 7 December 1968.
Saint Andrew has been regarded as the patron of Christian missions since very early times. The reason for this is not hard to understand; it arises from what happened when Jesus invited Andrew to become one of His chosen followers, the twelve apostles.
Andrew was the first of the several fishermen of Galilee whom Jesus chose as His closest companions.
It was during a talk between Jesus and himself on the seashore that Andrew had an idea which marked him out from all the others. Instead of accepting the invitation to visit Jesus at His home, Andrew decided that this meeting was too good to keep to himself. He wanted to share the new friend he had made, so he slipped quietly away and found his brother, Simon Peter.
This pleased Jesus very much, for Peter was one of the fishermen whom Jesus most wanted as one of His followers, and he was eventually to become one of His three closest friends.
Although Andrew never became as important a leader as his brother, he is remembered especially for the example he set of what a Christian ought to do.
Instead of keeping his meeting with Jesus a secret, he did the very thing which eventually made Christianity into a world religion: he went and found someone else to join the band of disciples. As the Gospel of St. John tells us (Chapter 1, verse 41) “He first findeth his own brother, Simon.”
Andrew is mentioned several times in other parts of the story of Jesus. Once a great crowd followed Jesus into the desert, and there He fed them in a marvellous way, by sharing a small boy’s picnic among all the hungry people (St. John’s Gospel, chapter 6, verses 5-14). It was Andrew who discovered this boy with the “five barley loaves and two small fishes” which Jesus shared among the crowd.
It would appear that Andrew was always ready to bring people to Jesus and to be then content to leave Him to say or do what He thought best for them. On another occasion, Andrew introduced some enquiring Greeks to Jesus (St. John’s Gospel, chapter 12, verse 22). In fact, he was the ideal missionary, and that is why he was chosen by the Church as the patron saint of all missionary work.
It is much more difficult to understand how or why St. Andrew was adopted as the patron saint of Scotland. All that can be said is that the Scots recognised him as such no later than A.D. 750.
Traditions of the 3rd century connect Andrew with missionary work in Turkey and Russia, and the diagonal cross known as the cross of St. Andrew is said to be in the shape of that on which Andrew was martyred in A.D. 70 at the Greek city of Patras, to which he had also taken the Christian faith.
“St. Andrew’s Tide”, on and around 30th November, is observed all over the world as a time of special prayer for the missionary work of the Church, inspired by the memory of this first follower of Jesus who had the gift of bringing others to Him.