“About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword” (NRSV, Acts 12: 1-2)
Throughout the Gospels James is closely associated with his brother, John. They were partners together in a prosperous fishing concern, being able to employ men to help them, which was unusual in those days. They were among the first whom Jesus called to be his disciples and an early indication of their character is given us by the nickname which he soon found for them: ‘Boanerges’ – Sons of Thunder (Mark 3:17) – an apt description of their hot-headed, but warm-hearted, dispositions.
On one occasion the inhabitants of a village in Samaria treated Our Lord with some discourtesy. It was quite enough to provoke James and John into asking permission to call down fire from heaven to burn up the entire village in revenge (Luke 9:51-55). At this time they had no idea at all that Christ’s Kingdom was to be one of love and persuasion; they were still thinking of it as a successful earthly empire, founded and held together by force.
And when they had learnt that the Kingdom would be established only at the cost of much suffering, and were themselves willing to pay the price, even then their minds were occupied with the rewards they would receive for their pains. That is why they asked Jesus to reserve for them the thrones closest to his own and therefore conferring the greatest honour, a request which greatly annoyed the other disciples and called forth Our Lord’s solemn rebuke (Mark 10:35-45).
James and John, then, as depicted in the Gospels, were men of human failings and imperfections, very alike in disposition, their temper easily aroused, their ambitions out of keeping with their calling; in a word, not exactly saintly. Their energies were still struggling between their own self-interest on the one hand and God’s will on the other, and self-interest often came off best. For it was not their fiery temperament which was at fault – many great saints have been fiery and outspoken in the cause of right against wrong – it was that they misdirected it and were inspired by sordid and worldly motives.
In spite of this they were from the very beginning two of the three close friends of Our Lord who formed the inner ring of the 12 Apostles – Peter, James and John – and it is noteworthy that on these three alone did he bestow the privilege of a nickname. Them alone did he take with him to see Jairus’s daughter when he raised her from the dead. To them alone did he, by his Transfiguration, give a vision of his glory and the assurance of his divine Sonship and authority. And finally, them alone did he ask to share the most poignant hour of his life, his agony of soul in the Garden of Gethsemane, too personal to be witnessed by any but those nearest to him.
The reason why he, the all-holy God made Man, chose these ordinary, very imperfect men to be his closest friends was that he accepted them not as they were but as they were becoming. Knowing human nature through and through as he did, he perceived their possibilities and foresaw the heights to which they could climb.
Nor did events prove him wrong. John lived to be a very old man, and with the passing years his spirituality and his knowledge of God steadily deepened and developed until he gave to the world the incomparable Gospel which bears his name, as well as the letters which have rightly earned for him the title, ‘The Apostle of Love’. That was the growth of which Jesus knew he was capable, from Son of Thunder to Apostle of Love.
As for James, he was not spared to live so long. Fourteen years after the Crucifixion he drained the cup of suffering, which during Our Lord’s earthly life he had avowed he could drink, and was the first of the Apostles to lay down his life for the Faith.
God accepts you and me also in exactly the same way, not as we are but as we are becoming. Thus in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, as soon as the son made up his mind to come back and start afresh and trust himself to his father again, then without waiting to see what improvement he was actually going to make, his father gladly forgave him and received him at once as his own son in his own home.
God has come into this world as Jesus Christ to bring us back home and all that is necessary for us is first the trustful acceptance of forgiveness he offers in response to our whole-hearted penitence; and then the resolution henceforth to live for him; just the repudiation of the selfish life in the far country where God counted for nothing, and a longing to enter, as true sons and daughters, into the full life of Our Father’s household.
There is no waiting on God’s part till we reach a certain standard. For Christ has come to fetch us home, to seek and to save the sheep lost in the wilderness. And that is good enough for God: if we are willing to come back and start an altogether new kind of life, then he accepts us as what we can become in union with him.
That is the beginning of the spiritual life, of the soul’s life with God. The rest of it consists in living up to the expectation and hope that God has of each one of us. For God’s acceptance of us is by no means final – we can still fall away and be lost. We have to work out our salvation in “fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), for St Paul admitted the possibility that when he had spent his life in preaching to others, he himself might be a castaway (1 Corinthians 9:27).
For the life of the soul is governed by God’s law of progress which operates throughout his Universe: first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear, the full maturity of the harvest. So by degrees must our souls grow to their full spiritual maturity, from the first uneasy stirrings of conscience and halting expression of penitence, “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (NRSV, Ephesians 4:13). “For He was made man that we might be made God…”, was how Athanasius described it in a bold phrase typical of that great saint. (1)
There is not one standard for this person and a lower one for that. The standard and the goal for all is the same: the perfection of holiness in the visible Presence of God, which is Heaven. For in Heaven, though all the saints differ from one another in all manner of ways, yet each is individually perfect, as in a necklace of pearls, some are large, others are small, but each is perfect in itself.
This perfection is what God has made us for, each one of us. And the lives of the saints prove how, by their union with God, ordinary men and women, no different to begin with from you and me, have been able to grow in penitence and faith and love until, being made free from sin, and become servants to God, they have their “fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life” (Romans 6:22). For God saw their struggle here for sanctity and he kept for them his promise recorded in Holy Scripture, “…they shall be mine…in that day when I make up my jewels…” (Malachi 3:17).
Reference
1. St Athanasius (297–373 AD) The Incarnation of the Word, 54. Available from:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.vii.ii.liv.html (Accessed 05 July 2011) (Internet).