The Church celebrates the feast of St Andrew by reading the passage from St Matthew which records how Jesus called him along with the other three prominent Apostles. In St John's Gospel, Andrew is the one who first brought Peter to Jesus. In many instances John's Gospel is closer to historical reality than that the Synoptics. It is quite possible, then, that Andrew and another disciple of John the Baptist (John the Son of Zebedee?) did have an initial encounter with Jesus that eventually led to the introduction of others [Peter, James] to Jesus. Nothing in the Synoptic Gospel suggests definitively that Jesus called His first four disciples the very first time He met them. Indeed, it is far more likely that they and Jesus knew each other before that day of grace when He called them. This does not take from the significance of that day of grace. It rather affirms the mystery of the Incarnation, whereby grace comes to us in the ordinariness of daily life, and where an initial human attraction to Jesus can be raised to a higher level by the grace of God.