for July 25
Feast of St. James, Apostle

Today’s readings address one of Jesus’s most challenging teachings: how God exercises authority and, by extension, how we as followers of Christ should do so. Both the apostles and the Christian Corinthians had trouble with this and 2000 years later, we’re still wrestling with it. But the difficulty goes all the way back to our human beginnings.

Just as Adam and Eve wanted to share in God’s exalted knowledge, James and John, the sons of Zebedee in the Gospel passage, wanted to share in Jesus’s power and glory. They wanted to be the elite of the Kingdom. Of course, that would also place them above the other ten apostles, who understandably responded with indignation. Understandably because we all share in this original sin of jockeying with others for power. Matthew further adds an element missing in Mark’s account of this story, one with which we are also familiar—the request comes from their mother. She does do homage to Jesus and asks as a favor, but is her assumption that her sons deserve these elite places so different from that of the parents who paid to get their children into elite colleges? Humanity, including Christians, is still far from having overcome the temptation to organize ourselves into hierarchies of value.

Jesus takes this opportunity to instruct all the apostles, not just those looking for special favor, in his way of exercising authority or power, and it is a way that turns our human understanding on its head. They are to be slaves, not the master. A slave is one who lacks the freedom to do anything other than what he is told. They are to serve, not to be served. How confusing that must have been to the apostles whose mission was to build a kingdom! How can a slave exercise power? As in his parables, Jesus uses language that seems to contradict his message. That’s because he’s trying to shake his hearers out of their patterned ways of thinking. He wants to free them to think and feel in new ways. The apostles are to exert authority, but it is not their own egocentric authority. They are to be Christocentric channels of God’s power, agents of Jesus’s action in the world once he has returned to the Father. We are called to do the same. The paradox is that we are to act freely but in alignment with a power that comes from beyond us. It’s hard to grasp this with the mind, which is why the measure of our freedom is the love in our hearts. Love is expansive and willing to sacrifice for others while love’s opposite, fear, is constricting and closes us off from others. Today is the feast day of this very James who was seeking honor but became the first of the apostles to be martyred. He did indeed drink from Jesus’s cup but not in the way he imagined.

The leaders of the church in Corinth were also caught up in a power struggle. Paul’s first letter to the community chastises them for the divisions between competing factions as well as other problems and exhorts them to come together as the body of Christ. It includes the beautiful paeon to love often read at weddings: “Love is not jealous, it does not put on airs . . . it is not self-seeking.” That letter moved the Corinthians to reconciliation, bringing Paul great consolation that he expresses in his second letter, from which today’s first reading is taken. The love of Christ in our hearts gives us the freedom to challenge our egocentrism. We won’t do it perfectly, but we need not be perfect. In fact, our imperfection is our ally in letting ourselves be guided by God: “We hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.” We encounter affliction and suffering in a world tangled up in original sin, we may have our low moments, but we know we are destined for new life. Reaching out to another in love even if we ourselves are hurting is a way of bringing the power of Jesus’s dying and rising to both of us. As the psalm response reminds us, “Those who sow in tears shall reap rejoicing.”
—Christine Szczepanowski

Today’s readings can be found on the the US conference of Catholic Bishops website.