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James, Brother of God
H o m i l y G r i t s
St James of Jerusalem, Martyr
Brother of our Lord Jesus Christ
October 23, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Grant, O God, that, following the example of your servant James the Just,
brother of our Lord, your Church may give itself continually to prayer
and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity; through
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Acts 15: 12-22A After they finished speaking, James replied, Brothers and
Sisters, Listen to me.
Psalm 1 - Beatus vir
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the
gospel that I preached to you.
Matthew 13:54-58 Are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and
Jude?
"Surp Hagop" means "Saint James" in Armenian, so I learned from Karen
Armstrong's "One City, Three Faiths". The Armenians have lived in
Jerusalem since the 4th century, but in 1070 bought a church building on
Mt. Zion which had been built by the Georgian monk Prochore some 40 years
earlier. In its main shrine was the head of St. James the Pillar, Jesus'
Brother and Apostle who had been beheaded in Jerusalem in `62 C.E., and
under the high altar was the tomb of James the Tzaddik, the first "Bishop
of Jerusalem" and head of the Christian community which had never
worshipped Jesus as divine, and where believers continued to be Jews as
well as Jesus' disciples. This James also is believed to have been the
Lord's brother and was known as The Righteous One. He was reputed for
his good relations with Pharisees and was respected in the Qumran
Community. The Jerusalem believers of which he was the leader worshipped
in the Temple every day, and kept their Jewish customs. (It was in
Antioch, not in Jerusalem, that Jesus' disciples were first called
"Christians.") James presided at the Council of Jerusalem--recognized
later as the Church's first general Council--and issued at its close the
final decree that "My judgment is that we should impose no irksome
restrictions on the Gentiles who are turning to God." In effect this
meant that the requirement of circumcision would be waived. (Centuries
later Muslims would continue the practice, though it is not listed as one
of the Pillars of Islam.) But the momentous decision to waive the duty
to circumcise all males has probably had no equal in the history of the
Church until the acts of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church
in our own lifetime, permitting the ordination of women to the
priesthood and episcopacy, and of Gay men and women as well, as
personified in Gene Robinson, whose election to be Bishop of New
Hampshire it has now confirmed.
No wonder such a tumult has followed, which many now claim, almost
gleefully, will cause a schism in Anglicanism. It is obvious that the
great schism in world religions over whether Gays and Lesbians are human
beings is still not healed. But these actions of the little Episcopal
Church's General Convention now, are prophetic actions which will ring
down the years and centuries to come as fully as significant as the acts
of the Council in Jerusalem at the end of the apostolic age. They indeed
signify the beginning of a new apostolic age, and we shall all be
credited for having been present at the foundations.
Many of Jesus' family and friends were believed to have fled to Europe
after his murder, so that as St Peter is believed to have been crucified
in Rome, and St Paul, being a Roman citizen, properly beheaded there,
so Mary Magdalene is believed to have settled comfortably in the south of
France and Joseph of Arimeathea is believed to have gone to England and
been buried in Glastonbury. James, the Lord's brother, was thought in
this version to have gone to Spain and to have been buried at
Compostela. There are various stories of Jesus having a twin brother,
and in some of them, James is said to have been the twin, so having his
body as a prize relic was the next best thing to having the True Cross.
Compostela became the holiest place for pilgrimages in Europe for
centuries--and it was at "the ends of the earth", the extreme limit of
the Empire in its day, which made for extensive holiday travel.
After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE the followers of the Way
stayed on in what was then called Aelia Capitolina until the Bar Kokkba
revolt in 135 C.E., when Rome expelled every circumcised male from
Jerusalem. Only non Jewish Gentile males now remained and from then on
were absorbed into the Great Church which was becoming Hellenized in its
theology and thought of Jesus now as the Logos, the Incarnate Word,
rather than denominated only as Jewish Messiah. The Armenians who
bought the Georgian church in 1070 were Monophysites, those who believe
that Christ has only one nature--the Divine, and no human nature. They
have their own "quarter" of Jerusalem to this day. Having human
natures, the Monophysites themselves reproduce but they do not
proselytize, as do the rest of us who believe we have more divine
natures, so there are fewer of them. .
So always remembered in Christian tradition as the first bishop of
Jerusalem and believed for years to have been author of a canonical
epistle, in the Orthodox Church, his feast day is called "James, the
Brother of God" and is marked by a special liturgy, celebrated on no
other occasion. But next to the towering apostles Peter and Paul,
James has always been shy among Protestants, the one epistle attributed
to him has been ignored and burdened by Martin Luther's slander of it as
an epistle of "straw", and as if to add injury to his insult, the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States does not observe his
feast day nor even name him in their Kalendar
But Josephus writes of him in his Antiquities, Book 20 Chapter 9, where
he has the following entry: "Concerning Albinus under whose
Procuratorship James was slain":
" But this younger Ananus, who took the high priesthood, was a bold man
in his temper, and very insolent; he thought he had now a proper
opportunity . . . Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road;
so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the
brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some
others, and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of
the law, he delivered them to be stoned. " So Josephus, no Christian
apologist, nevertheless finds this to be judicial murder.
Eusebius, the early church historian, records the martyrdom of "James,
the brother of the Lord" in his Ecclesiastical History (2.23). Recently
we all got our hopes up for James' popularity when Israeli antique
dealers claimed to have found an ancient inscription on a burial box with
his name on it, and it travelled around the museum circuit courtesy of
the Israeli government but it has now finally turned out to be a shrewd
and skilled forgery.
Jerome thought that James was a "cousin" of Jesus, and in the Eastern
Church it has been generally believed they were half-brothers, 'though
the liturgies are of course not entitled "James, Half-Brother of God."
Eusebius the Church historian quotes from the earlier Hegesippus, who
said James was called "the Just"-- for he was a holy man, who fasted, did
not cut his hair nor oil his body, and was much at prayer. According to
this version, James was taken to the pinnacle of the temple and thrown to
the pavement and beaten to death with clubs. Today as I was writing
this, the garbage truck passed by the Casa, and a rat jumped from it as
the driver stopped and rang the truck's train bell to announce his
coming. The rat ran straight for the house, through the open front door
and into the library. Carlos and Enrique, our house-men, summoned by the
train-bell to carry out the rubbish, grabbed clubs and thrashed around
the floor under the bookshelves till they cornered him and cudgeled him
to a bloody end on the tile floor. They picked him up and flang him out
of the house to the gutter, where he lay dead as a dormouse awaiting
portage to carry him away. Then I thanked the lads , tipped them,
apologized to the rat, and went back to read of the martyrdom of James
of Jerusalem by cudgeling, of which I had just seen an example. Not a
pretty sight.
The name James was a common name in New Testament times. Several people
bearing that name are mentioned in the New Testament. James, the son of
Zebedee, and brother of the apostle John, was put to death by Herod
Agrippa I before. 44 of the Common Era (Acts 12:1-2). Paul refers to
James, the brother, along with Cephas and John as men who were pillars
of the church; and Paul identifies James as "the Lord's brother" in
Galatians 1:19. The Roman Catholic Church, compromised by its prior
commitment to perpetual Virginity, avoids using the word "brother" to
mean that Jesus had "uterine siblings." Some believers hold the
literal doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, which others hold
more reasonably as a spiritual doctrine, since no one can be a biological
virgin after giving birth--the hymen is gone. (We never meant Virgin
BIRTH anyway: we meant Virginal Conception.) John's gospel says that
the brothers of Jesus did not believe in him during his ministry, and
though they might have come to faith in him as Messiah, certainly knew
better than to think their Mother was still a biological virgin. The
brothers are mentioned in Acts as being among the disciples, and Paul in
his letter to the Corinthians says Jesus made a Resurrection appearance
to James.
Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Church texts, Robert Eisenman
in his thousand page tome on James identified Paul as deeply compromised
by Roman imperial contacts, and James as not simply the leader of
Christianity of his day, but the popular Jewish leader of his time, whose
death triggered the Uprising against Rome. Eisenman argues that
characters like Judas Iscariot and the "Apostle James" did not actually
exist as such and he also tells a story of Paul's physical assault on
James in the Jerusalem Temple. Live and learn.
The collect for the feast of Saint James of Jerusalem admirably sums up
what a homily on this day might try to aim at in these days when so many
believers are "at variance and enmity", at least as much so as the Church
must have been in the days when it was divided between those who wanted
to maintain Jewish custom and culture, and those who wanted to see these
things as what Lutherans call "adiaphora" --indifferent matters.
Namely, then, Circumcision as a requirement for those entering the
Church. Now it is the idea that only heterosexuals may commit matrimony
or contrive sexual relationships, and this is seen by the rigorists as
not "adiaphora" but as of the faith and moral constitution of the new
life in Christ. Baptism may only be thought to initiate into the kingdom
of heaven those bodies of babies or adults whose sponsors or they
themselves can promise that only heterosexual marriages will be entered
into, only heterosexual orgasms enjoyed. .
Anyone made in the Image of God who is Gay as well as Strait and Bi and
Cross- and Trans-gendered, need not apply for Baptism, Confirmation,
Eucharist, or Marriage, which is now the most important and the most
gated of all the Sacraments.
The other prayer in the collect for today, "that your church may give
itself to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity" ought
to be taken a step further, in the direction of our sisters and brothers
in Islam, who all of them believe in the Qur'an, "The Utterance", which
declares Jesus to be Messiah and a prophet.. This is a place where
Muslims and Christians can identify each other as Believers. Bishop
Kenneth Cragg in his "Jesus and the Muslim: An Exploration", says that in
the Qurán the title Messiah "belongs with Jesus'supernatural birth and
designates him a prophet of the divine word. His being 'the son of Mary'
is always linked with his being 'the Messiah'." In the more limited
Qur'anic meaning, "Messiah in Islamic Scripture must be read within the
framework of Jesus'significance as there understood. The 'anointing is
to be understood as equipping and commissioning him for the task of
prophethood and teaching." Jesus' disciples are never in the Qur'an
referred to as 'Christians" but as Nazarenes, or "pure ones". We are
with Jews also called "People of the Book". And the term "Christian",
remember, came from Antioch, not from the disciples of the Lord who were
led by his brother James in Jerusalem.
The faithful Jewishness of James is something that should now serve to
bind us closer to the Jewish brothers of James and Jesus, and of their
sisters, who are referred to in the gospels, but, coming from a
super-macho culture, not named. Now in our own lifetimes they are
returning to our attention, and being called to his attention once
more: "While he was still speaking to the people, his mother and his
brothers and sisters arrived, and they waited for him outside. A
messenger told him 'Your mother and brothers and sisters are here, and
they are asking for you." Must they be kept waiting even now in the
twenty-first century while we apply to ourselves alone his inclusive
declaration: "Who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters? And
looking at those all around him, he said; "Here are my mother and my
brothers and my sisters. Whoever does the will of God is my brothers and
my sisters and my mother."
Sir Walter Raleigh
The Passionate Pilgrimage
Give me my scallop-shell of quiet
My staff of faith to walk upon
My scrip of joy, immortal diet
My bottle of salvation
My gown of glory, hope's true gage
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
*The "Passionate Pilgrimage" names the scallop-shell which is the symbol
of St James, and the badge of pilgrims to his shrine at Compasetela. The
scrip of joy is the knapsack or bag of the pilgrim, and hope's true gage
is the pilgrim's pledge. The bottle is nowadays not only for pilgrims,
but carries along the purified water needed by everyone in this century
of polluted springs and poisoned wells.
William Dalrymple in "From the Holy Mountain" says that many Syrians
eventually became disgruntled with Byzantine rule and converted en masse
to the heterodox Monophysites, and later greeted conquering Arab armies
as liberators and converted again, this time to Islam. They regarded
Islam as a small step, for they both started from the stance that God
could not become fully human without compromising his divinity.
Palestinian Christians, who profited from Imperial patronage of the Holy
Places, were not wooed by either Monophysitism or Islam and Jerusalem was
Orthodox until the Crusaders came in 1099.
The story of James's martyrdom can be found in Eusebius of Caesarea's
work, Church History (AD 325), Book II, Chapter 23: The Martyrdom of
James, who was called the Brother of the Lord: