Are You Able? Sermon on The Feast of James, Apostle (Matthew 20:20-28)

July 25, 2026, The Feast of James the Apostle, Season after Pentecost

Matthew 20:20–28, Psalm 7:1–11, Acts 11:27–12:3, Jeremiah 45:1–5

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this feast of Saint James the Apostle.

Three days ago we gathered around the feast of Mary Magdalene. She came to the tomb in the dark, heard her name spoken by the risen Lord, and carried the first resurrection proclamation to the apostles. Today the Church honors the first of those apostles to die for the faith he received from her. James son of Zebedee was martyred by Herod Agrippa, probably in AD 44, roughly fifteen years after the resurrection. He is gone from the New Testament in two verses of Acts 12, dispatched in a subordinate clause while Luke’s narrative moves on to Peter’s arrest and the angel who delivers him. The woman who bore witness for decades and the man who bore witness for fifteen years fall in the same week of the Church’s calendar. The difference between them was not in the depth of their devotion but in the length of time they were given to express it. Faithfulness to the cup is the measure of both.

James first appears in the Gospels being called from his fishing boat alongside his brother John. Jesus gives the brothers a name in Mark 3:17: Boanerges (boh-ah-NEHR-gays), Sons of Thunder. It is a name that fits: impulsive, ambitious, quick to call down fire on those who resist. He is among the first called and among the three chosen for the inner circle: present at the Transfiguration when the Father’s voice came from the cloud, present when Jairus’s daughter was raised, present in Gethsemane when Jesus prayed in agony. He has been at every defining moment of Jesus’ ministry from the Sea of Galilee to the garden. The Son of Thunder who would become a faithful witness to the cup he claimed he could drink has seen more than almost anyone alive. And he does not yet know what any of it costs.

Our Gospel reading gives us the moment when the question is put directly. The mother of the sons of Zebedee kneels before Jesus and asks that her sons be given the two highest seats in the Kingdom: one at his right hand and one at his left. Jesus turns to the brothers and asks: “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” (Matthew 20:22, ESV) They answer without hesitation, without qualification, and without any apparent awareness of what they are being asked: “We are able.” (Matthew 20:22, ESV) The question Jesus asks is not a trick. He is not trying to catch them in an overconfident claim. He is asking them a genuine question about what they are willing to enter. And they answer from the only frame they have: they are thinking about a Kingdom that looks like a human kingdom, a succession of power, a seat at the right hand of the victorious king. The cup has not yet become Gethsemane for them. The cross is still ahead. When they say “we are able,” they are being sincere. They mean it with everything they have. They simply do not yet know what they are meaning.

The cup in Matthew 20 is the same cup Jesus will pray over in Matthew 26: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39, ESV) The cup Jesus asks the Father to take from him is the cup he has just told James and John they will drink. He accepted their word and told them the truth: you will drink my cup. Those four words are a promise, and there is a grace embedded in that promise that is easy to miss. Before James drinks the cup, Jesus drinks it first, and he drinks it for James, and for every one of his people who will be asked to hold it after him. The “we are able” of the disciples is sustained not by their own strength but by the fact that the one who asked the question has already gone ahead of them into what the cup contains.

The mother’s request becomes the occasion for one of Jesus’ most direct teachings on authority in the Kingdom. Verse 25: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25–28, ESV) The collect for James’ feast is built directly on this passage. The spirit of self-denying service by which leaders have true authority is the spirit these verses describe. The mother asked for the seats without asking about the path. Jesus answered with the path. The glory she wanted for her sons is not denied in the Kingdom; what is corrected is her assumption that it arrives through power rather than through the cup.

The indignation of the ten disciples in verse 24 is worth noting. They are not angry because James and John asked for something wrong. They are angry because James and John asked first, and their indignation reveals the same ambition in their own hearts. The desire for significance is not itself the problem; it is the universal human condition. What Jesus corrects is the assumption that significance in the Kingdom arrives the same way it arrives in the kingdoms of this world: through position, through proximity to power, through getting to the right seat first. He calls all of them together and teaches them that the path runs in the opposite direction. The teaching that follows is for the whole Church.

Jeremiah 45 gives us the Old Testament word that governs this feast, and its context matters. Baruch is Jeremiah’s secretary and closest companion. He has written down Jeremiah’s prophecies at personal risk, read them publicly in the temple when Jeremiah was banned from entering, watched his prophet thrown into a cistern and publicly humiliated. He has given everything to a ministry that appears to be failing by every visible measure: the nation has not repented, the prophecies have not been welcomed, and the catastrophe Jeremiah warned about is coming anyway. His exhaustion in verse 3 is the exhaustion of faithful service that has produced nothing recognizably great: “Woe is me! For the Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.” (Jeremiah 45:3, ESV) Underneath the weariness is an unfulfilled expectation. He served expecting that faithfulness would earn something. He is discovering that it has not earned what he imagined.

God’s answer to that expectation has two parts. First, the redirection: “And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not.” (Jeremiah 45:5, ESV) The expectation of personal greatness must go. Then the promise: “Your life I will give you as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.” (Jeremiah 45:5b, ESV) Survival, not triumph. You will make it through what is coming. That is what I am offering you, and it is enough.

The parallel to the sons of Zebedee is precise. Baruch has served Jeremiah faithfully and expects his faithfulness to produce something recognizably great. The sons of Zebedee have followed Jesus faithfully and expect their faithfulness to produce the two highest seats in the Kingdom. Both are asking the same underlying question: after all I have given, what do I get? Both receive the same underlying answer: not what you are imagining. The three figures in these readings form a progression. Baruch expected greatness; he received the lesser promise of survival. The mother’s sons expected seats; they received the cup question. James received neither survival nor a seat. He received the cup itself, which is what the Lord drank first on behalf of all of them. Each one receives less of the world’s definition of a reward and more of the Kingdom’s. The reward worth having is not the seat; it is continued faithfulness in the service of the one who sent you, and if necessary, the cup.

Before we arrive at Acts 12:2, it is worth dwelling in Acts 11:27–12:3, because the context of James’ death places it in a way that should prevent any sentimentality about Christian faithfulness. The community from which Herod seizes James is a thriving, generous, prophetically gifted community. They are sending relief to their brothers in Judea. They are welcoming prophets from Jerusalem. They are living in the fullness of what the Spirit has given. And Herod kills James. The Church’s vitality and the apostle’s death occupy the same passage. Spirit-filled, faithful, generous Christian communities are not exempt from the cup.

Acts 12:1–2: “About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword.” (Acts 12:1–2, ESV) That is all. Two verses. The man who had been at the Transfiguration, who had heard the Father’s voice from the cloud, who had slept in Gethsemane, who had answered *“we are able”*when Jesus asked about the cup, is gone in two sentences while Luke’s narrative moves immediately to Peter. No speech. No last words. No final testimony. 

James’ death is the occasion for what follows, not the focus. This is what drinking the cup looks like in the Acts of the Apostles. Luke does not give us a deathbed scene or a last word worth recording because he does not need to. James had already said what needed to be said fifteen years earlier on the shore when Jesus called him and he left the boat. The whole biography of Saint James the Apostle is contained in two words: he followed. And in following, he arrived at the cup.

Psalm 7, appointed for this feast, is the prayer James could have prayed and probably did. James before Herod’s sword is precisely the person this psalm was written for. “O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge; save me from all my pursuers and deliver me.” (Psalm 7:1, ESV) The psalmist is being hunted. He does not respond with defiance or with despair. He responds with trust in the God who is a righteous judge: “The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me.” (Psalm 7:8, ESV) Acts 12 records that Herod was later struck down by an angel and eaten by worms. James did not live to see that. But the psalm gives us the posture of the one who drinks the cup without demanding to see the outcome first: not defiance but trust, not the demand for immediate vindication but confidence in the judge who sees what no one else can see.

The trust Psalm 7 describes is not naive. The psalmist is not pretending that the situation is safe or that the hunter will not catch him. He is entrusting the outcome to a judge he believes in, whose verdict he is content to wait for. This is the posture James carried to his death: not the certainty that Herod would fail, but the certainty that Herod was not the final authority. The one who commanded the harvest of the age could be trusted with the timing of one apostle’s death. The psalm is the inner life of a man going to the cup without demanding to see the resolution first.

The collect for this feast takes James’ martyrdom and turns it immediately toward the living. “O gracious God, your servant and apostle James was first among the Twelve to suffer martyrdom for the Name of Jesus Christ: Pour out upon the leaders of your Church that spirit of self-denying service, by which they may have true authority among your people.” (BCP 2019, p. 630) The collect does not dwell on the death. It names it, and then it asks for the spirit that made the death possible: the spirit of self-denying service. James is not honored primarily as a great teacher or a miracle worker. He is honored as the one who drank the cup he said he could drink. The collect asks that those who lead the Church today would be shaped by the same spirit, not the spirit that seeks the seat of honor but the spirit that is willing for the cup.

The question Jesus asked James and John is not retired with their generation. It is the question every follower of Christ is eventually asked, in one form or another, in one cup or another. The cup does not always look like Herod’s sword, and the feast is not only for those who face acute persecution. For many it is quieter: the long obedience in the same direction when no one is watching; the faithful ministry in a congregation that will not grow large, praying for people who do not respond, showing up week after week with everything you have and seeing little visible fruit; the cost of holding to what you believe in a culture that has decided those beliefs are not welcome. James’ cup was a sword. The cup the Son of Man drinks is a cross. The cup Jesus holds out to his followers takes different shapes, but the question is always the same: are you able? 

And the honest answer, before we know what the cup contains, is the same answer James gave: we are able. Not because the cup will be easy. Because the one who asked has already gone ahead of us into what the cup contains.

The calling already contained the cup. When Jesus said “follow me” on the shore of Galilee, he was not extending an invitation to a safe career. He was calling James into his own path, and his path runs through the cross. The cup was not added to James’ biography later, as a complication or a cost he had not anticipated. It was in the calling from the first morning. James was called from the boat, called to the inner circle, called to witness the Transfiguration and the Gethsemane agony. And he was called to the cup. These are not separate callings but one: to follow this shepherd is to follow him all the way. Jesus said you will drink my cup. He did not promise James a legacy or a platform. He promised him a cup. James did. He was the first of the Twelve. He will not be the last.

There is a final word this feast offers to everyone in this congregation who has ever wondered whether the form of faithfulness given to them is enough. Mary was given decades and a resurrection proclamation that would echo across two thousand years. James was given fifteen years and two verses. The Church needed both. The long witness and the short one, the sustained flame and the single flash, the woman who said “I have seen the Lord” for fifty years and the man who drank the cup before the others had even begun their ministries: the Kingdom is built by all of them. The size of the cup is not the measure of the faithfulness. The drinking is.

James answered the cup question quickly, before he knew what it cost. The Feast of James is the annual opportunity to hear that question again, knowing more than James did on the shore, knowing something about what the cup has cost others who have gone before us, and answering it again: we are able. Not because we are strong enough. Because the one who asked is stronger.

The Feast of Saint James is the shortest biography in the apostolic calendar. Called from the boat, given the cup, gone in a sentence. And yet the collect does not mourn him. It turns immediately to the living: pour out upon the leaders of the Church that spirit of self-denying service. The feast is not a memorial for the dead. It is a commission for the living. And the question that opened his apostolate is the question that runs through the whole history of the Church and lands again today on everyone who has followed Christ past the easy part: are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.