The Feast of St. James the Apostle, 2010

Text: Matthew 20:20-28

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“Great in the Kingdom”

The Scriptural basis of our sequence hymn this morning is a passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the author reminds us that “we are surrounded by so a great cloud of witness,” whose presence and testimony is the reason that we are to “lay aside every weight, and the sin that so easily ensnares us, and [to] run with endurance the race that is set before us.” Nothing should keep us, then, from being grateful for the saints and from honoring them, from taking encouragement from their faith and following their godly example. And here we’ve come this morning to the Feast of St. James the Apostle. So Happy St. James’ Day!

Now, the New Testament has many Jameses, so I thought we should begin by getting them straight. First, there’s James called “the Just,” Jesus’ brother. We read about him in the Book of Acts, where he appears to be the overseer of the original church in Jerusalem—its first bishop. Thanks to his episcopal diplomacy, when a bitter controversy about the circumcision of Gentile Christians arose, he lead the church to impose “no irksome restrictions” upon the new converts. This was the James who wrote the epistle of St. James in the New Testament. Tradition has it that he was martyred by being thrown down from a pinnacle of the temple. Well, James the Just is not our James today.

Next, there’s James, the son of Alpheus, one of the original twelve apostles. We traditionally call him James the Less, maybe because we know only that much about him—far less than any of the other Jameses. He is remembered in the church calendar on May 1 together with the apostle Philip. I only remember that May 1^st is Sts. Philip and James’ Day because that was the day I was ordained to the deaconate. Well, James the Less is not our James either.

Finally, we come to the other apostle James. In the gospels he is introduced as one of the sons of the old fisherman Zebedee. John is his brother, and both are given by Jesus the nickname “Boanarges”—Sons of Thunder”— probably on account of their fervent and tempestuous dispositions. Remember, it was James and John who wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans for not receiving Jesus on his journey. It’s James and John who declare in our reading this morning that they’re willing and able to drink the cup Jesus is about to drink, referring to his suffering and cross. They’re zealots, but they don’t know what they’re talking about half of the time. This is our James. In subsequent tradition he is called James the Greater, probably because, along with Peter and his brother John, he becomes part of the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. It was Peter, James, and John alone who were allowed into the room with Jesus and witness Him raise the little girl back to life. It was Peter, James and John alone who went up the mountain with Jesus and witnessed His Transfiguration. So he’s James the Great. Big James, in distinction from Little James the son of Alphaeus.

James was one of the first four disciples Jesus called. He was a principal in the family fishing business that he and his brother suddenly abandoned when Jesus came by one day and said “follow me.” Off they went, leaving old Zebedee right there in the boat by himself. And it looks as if they may have taken Mom with them. At least she’s with them in our gospel lesson today as Jesus and the disciples begin their final trek up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

The scene unfolds immediately after Jesus announces for the third time that He’s going up to Jerusalem to suffer and die. The implications of such a grim prediction seem to have bounced right off both mother and boys, for it was only a split second later that (either because they put her up to it, or because she took it upon herself) she tried to pin Jesus down about the positions of power her sons might expect to be granted in the new world order he was sure to establish, after he conquered his enemies in the Holy City. “Assure me,” she says to Jesus, with her boys in tow, “that in your kingdom these two will sit at your right and left hands.”

Well you can’t blame a mother for trying, but she couldn’t have been further off the mark. She, and more importantly James and John themselves, had completely misjudged the kind of power Jesus would display in Jerusalem, the nature of the kingdom He would establish, and the means by which He would come into His kingdom. They also succumbed to the human desire to cash in on celebrity, to ride to the top on another person’s coattails. As I like to describe one particular person who road the coattails of one very famous civil rights activist in the sixties, and now tries to get every photo-op he can possibly get, standing next to the leaders of the world: he’s a political ambulance-chaser. And that’s sort of where James and John are at this point—seeking to derive power for themselves by proximity to the real star; seeking Christian celebrity and power. (How does one become a “Christian celebrity,” anyway? Isn’t that kind of oxymoronic? You would think so from our passage today.) Anyway, the other disciples certainly saw it that way. They saw it as a power grab, on James and John’s part, and it infuriated them.

Their anger was hardly righteous, however. It did not arise from a commitment to the sort of servant leadership Jesus had been preaching. It stemmed from the same misunderstanding that afflicted the Sons of Thunder—Mama Thunder, too—from the same ambition, from the same envy, and from an indignant egalitarianism. “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t Jesus say something about twelve thrones? Who made these guys better than the rest of us? Who says they get more power?” See, if James and John are allowed to skip to the front of line for glory, the others might never get what they (and we?) really long for: a chance to be on top and lord it over the world. They all wanted to be great in the kingdom. They all—and isn’t it true that we all—want to be somebody.

Another preacher put it this way:

“We are all trying to get somewhere in this life and, although we may envision that destination in different ways, for the most part, where we are trying to get could be described as “ahead.” We may not have lofty aspirations but we’re willing to go anywhere as long as it’s forward. We may not be particularly driven, but we would still like to work our way up closer to the front of the line. We may not consider ourselves social climbers but we would rather sit closer to the head table that to the kitchen…We may not be notably ambitious, but if there is a ladder of success, we would prefer not to go down. Which is to say, by the standards of today’s gospel, we’ve got it all wrong.

“In India long ago,” he goes on to say, “there was an event called The Slow Cycling Race. When the gun sounded, instead of the usual mayhem at the start of a big event, there was calm. The contestants did not burst out of the gate, pedaling furiously, but moved as slow as possible along a rather short track, only a few yards long. The most skilled “racers” sat immobile for long periods of time. It turns out that the goal of this race was to come in last. Now, if you didn’t know those rules, you would go to the starting line and take off fast as soon as you heard the gun. You’d leave everyone else in the dust and break the tape at the finish with no one else in sight. But you would not hear any applause. There’d by no winner’s podium or champagne! You would have come in dead last. You’d have lost the race. Or, from a different perspective, you’d have won the wrong race.”

That’s the sad possibility we all face: that we might win the wrong race, or that we might seek to win the kingdom race by the world’s rules. See, most of us are in life’s race to finish first, but Jesus seems to have been in it to come in last. We’re always aiming up, but Jesus seems always to be aiming down. We want to get ahead of the line, but he’s always going to the rear and calling us to go there with Him. And there it is—the mark of the true disciple, the measure of true greatness, the vexing little paradox of the Christian faith: if you want to be great, be small; if you want to rise, go down; if you want to be first, be last.

Jesus program for greatness in the kingdom is one of downward mobility. “Whoever would be great among you, let him be your servant,” He said. You’ve got to be willing to climb down the ladder of success, as the world sees it, to rise to the level of greatness as Christ sees it. But going down is going up. Jesus does affirm that there is such a thing as greatness in the kingdom. There will be those sitting on His right hand and His left. There will be degrees of authority and power in heaven. But the greatest Ruler in Heaven is the greatest Servant there ever was, and those who will rise to the first and second places in the kingdom will do so not because they were great by the world’s standards, or even by how the Church judges the greatness of the saints, but because they were great at being least and last for the sake of the Church and for the sake of Christ’s kingdom. Who do imagine will sit at Christ’s right and left hands? Peter and Paul, the greatest of the apostles? According to this Gospel, I’m not sure they will be. When Jesus did come into His kingdom there was a man who was raised up with Him on his right hand, one who drank the same cup He drank, and it wasn’t Peter or Paul, or even James or John. They all had to learn from a thief what it would mean and what it would cost to be great in the kingdom.

As Henri Nouwen once wrote, “It turns out that when we are not angling up and beyond others, when we are not pushing them out of the way on our own driven path to the front of the line, when we are willing to go down a rung or remain at the rear, not only are we blessed to find Jesus waiting for us in those lower places—away in a manger, or washing our feet –we also finally find each other.” That’s why we need to seek to be downwardly mobile; that’s why we need to seek to be last and lowest; that we may be blessed to be with Jesus and His saints.

May it be so for you and me on this Feast of St. James, who (as our reading from Acts recounted) underwent judicial murder by the “higher-ups” of the religious hierarchy, and finally did drink the cup Jesus promised He would drink, and finally thereby become great in the kingdom of heaven. +