Now, I suppose I need not spend much time in massing together, in brief
outline, the characteristics of Barnabas. He was a Levite, belonging to
the sacerdotal tribe, and perhaps having some slight connection with
the functions of the Temple ministry. He was not a resident in the Holy
Land, but a Hellenistic Jew, a native of Cyprus, who had come into
contact with heathenism in a way that had beaten many a prejudice out
of him. We first hear of him as taking a share in the self-sacrificing
burst of brotherly love, which, whether it was wise or not, was noble.
'He, having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the
Apostles' feet.' And, as would appear from a reference in one of Paul's
letters, he had to support himself afterwards by manual labour.
Then the next thing that we hear of him is that, when the young man who
had been a persecuting Pharisee, and the rising hope of the
anti-Christian party, all at once came forward with some story of a
vision which he had seen on the road to Damascus, and when the older
Christians were suspicious of a trick to worm himself into their
secrets by a pretended conversion, Barnabas, with the generosity of an
unsuspicious nature, which often sees deeper into men than do
suspicious eyes, was the first to cast the aegis of his recognition
round him. In like manner, when Christianity took an entirely
spontaneous and, to the Church at Jerusalem, rather unwelcome new
development and expansion, when some unofficial believers, without any
authority from headquarters, took upon themselves to stride clean
across the wall of separation, and to speak of Jesus Christ to blank
heathens, and found, to the not altogether gratified surprise of the
Christians at Jerusalem, 'that on the Gentiles also was poured out the
gift of the Holy Ghost,' it was Barnabas who was sent down to look into
this surprising new phenomenon, and we read that 'when he came and saw
the grace of God, he was glad.' The reason why he rejoiced over the
manifestation of the grace of God in such a strange form was because
'he was a good man,' and his goodness recognised goodness in others and
was glad at the work of the Lord. The new condition of affairs sent him
to look for Paul, and to put him to work. Then we find him set apart to
missionary service, and the leader of the first missionary band, in
which he was accompanied by his friend Saul. He acquiesced frankly, and
without a murmur, in the superiority of the junior, and yielded up
pre-eminence to him quite willingly. The story of that missionary
journey begins 'Barnabas and Saul,' but very soon it comes to be 'Paul
and Barnabas,' and it keeps that order throughout. He was an older man
than Paul, for when at Lystra the people thought that the gods had come
down in the likeness of men; Barnabas was Jupiter, and Paul the
quick-footed Mercury, messenger of the gods. He was in the work before
Paul was thought of, and it must have taken a great deal of goodness to
acquiesce in 'He must increase and I must decrease.' Then came the
quarrel between them, the foolish fondness for his runaway nephew John
Mark, whom he insisted on retaining in a place for which he was
conspicuously unfitted. And so he lost his friend, the confidence of
the Church, and his work. He sulked away into Cyprus; he had his
nephew, for whom he had given up all these other things. A little fault
may wreck a life, and the whiter the character the blacker the smallest
stain upon it.
We do not hear anything more of him. Apparently, from one casual
allusion, he continued to serve the Lord in evangelistic work, but the
sweet communion of the earlier days, and the confident friendship with
the Apostle, seem to have come to an end with that sharp contention. So
Barnabas drops out of the rank of Christian workers. And yet 'he was a
good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of faith.'
Now I have spent more time than I meant over this brief outline of the
sort of character here pointed at. Let me just gather into one or two
sentences what seem to me to be the lessons of it. The first is this,
that the tap-root of all goodness is reference to God and obedience to
Him. People tell us that morality is independent of religion. I admit
that many men are better than their creeds, and many men are worse than
their creeds; but I would also venture to assert that morality is the
garment of religion; the body of which religion is the soul; the
expression of religion in daily life. And although I am not going to
say that nothing which a man does without reference to God has any
comparative goodness in it, or that all the acts which are thus void of
reference to Him stand upon one level of evil, I do venture to say that
the noblest deed, which is not done in conscious obedience to the will
of God, lacks its supreme nobleness. The loftiest perfection of conduct
is obedience to God. And whatever excellence of self-sacrifice,
'whatsoever things lovely and of good report,' there may be, apart from
the presence of this perfect motive, those deeds are imperfect. They do
not correspond either to the whole obligations or to the whole
possibilities of man, and, therefore, they are beneath the level of the
highest good. Good is measured by reference to God.
Then, further, let me remark that one broad feature which characterises
the truest goodness is the suppression of self. That is only another
way of saying the same thing as I have been saying. It is illustrated
for us all through this story of Barnabas. Whosoever can say, 'I think
not of myself, but of others; of the cause; of the help I can give to
men; and I lay not goods only, nor prejudices only, nor the pride of
position and the supremacy of place only at the feet of God, but I lay
down my whole self; and I desire that self may be crucified, that God
may live in me,'--he, and only he, has reached the height of goodness.
Goodness requires the suppression of self.
Further, note that the gentler traits of character are pre-eminent in
Christian goodness. There is nothing about this man heroic or
exceptional. His virtues are all of the meek and gracious sort--those
which we relegate sometimes to an inferior place in our estimates.
These things make but a poor show by the side of some of the tawdry
splendours of what the vulgar world calls virtues. It requires an
educated eye to see the harmony of the sober colouring of some great
painter. A child, a clown, a vulgar person--and there are such in all
ranks--will prefer flaring reds and blues and yellows heaped together
in staring contrast. A thrush or a blackbird is but a soberly clad
creature by the side of macaws and paroquets; but the one has a song
and the others have only a screech. The gentle virtues are the truly
Christian virtues--patience and meekness and long-suffering and
sympathy and readiness to efface oneself for the sake of God and of men.
So there is a bit of comfort for us commonplace, humdrum people, to
whom God has only given one or two talents, and who can never expect to
make a figure before men. We may be little violets below a stone, if we
cannot be flaunting hollyhocks and tiger lilies. We may have the beauty
of goodness in us after Christ's example, and that is better than to be
great.
Barnabas was no genius. He was not even a genius in goodness; he did
not strike out anything original and out of the way. He seems to have
been a commonplace kind of man enough; but 'he was a good man.' And the
weakest and the humblest of us may hope to have the same thing said of
us, if we will.
And then, note further, that true goodness, thank God! does not exclude
the possibility of falling and sinning. There is a black spot in this
man's history; and there are black spots in the histories of all
saints. Thank God! the Bible is, as some people would say, almost
brutally frank in telling us about the imperfections of the best. Very
often imperfections are the exaggerations of characteristic goodnesses,
and warn us to take care that we do not push, as Barnabas did, our
facility to the point of criminal complicity with weaknesses; and that
we do not indulge, instead of strenuously rebuking when need is. Never
let our gentleness fall away, like a badly made jelly, into a trembling
heap, and never let our strength gather itself together into a
repulsive attitude, but guard against the exaggeration of virtue into
vice.
Remember that whilst there may be good men who sin, there is One entire
and flawless, in whom all types of excellence do meet, and who alone of
humanity can front the verdict of the world, and has fronted it now for
nineteen centuries, with the question upon His lips, which none have
dared to answer, 'Which of you convinceth Me of sin?'