Homily for Tuesday, 25 July 2017‒ Feast of St. James

Tuesday of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 4:7-15; Psalm 126:1bc-2ab, 2cd-3, 4-5, 6; Matthew 20:20-28

Would most if not all of us not think that, for this Feast of St. James, one of Jesus’ closest friends and most important of his twelve Apostles, a reading more flattering toward this great Apostle might have been chosen? After all, there are Gospel readings that cast St. James in a better light than the one we have heard this morning. The Transfiguration is first on my mind, or even Jesus’ choice of the Apostles in which, after Jesus calls Peter and Andrew, before he calls anybody else to be his Apostles, he calls James and John, “the sons of Zebedee.”

We hear today of the favour asked of Jesus by “the mother of the sons of Zebedee,” for her sons. Matthew’s Gospel says that she kneels before Jesus only to ask him for this strange favour: “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.”

Understandably, the other Apostles feel slighted by James’ and John’s mother’s request for their sons that they be seated in God’s kingdom, one at Jesus’ right and the other at his left. But is it not curious that the other ten Apostles become angry not at James’ and John’s mother who asks for special treatment for her sons, but at James and John themselves? Maybe this is because the Apostles appreciated how difficult it would have been to be the mother of an Apostle. By experience with my own parents, I know how great (and often difficult) a vocation in itself it can be to be the parent of a seminarian or a priest today, or the mother or father of a married person, for that matter. But imagine being the mother of an Apostle!

An Apostle in Jesus’ time was not a calling with great job security. In fact it was almost a death sentence, if we consider that Jesus’ Apostles, except for John, are traditionally said to have been martyred, with St. James the first martyr among them. And so we might empathize somewhat better with James’ and John’s mother’s request for them.

To this request, though, Jesus responds in the only way he is able: “To sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.” If anything, today’s Gospel reading exposes a frequent and age-old temptation in our world and in our Church not to serve before being served, but to look first to our own security, our own comfort, and our own ambition.

Knowing this temptation in James and John; in his other Apostles; in us, Jesus warns them quite harshly: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,” but “it will not be so among you.” Regrettably, this has been so over the more than two thousand years of Christian history, more often than we would like to admit.

To be an Apostle; to be a Christian, living up to the call of our Baptism, is to imitate Jesus in striving to serve before being served; in giving of our lives in service toward one another. This imitation of our Lord, as St. James and his fellow Apostles knew all too well, is only possible with God’s grace.