“Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”
The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. For Anglicans, this is captured in Article XVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles; the only anathema in all of the articles concerns the denial of the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ. It is only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can and must engage the religions of the world as well as the forms of contemporary culture. And sometimes the pattern of the Sanctorale, especially of the Apostles of the Christian Church, coincide with the themes of the season and illustrate certain features of the Apostolic Faith and teaching.
The Feast of St. Philip and St. James is one of three apostolic pairings in the cycle of the Church Year and falls within Eastertide. The other pairing is found in the late Fall with the joint feast of St. Simon and St. Jude which completes the cycle of the twelve apostles and usher us into the omni gatherum feast and festival of All Saints. At the end of June there is another pairing though of a somewhat different provenance in The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. The readings for all these feasts in the Offices is instructive about the Scriptural witness to their lives, sometimes simply through the mention of their names. The readings for Philip and James canvass a number of important texts about their witness, particularly the witness of Philip. But note that the Epistle and Gospel for their feast complement the Eastertide readings from the Gospel of John and on the next two Sundays, the Epistle of James. The Gospel reading is the beginning of Jesus’s farewell discourse that illustrates the radical meaning of Christ’s going from us in going to the Father and what that means for his abiding in us and us in him. The Epistle reading from James exhorts us to seek the wisdom of God and not to waver in our faith and understanding. James also will emphasize the importance of the works of faith.
Faith and works are signalled as belonging together in these readings, and most explicitly in Jesus’s words to Philip that he who has seen me has seen the Father and that faith is either about “believing that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believing in the works themselves.” This is illustrated in Gerlach Flicke’s famous 1545 painting of Cranmer which shows him with pen in one hand and the Epistles of St. Paul in the other, along with a stack of books. The title of one is De Fides et Operibus, “On Faith and Works,” written by Augustine. The portrait captures the primary intent of the English Reformation, explained by the scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch as the recovery of the Scriptures understood by way of the best of the Patrisitic commentators, especially Augustine. That portrait is the basis for the Cranmer window in Hensley Memorial Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School in Windsor, Nova Scotia.
There is another complexity to The Feast of SS. Philip and James. There are two Collects appointed for the feast. The first alludes to the Gospel and specifically to the figure of Philip, presented in dialogue with Jesus. The second Collect centers on the figure of James. It draws upon the imagery of the epistle reading, again from St. James, from which we read on the Fourth and the Fifth Sundays after Easter. But the Collect and the rather curious explanation that precedes it, allude to another factor that relates to the doctrinal theme of the uniqueness of Christ. About the Apostles, we don’t really know a whole lot about them in an historical and biographical sense. But there is mention in the gospels of James, the brother of the Lord. What exactly does that mean?
To be honest, no-one knows or can know for certain historically or empirically whether Mary had other children; in short, whether Jesus had brothers and sisters biologically speaking, if you will. But doctrinally, the point at issue has to do not with Jesus as being merely an ordinary Jew of his day, but as the Lord and Saviour of mankind albeit through the particularities of that culture. The tradition of the Church in reflecting on the uniqueness of Christ has tended to insist on the perpetual virginity of Mary; she is Virgin and Mother, and on the uniqueness of Christ as the only-begotten of the Father, divinely speaking, and the only son of Mary, humanly speaking. Jesus cannot be just another guy. He is like us in all aspects save sin. Mary cannot be just another woman; she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by God through whom our humanity is regenerated and remade in the image of God.
Anselm offers an intriguing and important theological explanation. “God,” he argues, “can make a human being in four ways: from man and woman, as constant experience shows; neither from man nor from woman, as he created Adam; from a man without a woman, as he made Eve; or from a woman without a man,” referring to Mary as Virgin and Mother (Cur Deus Homo). This ‘logical’ approach comprehends all the theological possibilities with respect to human redemption and provides an explanation for the virgin conception of Christ and his virgin birth from Mary.
Mary’s role in the economy of salvation and in the preparation of Providence is to be the theotokos, the God-bearer, the pure and perfect human source of Christ’s pure and true humanity without which he is not saviour, both hers and ours. While one can speak of the customs of earlier times, one cannot prove from such customs that Jesus actually had brothers and/or sisters from Mary, his mother. There is equally the custom of the extended family of relations, cousins and kinsman, spoken of as brethren. This point of view is captured in the second Collect that pertains to James, associating James with the epistle of James, and suggesting that he along with Jude are “kinsmen of the Lord.” There are actually about eight different ‘James’s’ in the New Testament. The Collect however is scrupulously honest with respect to the Scriptures and to the historical understanding while being firmly principled with respect to doctrine.
Such things go to the heart of the apostolic faith and to the witness of the Church to Christ and complement the extraordinary words of Christ to Philip that reveal legitimately different approaches to faith by us.
“Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”
Fr. David Curry
>Eve of the Feast of SS. Philip & James, 2026