Acts 11:27-12:3
Psalm 126
2 Corinthians 4:7-15
Matthew 20:20-28
There is a cultural movement I have begun noticing (and if I am noticing it, it must have been going on for a very long time by now), where young men are looking to rediscover the positive aspects of masculinity. And so while there are many voices online and elsewhere that would look to capture them and lead them on a particular version of masculinity, I think today’s saint shows us one of the best.
St James the Greater is the brother of St John, both described in the Gospels as the “sons of Zebedee”. Our Lord, ever one to give his friends much better nicknames, describes the two as “sons of thunder”. Now this is the type of name to make a man push his shoulders back and his chin up!
What we learn about them is that, over the course of their few years as Christ’s disciples, their masculinity was, shall we say, baptised. That is to say, all those things that made them men were filed, polished, and refashioned by the Lord Jesus into the type of men God is looking for – the type of men God originally had in mind when he invented men.
St James had great zeal, and to this was added courage. Rather than renounce his Lord, he willingly went to win the crown of martyrdom. To his courage was added love, for he saw the Lord Jesus go to the cross to battle the forces of darkness so that he would not have to. And I think this is where we learn something of what a holy masculinity looks like.
Men want to find the truth, and stand on that truth bravely. They want to find people to love and care for, and stand between those people and the danger that threatens them. In Christ, we discover what it means to live this way.
But we must remember not to just settle for any truth. We must continue digging into the Scriptures, and to be willing to have a robust exchange of ideas, in order to continue revealing more Truth.
We must also have courage, in order to stand against evil. And to courage we must mix in love, because as someone wise once said, “men do not fight bravely in war because they hate the enemy in front of them; they fight bravely because they love the people behind them.” (I think it might have been G. K. Chesterton.)
In all things we look to the Lord Jesus for the greatest example of true masculinity. When, in St Luke’s Gospel, he turned his face to Jerusalem to begin his final journey, he was rejected by the Samaritans (Luke 9). St James turned to him and asked if he should call down fire from heaven for their rejection of the Messiah. But Jesus declined; not because calling down fire from heaven was necessarily wrong, since Elijah had done that in the past (2 Kings 1). In that instance, the fire from heaven brought about trembling respect and awe for God. This time around, Jesus refused the fire from heaven, for he was to do something that bring even greater trembling respect and awe for God: he would go to the cross, on his own, take the punishment for our sins, and come back to life, bringing us safely through death. That sort of self-sacrificial love, running through the courage and knowledge of truth that the Lord Jesus held, was the true image of godly masculinity.
Let us therefore give thanks to God for making men, and for redeeming men in the image of the Lord Jesus, and let us pray that God would raise up a generation of godly men to lead the Church into the next generation, as a blessing to God’s creation.