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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
As the saying goes, appearances can be deceiving. You might be at the grocery store with someone else’s children, or maybe your own adopted children, and a person in line with you assumes that the children are your own children, even your own biological children, perhaps going so far as finding family-resemblance between you and the children. Some of that kind of deceptive appearance is involved in today’s Gospel Reading, in which, years after His childhood there, people in the Nazareth synagogue took Jesus to be the son of the carpenter, Joseph, and the brother of James and Joseph and Simon and Judas and of the sisters then present. To be sure, Jesus was not the biological son of Joseph, but Jesus was in some sense his adopted son, and, likewise, Jesus was at most a half-brother or more‑likely a step-brother or a more-distant relative of James and the others, which kind of relations the Greek word that is translated “brother” all can mean. Nevertheless, the feast that falls on this day is titled “St. James of Jerusalem, Brother of Jesus and Martyr”.
Whatever Jesus’s exact relationship to James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, Holy Scripture tells us elsewhere that they initially did not believe in Jesus (John 7:5). And, on at least one occasion, they came to Jesus as if to take charge of Him, but Jesus essentially disclaimed their family relationship and identified as His true family those who believed in Him (Matthew 12:46‑50; Mark 3:31-35; Luke 8:19-21). Perhaps in part because Jesus’s own family did not believe in Him, people in the Nazareth synagogue, as today’s Gospel Reading tells us, took offense at Jesus—or, more literally, were “scandalized” or caused to sin—and they did not believe in Jesus, either. For them there was a seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between what they wrongly thought was Jesus’s ordinary origin and His astonishing wisdom and mighty works, which carried an unmistakable claim that Jesus was far more than they thought, and so they refused to believe in Him (Stählin, TDNT, 7:350).
Are we ultimately any better? In what ways do we find Jesus to be too ordinary? In what ways do we find Jesus to be too astonishing? What seemingly irreconcilable contradictions cause us to sin or fall from faith? How, like Jesus’s hometown and own household, do we fail to honor Jesus in our towns—schools, workplaces, church—and in our households? Does what might be called our “familiarity” with Jesus “breed contempt”? Do we take Jesus for granted? Do we maybe even reject Jesus? (Mackie, CPR 32:4 p.68.) Appearances are not always deceiving, sometimes what appears to be sin and unbelief is exactly that, sin and unbelief. By nature, we, like the people in the Nazareth synagogue, are sinful and unbelieving and so deserving of both death here and now and eternal torment in hell.
The Divine and human person of Jesus and His work call for repentance and faith but often find opposition and rejection, disclosing people’s inner attitudes and true relationship to Jesus and the Father Who sent Him. That division between believers and unbelievers leads to the ultimate division between salvation and damnation. (Stählin, TDNT, 7:345.) When, enabled by the Holy Spirit, we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin, and want to stop sinning, then God forgives us. God forgives our sinful nature and all of our actual sin. God forgives our sin of taking offense at Jesus, our sin of dishonoring Jesus, or whatever our sin might be. God forgives us for Jesus’s sake.
The people in the Nazareth synagogue, as today’s Gospel Reading tells us, were right at least that Jesus’s mother was called Mary. What they did not know was that the Holy Spirit came upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, so that the Child born to her was the Son, not of Joseph, but of God (Luke 1:35). The people in the Nazareth synagogue, as today’s Gospel Reading tells us, wondered where Jesus got such things as His astonishing wisdom and mighty works. What they did not know was that those things were communicated to Jesus by the personal union of His human nature with the Divine nature of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Out of God’s great love for us and for the whole fallen world, that Divine and human, all-knowing and all-powerful Jesus suffered maybe the most dishonorable death then‑imaginable, namely, hanging naked on a cross. Yet, Jesus so died there on the cross for us, in our place, the death that we deserved. And then, three days later, Jesus rose from the dead.
The risen Jesus at one point even appeared to St. James (1 Corinthians 15:7), who perhaps by then had come to believe, for the risen Jesus appeared seemingly only to believers. Regardless of when James came to believe, though, the Holy Spirit would have brought him to faith, as the Holy Spirit brings us to faith, working through God’s Word, especially through His Word in its sacramental forms. For example, in Holy Baptism we are born of water and the Word (confer Ephesians 5:26), born from above by water and the Spirit (John 3:5), born not of blood nor the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God (John 1:13). There at the Font, among other things, we are made children of God the Father, and so we become brothers and sisters of Christ in the fullest‑possible sense. And, so baptized and individually absolved, we are admitted to the Sacrament of the Altar. At this Rail we receive bread that by the Word is the Body of Christ given for us and wine that by the Word is the Blood of Christ shed for us, and so thereby we also receive forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. We do not take offense at what might be considered the hard teaching about Jesus’s giving us His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, but we feed and drink, and so we abide in Him, and He abides in us, and so He will raise us up on the last day, and we will live because of Him (John 6:51-62).
After Jesus’s Ascension, St. James was with the apostles (Acts 1:14), and later St. James himself was considered to be an apostle (Galatians 1:19; confer 2:9). St. James met the Apostle Paul, and, as we heard in today’s First Reading (Acts 15:12-22a), St. James was leading the church in Jerusalem (confer Acts 12:17), in that case giving judgment how to receive the Gentiles into the church, with which judgment the other church leaders concurred. Perhaps earlier St. James had written the Divinely-inspired letter of which we heard the beginning as today’s Epistle Reading (James 1:1-12), and, later, according to non‑Biblical historical witnesses, St. James, apparently for claiming that Jesus was the Son of Man, reportedly was thrown from the temple and stoned and beaten to death (Pfatteicher, Festivals, 400)—the blood of his martyrdom is reflected in our red paraments, banners, and bulletin covers.
Although appearances can be deceiving, today celebrating “St. James of Jerusalem, Brother of Jesus and Martyr”, we thank God for St. James as an example of God’s mercy and will to save us and as a gift of ministers to His Church, and we thank God for saving us, like him, by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Our faith is strengthened as we see St. James brought to faith and forgiven his sins. And, although we do so imperfectly now, we imitate St. James’s faith and, according to our callings, we imitate St. James’s other virtues. (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXI:4-6; confer Augsburg Confession XXI:1.) For example, today’s Collect asks that we may follow his example of prayer and reconciliation and be strengthened by the witness of his death. We also follow the words of St. James’s Epistle and count it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds, knowing that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness and that those who remain steadfast under trial and withstand the test receive the crown of life (confer Revelation 2:10; 3:11).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +