25 July 2022
Feast of Saint James, Apostle
We celebrate Saint James, an Apostle’s whose own growth is displayed in the New Testament canon. Today’s Gospel reveals an early naivety, an impulse to treat the Christian vocation as a matter of ascending steps on a ladder of prestige. Jesus uses the request from the mother of James and John as a teaching moment. The message they need to hear is love will never lord itself over others but always serve. Worldly aspirations incentivize us to increase; the love of Christ willingly decreases, stoops ever further down the cavernous depths of human misery.
A verse in the Acts of the Apostles laconically informs us that James was put to death by the sword at an order of King Herod, becoming the first of the Apostles to be martyred. With that in mind, we can imagine the Gospel scene: James feeling the rebuke from Jesus, only to then feel the seed of a desire to truly give his life over. The desire to drink the chalice from which Jesus drank was itself something Jesus taught him.
This feast encourages us because it shows us how clumsy petitions at the foot of Christ, even misunderstandings of what He wants from us, can, with growth in love, help us become saints.