James of Jerusalem
Dean Gay Hall
Seabury-Western
October 23, 2007
For a variety of reasons I don’t remember now, I decided in my middler year of seminary to take the patristics course offered by Harvard Divinity School. It was a wonderful course taught by an eminent church historian named G.H. Williams. Professor Williams occupied a chair called “Hollis Professor of Divinity”, the oldest endowed chair at an American university. The Hollis chair was itself quite a controversial endowment when it was established in the early 19th century because its purpose was to ensure that there would be someone on the Harvard faculty perpetually assigned to teaching the German Higher Criticism of the Bible. By the time it got down to Professor Williams’ era the Hollis Chair was simply the most prestigious position in the Divinity School faculty, and one of its perquisites was a large office in the bowels of the Widener Library.
G.H. Williams looked like a Harvard professor, and his office looked like a Harvard professor’s office. He had long white hair and an absentminded demeanor. His office was, like mine, stacked with books and papers everywhere. It also had a large stuffed owl, symbolizing, I guess, Minerva, in one of the bookcases. I had occasion to see this office because Professor Williams insisted that each of his students come to his office and read his or her term paper aloud to him, including the page numbers and footnotes. (He had a perpetual ringing in his ears from a bomb which exploded near him and he could concentrate better by listening than by reading. He also had total auditory recall. “Mr. Hall, I find your assertion on page 7 doubtful!” I remember him saying to me.) If you can imagine what it felt like for me, a 24-year old seminarian to be reading aloud a 30 page paper on Justin Martyr to this whitehaired eminence with a taxidermied owl looking down on you in the basement of the Harvard University Library, you have a sense of how nervous I was.
Realizing that I was nervous, Professor Williams took up a reference I had made in my paper to James of Jerusalem, the saint we remember today. “You know,” he said, “I’ve always thought that one of the strongest proofs for Christianity is that Jesus’s own brother believed it.” He went on to explain: “I have a brother, and it would take a lot for me to believe that he is the Messiah. So if Jesus’s own brother believed him divine, that means he must have been really extraordinary.”
Now I’ve heard a lot of apologetic arguments in my time, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anything quite so original. Believe in the Gospel because Jesus’s own family did. You know how ambivalent you are about your own family members. What would it take to get you to believe one of them as the Messiah?
It’s in the spirit of that question that I ask you to listen again to what Jesus’s detractors say about him in the 13th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel:
"Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?" [Matthew 13]
When Karl Barth and others talk about the “scandal of particularity”, they are referring to our latter-day inability to think of the reality of God becoming incarnate in a particular flesh-and-blood human being, Jesus of Nazareth. We seem, at this moment in history, more comfortable with generality than particularity. But what G.H. Williams and this reading from Matthew are pointing us to is a kind of sibling of the scandal of particularity. I call it the “scandal of familiarity.” It’s not that I can’t believe that God could become incarnate in a 1st century Jewish person. It’s rather that I can’t believe that God could become incarnate in somebody I actually know.
What James’s testimony to Jesus reveals is a willingness to suspend disbelief, to divest oneself of one’s Romantic tendencies about God and the divine. G.H. Williams believed in Jesus because James, Jesus’s brother, believed in him. The people in Nazareth seem to take the reverse tack. They want their Messiah to be something special. They disbelieve Jesus precisely because he is so, well, ordinary. This is the guy we grew up with. Can’t you get us someone with more impressive credentials?
Groucho Marx said famously that he would not want to belong to a country club that would have someone like him as a member. How exclusive can a club be if it admits Groucho Marx? I think there are two things this “scandal of familiarity” is saying to us.
First, we distrust the familiar because we are habituated to it. I think one of our deepest spiritual problems is a prurience for the exotic. I cannot tell you the number of pastoral conversations I have had over the years with people who come to complain that it’s been a long while since anything “mystical” happened to them at the altar, as if every act of taking communion was supposed to be a Technicolor “zap” in Dolby sound. If the scandal of particularity involves God taking on the flesh-and-blood reality of day to day human experience, then we must be prepared to accept the fact that the divine is now inextricably interwoven with the ordinary. And one of the facts of life about the ordinary is that it can become routine, even boring at time. As James would remind us in his eponymous letter, it’s not about mystical experiences. It’s about action. The answer to the Nazarenes question, “Where did he get all this?” is James’s signature statement, “Faith without works is dead.”
Second, we distrust the familiar to the same extent that we distrust ourselves. If the divine is always linked in our minds to the exotic, then it will always be smarter, stronger, more energetic people than me who will always be on the hook for living out the Gospel in the world. For good old familiar Jesus to be healing the sick and proclaiming the Good News to the poor means that I might just have to start doing that, too. So it’s easier and more comfortable for me to define the holy as that to which I cannot ever possibly attain.
But the life, logic, and witness of St. James of Jerusalem, the brother of our Lord, will not let us do that. Our tradition has it that James not only believed it, he went on to preside over the church that gathered in response to his brother’s life, death, and resurrection. And not only that: because he would not dissuade others from making common cause with his brother and his followers, he died the death of those whose prophetic witness is always so threatening to the status quo. He died the death of a martyr. May we, as we gather at the table of James’s brother, have the grace to open ourselves to the familiar in all its aspects, so that we might be his brother’s witnesses too. Amen.