Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dear friends!

Today we’re celebrating our patron saint St James the Greater! Someone who was chosen directly by Jesus during his earthly life. Let’s focus on one thing that the Father can be teaching us through him.

James belongs, together with Peter and John, to the group of the three privileged disciples whom Jesus admitted to important moments in his life, for example: the event of the Transfiguration of the Lord and his Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The triumphal ecstasy and the weakness. Aren’t you and me also faced with contrasting situations in life? Sometimes we can feel as dwelling in the glorious embrace of Heaven and other times sharing in loneliness, rejections and humiliations.

Being an overall enthusiastic and generous character, St James showed at the same time very worldly desires. He needed the Cross to access the Glory. Through his mother he requested Jesus to be seated next to the Master in his Kingdom, revealing an appetite for favoritism above others. The good Jesus will invite him to purify his pride drinking from the chalice of his passion and so become the first martyr among them. Our sufferings lived with love can be the Lord’s path to our greater glory with Him.

We can say that the journey that James walked, not only exterior but above all interior, from the mount of the Transfiguration to the mount of the Agony, symbolizes our entire pilgrimage. We just need to be His docile friends. In our highs and lows let’s recall his example and pray to St.James, he knows us and has been entrusted with this parish.

God bless you!

Fr Remi