Today is the Feast of St. Barnabas, an early Christian missionary who, on becoming a follower of Jesus, sold some property and donated the proceeds to the Apostles for their work. Although today Paul is better known than Barnabas, it was Barnabas who introduced Paul to the leaders in Jerusalem, and who brought him from Tarsus to Antioch where for the first time the mission was being preached to the Greeks and where the name "Christian" was first given to the followers of Jesus.

This was an important recognition of the fact that Christianity was a separate entity, and not just a branch of Judaism. At Antioch, under the leadership of Barbanas and Saul, the Christians first felt free to operate independently of Judaism, yet this first gentile community maintained a very close relationship with and even contributed financially to the mother church at Jerusalem.

Barnabas was a good example of the kind of missionary Jesus expected His followers to be. In Matthew's Gospel, He instructed the disciples on their role as missionaries. They were not just to preach the arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but they were also to prove its arrival by performing the miracles Isaiah had prophesied for the Messianic age.