Overview:

Feast of St. James, Apostle

A Reflection for the Feast of St. James, Apostle

Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served
but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mt 20:28)

Find today’s readings here.

I did not attend a Jesuit high school. When I arrived at my Jesuit university, I met a lot of Jesuit high school alums who told me that they “loved doing service.”

At the campus activities fair at the beginning of the semester, tables recruiting for service clubs were mobbed with interested freshmen. Membership in many of them required selection from a competitive application pool. Because I wanted to jump into campus life with both feet, I decided that I, too, was going to learn to love service.

Over the course of four years of service and ministry work, I did learn to love it. But what my eager fellow freshmen didn’t warn me about is that that love was not similar to the love I had had for the other extracurricular activities I had tried before. It was much different from trying out for the school play or practicing to get really good at a sport. It was others-oriented, self-sacrificing, and in many cases it was challenging or even painful. It wasn’t just hard work; it was also often emotionally draining. Sometimes I would come home from a service placement and cry. After returning from immersion trips over school breaks, I would have an incredibly difficult time reacclimating to the new semester. When I took on service-oriented course work, it was hard to meet friends in the dining hall after class and switch to our regular, daily topics of conversation.

It’s difficult to explain what it is to be devastated but also to feel full. To cry but also to know you want to go back next week and do it again. To sometimes spend your service placement laughing and having fun with community members, and other times to hear something heavy that you can’t shake for days. “Loving” service is not like loving other pursuits. It’s deeper. It’s also at times much more painful.

That’s what Jesus is trying to tell us in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew. Especially when our service mimics that of Christ, it is not always easy to say “yes” to. It is not always pleasurable or immediately gratifying. It is in the image of someone who lays down his life—but does so for the ultimate purpose.

When the mother of Peter and James asks Jesus for her sons to sit at his side in the Kingdom of God, Jesus knows that she makes a much bigger ask than she or her sons realize. As much as they insist that they are prepared to “drink the chalice” that Jesus is also going to drink, they couldn’t possibly be prepared for what that responsibility entails. As excited and as willing as they might be to engage in service, its demands will shock and challenge them, maybe even destabilize them. And yet, that struggle is what the Christian life is all about—and also what can bring Christ’s disciples a deeper fulfillment than they have yet known.

I think of Peter and James like those eager freshmen at the campus activities fair. They’re all ready to sign up; they want to serve. And yet, the road ahead would frighten them if they could see it clearly. Instead, they forge ahead, able to gain clarity about service’s pain and pleasure only through experience. How comforting; in this way, they’re a lot like us.

Molly Cahill is Associate Director of Digital Strategy at America. She was a 2020-2021 O'Hare Fellow.