This post is a part of a new saint project I am doing. You can read more about that here: Coffee with the Saints
Although this post is a few days late, I want to take some time here to reflect on St. Philip and St. James, whose feast days we celebrated together this past Friday, May 3rd.
St. Philip: We hear about his calling to be a follower of Jesus in the Gospel of John, right after Jesus' baptism by John. In this story, it says that he meets Philip as he was about to depart for Galilee, asks Philip to follow Him, and we know that he does because he immediately goes and calls Nathaniel (cf. John 1:43-46). It says there that Philip was from Bethsaida (as were Andrew and Peter). Other stories about Philip's life can also be found in John's Gospel: one is in John Chapter 6, one in John Chapter 12, and another in John Chapter 14.
In Chapter 6 we see Jesus question Philip about how to feed all of the people; Philip answers without knowledge of what Jesus was going to do here, but that seems to be the point: Jesus was teaching them, and needed them to start thinking about how difficult the task of feeding all of these people would be before He showed them how He was going to do it. In Chapter 12, some Greek people come to him hoping to see Jesus. From this, and from his Greek name, it is inferred that Philip probably spoke Greek, and thus he was able to help introduce another part of the world to the Apostles and to Jesus. Finally, in Chapter 14, Philip asks Jesus during His Last Supper farewell discourse to show them the Father; this gives Jesus a way to teach them about His mission by Philip having a mind which questioned and sought truth from Jesus.
Other than these stories, not a lot is known of Philip from Scripture; he is mentioned much more often in writings outside of the New Testament, and since I have no knowledge of those and for the most part they are usually unreliable, we will stop here with the story of Philip.
St. James (the Less/the Just): James is a name which appears a few times in the Gospels, and since I am not in any way a Scripture scholar I won't spend much time here distinguishing the various people called James in the New Testament and how we know who they are. I will talk a bit about the person, but I will not attempt to explain how I know which one he is, but rather trust Catholic tradition which has handed down stories and traditions about this apostle.
St. James is definitely one of the apostles, but we hear a lot more from him after Christ's death and resurrection. Tradition (very reliable tradition) holds that he was the first Bishop of Jerusalem after the apostles went out following Pentecost to spread the Gospel. This seems to hold true if one looks at the story of the Council of Jerusalem from Acts 15; the apostles are discussing the question of circumcision, or if Gentiles had to first become Jews to become Christians. The discussion happens, and Peter speaks, putting an end to debate; when the group is silent after Peter, the council ends with James speaking up and summarizing what they have now agreed upon. James was able to do this, it would seem, because he is the Bishop in the place where the council is taking place; Peter is the Pope, but James is the one hosting, and thus concluding, this council.
Finally, one of the main ways we know of St. James is through the epistle (letter) which bears his name. This epistle, which is quite short and worth reading, was disliked by Martin Luther mainly because of its practical exhortation to action. In a famous way, James 2:14 calls faith without works 'dead', a teaching very important for the Church and difficult for Luther to reconcile, which led him to call the epistle of James straw and attempt to remove it from the Canon. For this reason, it would be good for Catholics to read this epistle, knowing that it is important to a Catholic understanding of the way that our faith is lived out in action.
In summary, these two saints are very important because they were apostles, and thus were close to Jesus and were vital to the spreading of the faith in the early Church. Like all of the apostles, they were given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and through that Spirit went out and proclaimed Christ to all peoples. Today, we must be very thankful for the apostles, and with this feast particularly thankful for these two saints and martyrs, for their dedicated witness to the faith the point of death, since without these men the faith would not have continued and spread throughout the world.
Saints Philip and James, PRAY FOR US!
