The following sermon is the fifth of six in the series titled The Easter People, presented by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. The title of this sermon is James. The song at the end of Mr. Howe's sermon is sung by Johnny Knight and is adapted from the multimedia presentation Cry 3, used by permission. We've been looking these last several weeks at some of the resurrection appearances that Jesus made and the lives of the people to whom he showed himself after the resurrection. One thing that I hope is becoming very clear to us is that these various resurrection appearances were as different from each other as were the several people to whom Jesus appeared. The tenderness that He showed to Mary Magdalene, for instance, where He only had to speak just her name, and her sorrow dissolved into joy.

That's a very different kind of a moment from the one we were thinking about last week when He says to Thomas, Come on, put your finger in the nail print. Put your hand in My side. It would seem that Jesus meets each individual person at the point of his or her particular need.

Aren't you glad? He does that with us as well. I want to say just parenthetically that there are those who try to dismiss these resurrection appearances as some sort of hallucinations.

And the people who say that I think know very little about the phenomenon of hallucination. Hallucinations, when they occur at all, happen to people with a very particular psychological mindset and usually under very special circumstances. They do not occur repeatedly to vastly different sorts of people, individuals and groups, at every hour of the day, indoors, outdoors, on the road, at table, on the beach, with physical and verbal interaction, not just visual appearance, over a period of 40 days, fairly intensively for 40 days, and then they abruptly stop.

There is absolutely nothing like that in all of recorded history. You can try to dismiss this as a hoax, I suppose. The whole thing, one gigantic hoax, then you're going to have to explain What was behind that?

What did they have to get out of such a hoax? But hallucinations really won't make it. Paul, in summarizing the appearances of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, makes the comment that at one point, He appeared to more than 500 brethren at a single time.

Most of whom are still alive, he says, at the time of writing that down. In other words, you can go and check with them. Vaccinations don't appear to 500 people at once.

Well, if you look again at that list in 1 Corinthians 15, St. Paul summarizes it this way. Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than 500 brethren at one time, then to James, And last of all, as to one untimely born, in other words, I wasn't part of that initial scenario, he says, last of all, he also appeared to me, to Paul. Out of all those various resurrection appearances, the one that I find most intriguing is the one that we know least about.

He appeared to James. We know very little about that. But I find it very, very intriguing.

There were several men named James in the New Testament. One, in fact, was one of the twelve apostles, brother of John, sons of Zebedee, sons of Thunder, as they were nicknamed. That's not the one we're talking about.

It's very clear from what happened afterward that the James Paul refers to is Jesus' own half-brother, the younger son of Joseph and Mary. Some people would dispute that. There is a theory that went around in the early church that Mary remained a virgin all her life and therefore had no other children, but there's nothing in Scripture to back that up.

And in fact, it says quite the opposite. Matthew writes that when Jesus taught in his own hometown synagogue, you remember when he went back home and he taught there, his neighbors were astonished, and this is what they said. Where did this man get all his wisdom?

Is not his mother called Mary, and are not his brothers and sisters here with us? You see the implication of that. This is just a hometown boy.

Who does he think he is? We know his family. We know his mother.

We know his brothers and sisters. And Matthew goes on to mention four brothers by name. James, Joseph, presumably Joe Jr. I think they call him Chip.

Judas and Simon. Probably James was the oldest of the four. He's mentioned first.

We don't know the names of his sisters, but he came from a large family. And it's John's comment in the Gospel reading we heard just a moment ago that I find the most startling. Did you hear it?

It says, prior to His resurrection, during the time of His earthly ministry, even Jesus' own brothers did not believe in Him. Even His own brothers did not believe in Him. At one point, in fact, they tried to stop Jesus from ministering, presumably alarmed for His well-being.

Mark 3, verse 21 says, When His family heard of what was happening, they went out to seize Him. For the people were saying, He is beside Himself. And the scribes were saying, He is possessed by demons.

They went out to seize Him. Stop His ministering. He's crazy.

He's going to get hurt. Stop it. I want you to consider the implications of that.

Jesus' own brothers and sisters, raised under the same roof from the same parents, living in closest proximity to Him in the same household, in a strategic position to hear Him and observe Him better than anybody else ever did, able to weigh His claims and judge His character, And they don't believe Him. You think you've got problems with your family. Just think about the implications of what that says concerning their view of Mary, their mother.

Sherma, angels and archangels, right. Virgin birth in a stable. They thought He was crazy.

Or worse, a blasphemer against holy God. Maybe the scribes are right. Maybe he's possessed of an evil spirit.

I want you to feel the poignancy of Jesus' comment. I know you know the first part of this. Everybody knows the first part of this comment.

I wonder if you know how it ends. When Jesus said, A prophet is not without honor except in his own country. Do you know what the rest of it is?

and among his own kin and in his own house. The prophet is not without honor except in his own house where they've rejected me. Once when they told Jesus that his family was looking for him, he replied, Who are my mother and my brothers?

And he answered his own question, whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. In other words, yeah, of course, I've got a human family. But that's not as important as those who are members of the family of God.

That's God's forever family. Those are the ones who are my real relatives. I think that Jesus' relationship with his brothers and sisters was severely strained is evidenced by what happened on the cross.

You remember as he's hanging there, one of the words from the cross was to entrust Mary, his mother, not to one of her own children, but to John the beloved disciple. He skips over his own brothers and sisters and entrusts her to John. And it says that from that moment she went to live in John's house because of the Word of Jesus.

Blood may be thicker than water, but it's not thicker than the water of baptism. Amen? Those who are united by faith to Christ are also united by Christ to each other with bonds that are stronger than any human familial relationship.

And this is why Jesus could say, truly, I say to you, There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and the gospel who will not receive a hundredfold. Now in this time, houses and brothers, sisters with mother and children and lands with persecutions. And in the age to come, everlasting life.

In other words, you may have to leave. your own home and your family. I hope you don't. Very, very costly.

You may have to leave. Your allegiance to Jesus may be a sword cutting through your family and that's going to be very painful, but be encouraged. If you have to leave your own home, there's a hundred homes open to you.

All of our homes belong to you. If you have to leave, your brothers and sisters, welcome to the family. We're all your brothers and sisters.

If you have to leave your mother and your father, there are many mothers and fathers right here in this room. You get it? With persecutions.

The most painful sort. Rejection from your own kin. But it's worth it.

And God will make up for it. If you have to pay that price, what you give up, you'll receive a hundredfold. For my sake and the Gospel.

This is why Jesus said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and even his own life, he can't be my disciple. He doesn't mean we're to literally hate in the sense of despising, rejecting, heaping ignominy upon. Not that, no. He means that in comparison with your love for me, In comparison with your allegiance to me, your love for any other member of your family would be like hatred.

In comparison, if there's a conflict. Should I have to choose, there's no contest. I walk away from that other relationship in order to stay with Jesus in a second.

And if I don't do that, I can't be His disciple. You get what I'm saying? Those are strong words, aren't they?

But I submit to you that Jesus knew exactly what he was saying, not simply out of divine wisdom or some sort of prophetic insight. He knew what he was saying out of his own painful experience at home. He knew what it was to be rejected and despised and ridiculed by his own family.

His brothers and sisters didn't believe in him. They thought he was crazy. they scorned his supernatural birth they ridiculed their own mother's claims that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit they tried to protect him from himself at the beginning and by the end they abandoned him to his accusers which is why Mary was standing there at the foot of the cross all by herself but he appeared to James I don't know anything more about it than that.

He appeared to James sometime during that 40-day period. We don't know where it was. We don't know when it was.

We don't know what the circumstances were. We don't know why He appeared only to James and not to the others. We don't know.

I wish I knew, but we don't know. So, what we do know is that that encounter utterly transformed his unbelieving younger brother. Totally converted him to the point that he became the leader of the Jerusalem church.

Did you know that? He leapt right over the apostles themselves. The leader of the church was not Peter or James, the other James or John or Andrew or any of the others.

This James who wasn't even a member of the twelve becomes the leader of the Jerusalem church. It's James who presides over the council in Jerusalem in Acts chapter 15, not Peter or John or any of the others. It was to James that Paul came for an endorsement of his ministry after an equally surprising conversion.

you remember that story Paul the persecutor of the church the murderer of Christians has an extraordinary encounter with Jesus is given the whole gospel by revelation he did not witness it he was not an eyewitness God revealed the gospel to him supernaturally Paul goes out and starts preaching and after a while he says you know I really better go check this out and make sure the apostles in Jerusalem agree with what I'm saying who does he go to for endorsement? James. In Galatians 2 verse 9, James is counted to be an apostle and a pillar of the church.

In fact, he's mentioned before Peter and John. You can call Peter the first pope if you like, but the truth of the matter is James got there before he did in any recognizable sense. Isn't that extraordinary?

Mary? It's as if all this data, all this experience of 30 years of living with Jesus, which up to this point, James has been rejecting. It can't be my own brother, Messiah, you've got to be kidding.

You see? But all that data, he's lived with this man for 30 years, and he's been looking at it as a negative, and all of a sudden it flips into a positive. And all of that wealth of background is so overwhelming.

He knew Jesus more intimately than did any of the others. And that knowledge, that flip-flop, that change from negative to positive has such an effect on him that he moves right into this position of leadership. Tradition has it, we can't absolutely prove this, but it's tradition that James was martyred around 62 or 63 A.D.

by being hurled from the roof of the temple in Jerusalem when fanatical Jews demanded that he renounce Jesus that he blasphemed Jesus, and he refused. Eusebius says that his last words were, Jesus is the Son of God. And they threw him to his death.

That's pretty powerful from your own half-brother, isn't it? Jesus is the Son of God. That's just about all we know of James, except for this very important little letter at the back of the New Testament.

I want you to look at it one more time with me. Page 1054. When I taught this book some time ago, I said that it's the most interesting book in the Bible because so many people see a contrast here between what James is saying and what Paul in particular and others were saying about salvation.

Paul says salvation is by grace, through faith. You don't do anything to earn it. You can't earn it.

You simply receive it. And people read James kind of superficially and it seems as if he's saying salvation is a matter of doing good works. You've got to earn your way into heaven.

If that's so, if there is that big conflict, isn't it very strange that Paul came to James for an endorsement of his ministry? Isn't it very strange that James is the one who decreed that Gentiles are not to be bound by Jewish law at the close of the Jerusalem Council? James is not saying you have to work your way into heaven.

He's simply saying that a faith that doesn't affect your behavior is a pretty inadequate faith. A faith that doesn't make a difference in the kind of person you are is a pretty inadequate faith. And I'm suggesting to you that that's based on a whole lifetime of growing up with the one who exhibited it best.

you want to know what it's like to be a man of faith look at the original look at Jesus look at what it meant for him to be a man wholly submitted to the Father he lived with him I believe the key passage is the one we had as our epistle reading this morning chapter 1 starting with verse 22 James says Be doers of the Word, not just hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the Word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror. For he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.

But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer that forgets, but a doer that acts, he shall be blessed in his doing. the way that's often interpreted is something like this we're to look into the law of God we're to look into the scriptures we're to look into that mirror and see what we ought to be like and then we think about it and we realize how desperately far we fall short of what we ought to be and we're overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow and desperation We can't even begin to be what's reflected there in the Scriptures. And so out of desperation we turn to Jesus for forgiveness and a new start.

You've heard it told that way? That may be fairly good preaching, but that's not what James said. In fact, he said exactly the opposite.

He says we're to look into that mirror, and it's not a law of condemnation. It's a law of liberty. It's a perfect law.

We're to look into that mirror and we're not to see ourselves as we ought to be. We're to see ourselves as we truly are in Jesus. We're to look into that mirror and it's not that we see our inability to do these things.

We're astonished that we see new resources, new possibilities, a new ability to be what God wants me to be. In fact, we're to look into that mirror and it starts out looking like me. And as I look more deeply, I see the face of Jesus smiling back at me, looking at me through my own eyes.

We see Jesus being formed inside of us, making us new people. You get it? The tragedy is having seen that to turn away and forget what we're really like.

Settle for so much less. go back to the way we used to be. We don't have to do that.

I look into the law of liberty and I see who I am in Christ. And it's marvelous. That's good news.

It's not that James is clinging to the law while Paul is proclaiming grace. No, no. It's that James himself has been so utterly transformed by his encounter with the risen Lord that he sees himself in a brand new way. he sees Jesus in himself you see he's come to a new conclusion not only about Jesus but about James have you had that kind of an encounter with the Lord?

do you see yourself as a brand new person? if anyone be in Christ he is a new creation old things are passed away all is become new I can do all things in Him who strengthens me. Therefore, it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.

And the life that I live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who gave Himself for me. For me to live is Christ. Paul says, wretched man that I am, who's going to deliver me from this body of death?

James says, in Jesus Christ, I've been delivered. I'm a brand new person and I can do all things through Him who strengthens me