TRINITY · 25 JULY
Saint James the Apostle
Son of Zebedee · First of the Twelve to Die · Patron of Pilgrims · d. c. 44
James — JAYMZ · Zebedee — ZEB-eh-dee · Boanerges — boh-ah-NER-jeez · Herod Agrippa — HER-od ah-GRIP-ah · Compostela — kom-pos-TEH-lah · Santiago — san-tee-AH-go
Grant, O merciful God, that as thine holy Apostle James, leaving his father and all that he had, without delay was obedient unto the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him; so we, forsaking all worldly and carnal affections, may be evermore ready to follow thy holy commandments; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
James the son of Zebedee (ZEB-eh-dee) was a fisherman of Galilee, the brother of John the Evangelist, and one of the first four to be called. Jesus gave James and John the surname Boanerges (boh-ah-NER-jeez) — sons of thunder — which subsequent tradition has understood as a reference to their temperament: they were the two who wanted to call fire down from heaven on the Samaritan village that would not receive Jesus; they were the two whose mother came to Jesus and asked that her sons might sit on his right hand and his left in the Kingdom, and who were told that they would indeed drink the cup that Jesus drank. They drank it: John outlived all the Apostles; James was the first to die, killed by the sword of Herod Agrippa (ah-GRIP-ah) in Jerusalem around 44 AD — the first of the Twelve to receive the martyrdom their mother had asked for.
James was present at the three most intimate moments of Jesus’s ministry: the raising of Jairus’s daughter, the Transfiguration, and the agony in Gethsemane. In each of these he was in the innermost circle — the three, Peter and James and John, who were taken apart from the others to witness the glory and the suffering. He saw the cloud and heard the voice on the mountain. He saw the Lord prostrate in the garden, sweating as it were great drops of blood. He was present in his brother John’s witness at the cross, and at the Resurrection appearances. The depth of what he had seen and heard is the measure of what he carried to his death: not abstract belief but direct experience of the Lord in his transfigured glory and his broken humanity, and the seal of martyrdom put on that experience within a decade of the Resurrection.
The tradition that sends James to Spain before his martyrdom in Jerusalem is among the most debated in Christian hagiography. The Acts of James, and the medieval tradition built upon it, hold that he preached in the Iberian Peninsula before returning to Jerusalem, and that his body was subsequently carried by his disciples to what is now Santiago de Compostela (san-tee-AH-go deh kom-pos-TEH-lah) in Galicia, where the shrine became the greatest pilgrimage destination of the medieval West. Whether James ever went to Spain is historically questionable; that his shrine in Compostela became the centre of a vast pilgrimage tradition is historically certain. Millions of pilgrims have walked the Camino de Santiago over the centuries, and the tradition continues. Whether or not James ever preached in Spain, the faith he carried — sealed with his blood in Jerusalem — is what animated those pilgrims on the road.
His feast on 25 July falls in Trinity-tide, the long season of faithful witness, which is right for the first martyr of the Twelve: the man whose death comes earliest in the apostolic record, before the great missions of Paul and the long witness of Peter and John, as the first instalment of the cup that Jesus said they would drink. James is the patron of pilgrims, and the whole apostolic mission is a pilgrimage — the Twelve and the Seventy and all who came after them walking from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth in obedience to the same commission, carrying to unknown peoples in unknown places the news of the Resurrection that James himself had witnessed. He stands at the head of the martyred Apostles — the first to go where Jesus told them all they would go — and the cloud of witnesses gathers behind him, and the pilgrimage road does not end.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant James didst show the Church that the sons of thunder become the witnesses of sacrifice, and that the cup of glory is the cup of suffering; Grant that we may follow where he led, drink what he drank, and find at the end of our pilgrimage the same Lord who called us from the shore; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.