In Acts 13, Luke brings us back to Antioch — third city of the Roman Empire, capital of the wealthy province of Syria — where a community of very different men and women is gathered in prayer. It is here, amid the ordinary business of worship, that the Holy Spirit speaks: Barnabas and Saul are to be set apart for the work to which God has called them.
There is something worth pausing over in Barnabas's response. He was, Luke tells us, a man full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and he was the one who had first brought Paul to Antioch and vouched for him before the wary community in Jerusalem. He had every reason to feel that this was his work, his community. Yet when the Spirit asked him to leave it, he did not resist, and he did not suggest that someone else go in his place. He simply obeyed.
Before Paul and Barnabas were sent, the community fasted and prayed. This detail matters more than it might seem. St. Josemaría Escrivá once summarized the proper order of any apostolic undertaking: “First, prayer; then, atonement; in the third place, very much in the third place, action.”
We live in an age that reaches instinctively for planning and projects, but the early Church knew a different order — prayer and self-denial first, and only then, action. It was only after this fasting and prayer that the community laid hands on the two missionaries, an act recalling Moses laying hands on Joshua, investing him with authority that "all the congregation of the sons of Israel may obey."
It is worth noticing, too, who did the laying on of hands. Those who commissioned Paul and Barnabas were far less prominent figures than the two men they sent out — much as the man who baptized Paul was himself obscure. The sacraments were never about the reputation of the minister. They are instruments through which God's grace works, regardless of who holds the human office.
Luke, throughout his Gospel and this second volume, likes to pair figures together. Earlier, we watched Peter and John work side by side, with John quietly deferring to Peter, who became the Church's spokesman. Now, a new pair emerges: Paul and Barnabas. It was Barnabas, after all, who had introduced Paul to the Jerusalem community and brought him to Antioch in the first place — by every natural measure, the senior partner. Yet once the two set out together, it was Barnabas who stepped back and let Paul take the lead. St. John Chrysostom marveled at this: “Look how Barnabas gives way to Paul. How should it be otherwise, to him whom he brought from Tarsus, just as John gives way to Peter on all occasions, even though he commands more respect? Indeed, it was to the common advantage that they both looked.”
That is a fair description of what true apostolic friendship looks like. It does not compete for the higher place. It rejoices in whatever gifts the other brings, because both are looking toward the same end — the good of souls, not the size of one's own role.
It is also in this chapter that Saul becomes Paul. The name change follows the same pattern we have already seen with Simon becoming Peter and Joseph becoming Barnabas: a new name marking a new commission. From this point on, Paul's life belongs entirely to the mission for which God has claimed him — as, indeed, do the lives of Peter and Barnabas. None of them lives for themselves any longer.
Soon after, Paul confronts the false prophet Bar-Jesus, also called Elymas, striking him with the same blindness Paul himself had once received on the road to Damascus. Chrysostom notes the fittingness of this: Paul applies to Elymas the very remedy that had once converted him, hoping the same medicine might work a second conversion.
The chapter closes with Paul's great discourse in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch, where he retraces the whole of salvation history — the election of Israel, the Exodus, the judges, the kings — and shows how every line of that history converges on Christ. Chrysostom observes something delicate in how Paul tells this story: he passes over Israel's failures, dwelling instead on God's kindness. His purpose is not to shame his listeners but to open their hearts, trusting that once a soul perceives what God has done for it, it will respond in faith.
The sermon reaches its climax in the proclamation of the Resurrection and the forgiveness of sins: "By him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the Law of Moses" (Acts 13:39). The Law can diagnose our condition, but it cannot cure it. Only the grace won by the risen Christ heals us at the root.
When some among the synagogue turned against them, Paul and Barnabas "turned to the Gentiles" — a phrase worth noticing for what it does not say. It is not a door slammed shut but a door held open elsewhere. Paul does not abandon his own people; he simply widens the field of his labour. And in this, as in every step of the chapter, Luke wants us to see clearly that Paul and Barnabas prevail not by force of personality, but because they are carried by the Holy Spirit who called them, and upheld by a community that had prayed and fasted for them before they ever left home.