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St James, whose feast we celebrate today, is as you might say the Everyman of Apostles. If we read further on in Mark's Gospel we find him at many of the critical events. When Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus from the dead "he did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James". These same three Apostles go with Jesus up to a mountain top in the mysterious episode when "he was transfigured before them", and are with him when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of the first Easter. And, as we read just now, James was among the first disciples whom Jesus called to join him.
Yet we do not get a clear picture of who James is. Other apostles, who appear less, appear in more memorable ways. Everybody has an idea about the Apostle Thomas - doubting Thomas. Most of us remember the Apostle Philip and his meeting with the Ethiopian official. And of course we have a very vivid picture of Peter and John, not only because of what we see and hear them doing in the Gospels, but because they wrote a good deal of the New Testament. John gave us the fourth Gospel, three letters, and the book of Revelation. From St Peter we receive two letters that bear his name and - scholars believe, the substance of Mark's Gospel. St Paul, the last of the Apostles, also lives on in the words God gave him to pass onto us in his letters.
But we don't have so much to remember James by. We hear him speak twice. On both occasions the Gospels tell us that he and his brother spoke up together. These two seem to have been thick as thieves, as some brothers are. In Mark they ask Jesus "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory" (in Matthew's Gospel, as we read in church this morning, it's their mother who makes this request on their behalf). In Luke when a Samaritan village reject Jesus James and John ask "Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?"
Two incidents are not much to base a character study on, but one does notice two things that these remarks have in common. On one hand they make James and John seem a bit big for their boots. On the other hand it's also clear that they take the supernatural very seriously. They don't labour under the misapprehension that Jesus is just a wise teacher. They know they are in the presence of divine power. They may be over-enthusiastic about their own roles in all this, but they have no doubt Jesus is going to rule the world and fire from heaven is nothing remarkable when you're with the son of God. It's much of a piece with the nickname Jesus gives them - Sons of Thunder.
Of all the human authors of the New Testament, John is the one who is most at ease with the things of heaven. Mark, St Peter's disciple, begins with a circumstantial account of baptism in the River Jordan; John the Apostle begins with the famous meditative passage "in the beginning was the word". But alas, we have no Gospel according to James. James the Apostle has left us no words but the ones Mark and Luke attribute to him. (The author of the Letter of St James is of course a different man altogether, generally taken to be the brother of Jesus). For scarcely ten years after the Resurrection, before the church was established, before there was leisure, and a demand, for James to write down his recollections of the great days when God walked the earth, wicked king Herod "had James, the brother of John, put do death with the sword". James became the second Christian martyr we know by name, and the first of the Apostles to be killed. He leaves the story, as he entered it, early and quietly.
This is why one can think of him as the Everyman Apostle. He's in the heart of the story, yet we gather relatively little about his character; hence to consider the story of St James the Apostle is not to think of particular words or deeds, so much as to wonder "what was it like, to be an Apostle?"
That's a big question - and this is a small sermon. May I leave it as a question to ponder during the week? Perhaps it might be worth glancing through Mark's Gospel and re-reading those passages where James appears as part of the inner circle of the apostles -chapters 5,9 and 14. What was it like to spend two or three years working with and following the son of God? To be with a man who was without sin - to share conversation, food, and no doubt some pretty uncomfortable sleeping quarters with the creator of the heavens and the earth? In general terms it's a question one could ruminate on profitably for a long time. I put it to you and I leave it to you.
What I'd like to do in the short time remaining now, though, is concentrate on three similarities, and one important contrast, between the experience of the everyman Apostle James and, in an earlier age, the prophet Jeremiah.
The first similarity is that they both answer the call at once. One of the most striking aspects of the passage in Jeremiah that we read is the cinematic jump-cut straight from Jeremiah hearing the word of the Lord to the people reacting to Jeremiah speaking it to them. It's as though Jeremiah was putting on his hat and going out the door to the Temple to preach whilst the Lord was still telling him what to say. And in just the same way James and his brother walk away from the family business in the middle of the working day when Jesus calls them. And why are they both prepared to drop everything? The second similarity between James and Jeremiah is that they're dropping everything to follow a person. James hasn't just had a bright idea for himself, just as Jeremiah hasn't just come over all angry. Both of them have met God. Not a theoretical God, not an abstract all-pervading goodness, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of words and deeds. God spoke James, as he spoke to Jeremiah, man to man. That's why they dropped everything. And what do they do after they've dropped everything at God's command? The third similarity is that in many ways Apostles and Prophets had similar tasks to perform. The word apostle is from a Greek root meaning messenger. Prophets and Apostles are both charged by God with telling a story. And to an extent James and Jeremiah are given the same story to tell. "Repent", Jesus preaches in Galilee. Likewise God says to Jeremiah "Perhaps they will listen and each will turn from his evil way. Then I will relent".
Now, there's a reason we hear this message again and again throughout the Old and New Testaments. The reason is that, as Isaiah says "we all like sheep have gone astray", and as St Paul says "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". This is a very important message for us to remember. I don't set up to be one of those hellfire preachers you get in the free churches, but it is a fact attested to by scripture, by the tradition of the church, and indeed by our own Anglican Articles of Religion that we are very far gone from original righteousness, and of our own nature inclined to evil.
This is true. But it is not disheartening. And here we come to the interesting contrast between James, the Everyman Apostle, and Jeremiah, the prophet of doom. In one respect the word James was called to preach was the same as the message God put into Jeremiah's mouth. But there was more to it. "Repent… and believe the good news!". In the Gospels, God is not belabouring his people to get themselves out of their own mess. God still says "repent", for so long as we are human we will need to do that. But the message of the Gospels is "repent, and you will be freely forgiven no matter how wicked you are".
This is why we here today in Fulbourn can repeat Archbishop Cranmer's comprehensive confession of sin, acknowledge that we have strayed from God's ways like lost sheep and there is no health in us, and yet not fall into terminal depression. There is no health in us. This is true: and on its own, so disheartening we might all despair. But if we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. It is the great possession of Christians that we can look our own wickedness in the eye, not pretending it's one whit less disgusting than it is, and still feel cheerful about ourselves. This evening we give thanks for St James and the other Apostles: for it is through their faithfulness that this most essential of all messages has come down to us.