Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday after Trinity 2026

Towards the beginning of today’s Gospel we are presented with a list of the names of the twelve apostles. These are the members of Jesus’s circle who will have a particularly central role in sharing and subsequently enacting his mission. Much of the rest of today’s Gospel tells them how to do that, with both practical instructions and strong encouragement. The Twelve are a group, a body, constituted to be sent just as Jesus has been sent; but they are also individual names of particular people given authority to act as Jesus acts. Just a few verses earlier, Jesus reflects on the abundant richness of a harvest which really needs labourers. His followers are encouraged to pray that the Lord will send helpers. The answer to that prayer is them. 

Those twelve names we heard read today have ‘a past, a present, and a future’ as one New Testament scholar puts it. By the time Matthew’s Gospel was heard in the earliest Christian communities, these names would have resonated with a kind of heroic status. They were the first witnesses to Christ’s ministry and the first entrusted with its spread. Their number—twelve—equates to the twelve tribes of Israel, those Jewish communities historically set into a relationship of covenant with the Lord. The Twelve represent a continuity in that intimate relationship, now, through the life of the Church, opened to the whole world. Their proclamation—especially in Matthew’s Gospel—is that through Jesus’s ministry and teaching, the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. We remember the names of these key personnel in the Gospel drama which follows; Peter first, Judas last. Yet, both would betray Jesus in different ways in the scenes which are still to come. What we are to learn about the Twelve throughout the rest of the Gospel story does not necessarily inspire the reader with robust confidence! They are not exactly a lithe, highly trained team focused on grand strategy or KPIs.

Yet, we celebrate their names. We recall them in our calendars and call upon them in our prayers. We tell their stories. Each name reminds us that the Christian faith cannot be learned separately from those who embody it. In other words, Christian truth is not something that can be apprehended in theory or solely by ideas—the Gospel is not ideology. People transmit the Gospel, pointing not towards themselves but rather to the Kingdom of Heaven which has come near. It is both extraordinary and encouraging when we consider how this message was entrusted to this particular group of ordinary people. The social world of the first Christians was diverse and complex, but it is very clear that those who died for Christ were frequently from very ordinary backgrounds. We have many of their names in lists, not unlike the list we heard of the Twelve, which have entered the Church’s liturgy and other documents. We celebrate their names, each of us sharing with them in the dignity of baptism, the dignity of discipleship.

Julian the Apostate became Roman Emperor in 361AD. He was a nephew of the Emperor Constantine, and is regarded as the last non-Christian Emperor. During Julian’s reign he spearheaded a campaign to revive the old pagan religions, in part to prop up a disintegrating Roman Empire, and wrote against the people he called Galileans. Most of his writings have been lost to us, and can only been reconstructed from fragments or the responses of his opponents, but it is clear that he plays Jews and Christians off against each other, he dismisses the development of Christian doctrine, and particularly detested the early Christian practice of praying at the graves of the martyrs: ‘why do you grovel among tombs?’ he asks rhetorically in first book against the Galileans? Julian held in contempt what he saw as a kind of pseudo-religion emerging from a small locality on the shores of the Sea of Galilee against the universal pantheon of pagan gods which he celebrated. This Christian cult was not sophisticated, not a philosophy. Their beliefs were simply local beliefs. These Galileans held what he dismissed disdainfully as the ‘creed of fishermen.’ 

In one sense, he was right. The Christian Gospel is rooted in the witness of these earliest followers of Jesus. When we say, as we shall in a moment, that we believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, we are assenting to that witness, consciously placing ourselves and our own generation within the same waters as the Creed of the Fishermen. In this Eucharist it is as if our names are added to that list of those who have seen what Jesus is doing and who have heard his call to be sent out and engage in a mission which is his, not ours. 

Matthew tells us today, that the Good News is this, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven has come near.’ As that proclamation is made, extraordinary things will emerge, because that is what happens in Jesus’s orbit. There is a dynamism in today’s gospel, as this group of Galileans is sent out: moving through towns, travelling lightly, hauled before governors and kings, persecuted, moving again. Julian the Apostate was not entirely wrong—you could say that Christianity is not primarily a religion, but rather a life. The Gospel almost bursts with this sense that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near, a Kingdom into which we are invited. Christianity is an event to be experienced and participated in, the calling together of those who believe to partake in the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection as a community of individuals in loving communion. This way of seeing our faith calls us to a mode of existence to be lived and experienced, not firstly as a set of facts and propositions to be understood intellectually. That is not to say that doctrine and theology don’t matter—quite the opposite. Christian doctrine is there to give expression to this truth, to give shape to our lives and hopes, to how we structure our existence in the light of the truth revealed in Jesus Christ, that message committed to his followers. But Christian questions are questions of life and death, living and loving, healing and wholeness, reconciliation and renewal. 

Around a century after Julian the Apostate’s death, the historian Theodoret records the Emperor’s dying words: ‘Vicisti, Galilaee’—‘You have won, Galilean’ or ‘Galilean, you have conquered.’ This religion—this way of life—would indeed sweep across the Roman world and far beyond. But it emerged on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; it is indeed the Creed of Fishermen. These ordinary individuals, ‘without arms or charms of culture’, as W H Auden put it, noticed that the Kingdom of Heaven had come near in the life and teaching of Jesus, and went out with that message. Those Twelve, saw in Jesus not the triumph of ideas, but the possibilities of a whole new world emerging around them.

These great twelve names have a past, a present, and a future. A past in their historic context and identity, these Galileans. A present, as we remember them, as we celebrate their witness and worship with them now. A future in Christ’s ongoing ministry in the world until the end of time. They were the initial answer to that prayer that the Lord would send labourers into the harvest. Today, we too are the answer to that prayer; not just included in that future, but transmitting it, and living it.