Feast of Saints Philip and James, Apostles
My grandmother passed away a year ago last spring (she was 102). Since then, I have thought many times about her. I miss her greatly - the way she cut grapefruit, the letters she wrote me, and the music she would play. Maybe most of all, I miss her stories. In her stories, I could almost hear the beautiful deep bass voice that my great-grandfather had as he sang at funerals in the late nineteenth century; I could glimpse the ruby engagement ring my great grandmother was given; I could get a sense of what my grandfather must have experienced as a submarine sailor in the Pacific theater in World War II.
She connected me to times and peoples and places I have never seen, and will never see on this earth. I have thought, too, of how many people she might have known who knew about times and places in the early and middle nineteenth century, and so on down through the centuries.
So this past year I've felt a bit adrift, a bit cut off from the stories - and it has made me want to tell my grandmother's stories to my children. It has also made me realize just how vitally important story tellers - apostles like Philip and James - are to our Christian faith.
Paul emphasizes this in today's first reading (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). I think it is worth all of us reading today's scriptures to focus intently for a minute or two on being Paul's brothers and sisters in Christ that he is addressing here. What does it mean to be one of those who has received the Gospel "in which you also stand"? It hits me in a new way today, to think of myself as part of those Paul counts as disciples, stretching all the way back to the ones who first knew Jesus. Paul takes great pains to write out his Christian lineage in order to tell his readers how we know that Jesus lived, died and rose again. We know about Jesus because our grandmothers, and their grandmothers, and so on, told us so.
It's hard to feel like that's enough in our culture that prizes (for good reasons) scientifically verifiable evidence. And yet it is not only today's culture that thinks in those kinds of terms. In today's gospel (John 14:6-14), we see Philip demanding that Jesus show them the Father - and Jesus says, "Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip?" Jesus continues by saying that we should believe in him because he is in the Father and the Father is in him. But if we can't believe even that kind of statement - believe in him because of his works.
What is especially important here though is that Jesus finishes this passage by noting that the ones who believe in him will do greater works even than Jesus has done. In other words, belief in Jesus exactly gets perpetuated by the stories and the works told and done by, and about, the apostles, the saints, the martyrs, and the everyday saints right down to our present day.
On today's feast day of Saints Philip and James, let us be thankful for their own stories about Jesus and works done in Jesus' name, in whom we stand as fellow believers.
- Jana M. Bennett