EASTERTIDE · 1 MAY
Saint Philip & Saint James the Less
Apostles · Philip in Hierapolis · James first Bishop of Jerusalem · d. c. 80 & c. 62
Philip — FIL-ip · Bethsaida — beth-SAY-dah · Hierapolis — hee-er-AP-oh-lis · Phrygia — FRIJ-ee-a · James the Less — son of Alpheus · Josephus — joh-SEE-fus
O Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life; Grant us perfectly to know thy Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life; that, following the steps of thy holy Apostles, Philip and James, we may stedfastly walk in the way that leadeth to eternal life; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
They share a feast day in Eastertide — Philip (FIL-ip) on the one hand, James the Less on the other — and they are paired not because their ministries were similar but because they were both present at the founding of the Church and both represent, in different ways, the diversity of how the Gospel was received and transmitted from the very beginning. Philip appears in the Gospels as the Apostle who brings people to Jesus: it is Philip who finds Nathanael and says come and see; it is Philip who is approached by the Greeks in Jerusalem who want to see Jesus; it is Philip who at the Last Supper asks the question that draws from Jesus one of the most important theological statements in the fourth Gospel: Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us — and the answer: He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. This question, asked in apparent incomprehension by a man who had been following Jesus for three years, produces the clearest Christological statement in the Johannine tradition: the Son and the Father are one, and to see the Son is to see the Father. Philip’s apparently naive question is the occasion for the fullest self-disclosure of the divine identity in the entire Gospel.
James the Less — the Less to distinguish him from James the son of Zebedee, who has his own feast on 25 July — is identified in the tradition with James the Lord’s brother, the leader of the Jerusalem church, the author of the epistle that bears his name. James of Jerusalem is the Apostle who stayed: while the others went out to the ends of the known world, he remained in Jerusalem, governing the first community, presiding over the Council of Acts 15, writing the epistle that insists that faith without works is dead. He was called James the Just by his contemporaries, famed for the calluses on his knees from his constant prayer in the Temple, and he was thrown from the Temple wall and killed around 62 AD by the high priest Ananas, an act that the Jewish historian Josephus (joh-SEE-fus) records with disapproval as illegal and unjust.
Philip’s subsequent ministry is traditional rather than scriptural. The tradition sends him to Phrygia (FRIJ-ee-a) in Asia Minor, to preach in the great city of Hierapolis (hee-er-AP-oh-lis), where he is said to have died — by crucifixion, or by stoning, or by natural death; the accounts vary and cannot be reconciled. His daughters, who were prophetesses, are mentioned by Papias and Polycarp as living witnesses to the apostolic generation. What Philip accomplished in Phrygia — how many communities he founded, how far his mission extended, what became of the churches he planted — is unknown. The tradition preserves the name of his city; it does not preserve the names of the people he taught or the congregations he established. They are in the cloud of witnesses, with him: the unknown fruit of a known commission, the harvest that only God can count.
Their feast falls on 1 May in Eastertide, in the season of the Resurrection’s first expansion — the season in which the Church moves out from the empty tomb into the world, carrying the news. Philip who says come and see and James who stays to govern the first community between them represent the two essential movements of the apostolic mission: the going out and the staying home, the missionary frontier and the mother church, the voice that calls the stranger and the hand that steadies the household. The Eastertide setting is exact: both impulses are Easter impulses, both are responses to the same empty tomb, both are expressions of the same commission. The Church goes out because Christ is risen; the Church governs itself because Christ is risen; both Philip in Hierapolis and James in Jerusalem are doing the same thing in different places, and the cloud of witnesses includes both, and the harvest of both is known only to God.
O Almighty God, who by thy servants Philip and James didst show that the same Gospel calls some to go out to the ends of the earth and others to stay and build the Church at home; Grant that we may serve thee wherever thou dost place us, knowing that the frontier and the household are equally sacred, and that the commission given on the mountain in Galilee is fulfilled in both; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.