St. Philip and St. James—May 3

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

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

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“Jesus said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father too. From this moment you know him and have seen him.’ Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and then we shall be satisfied’” (John 14:6-8).

Among the Galileans who were fortunate enough to have been chosen by Jesus to form part of His intimate circle were Philip the son of Alpheus and James the Less.

James was born in Cana of Galilee, near Nazareth, and was a relative of Jesus. The Gospel doesn't mention the exact moment when Our Lord called him. But Scripture does testify to the important position that James held at the Church in Jerusalem.

We're told by St. Paul, “Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to meet Cephas. I stayed fifteen days with him but did not set eyes on any of the rest of the apostles, only James, the Lord's brother” (Gal. 1:18-19).

In the Acts of the Apostles, we're told, “He raised his hand for silence and described to them how the Lord had led him out of prison. He added, ‘Tell James and the brothers.’ Then he left and went elsewhere” (Acts 12:17).

Also in the Acts: “After this, we made our preparations and went on up to Jerusalem. Some of the disciples from Caesarea accompanied us and took us to the house of a Cypriot with whom we were to lodge. He was called Mnason and had been one of the earliest disciples.

“On our arrival in Jerusalem, the brothers gave us a very warm welcome. The next day, Paul went with us to visit James, and all the elders were present” (Acts 21:15-18).

So on a number of occasions, St. Paul, and also in the Acts, tells us about that position that James occupied.

In Galatians we’re told, “and when they acknowledged the grace that had been given to me. Then James and Cephas and John, who were the ones recognized as pillars, offered their right hands to Barnabas and to me, as a sign of partnership. We were to go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised” (Gal. 2:9).

The Corinthians were told St. James was one of the people privileged to receive a private appearance of the risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:7).

Philip was a native of Bethsaida, a little town on the shore of Lake Gennesareth, as were also Peter and his brother Andrew (John 1:44), who were probably very close friends of his.

“One day on the banks of the Jordan, Philip met Jesus as He was making His way towards Galilee in the company of His first disciples. The Master said to him, “Follow me” (John 1:43).

That was how Our Lord invited His disciples to join His little company, just as the rabbis did with their followers.

Philip followed Him and immediately began introducing his own friends in turn to the one who had become for him the center of his life.

We all have something to learn from the apostles, and this particular disposition of Philip is particularly relevant for us. He immediately looked to his own circle of friends and began to bring them to Jesus.

We're told in St. John, “Philip found Nathanael” (John 1:45). It's an interesting verb, “found.” It means he was looking for him. Philip saw that it was his business to find people and bring them to Jesus.

“And he said to Nathanael, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’”

Faced with Nathanael's doubts, Philip gives him the best of all replies, “Come and see” (John 1:46). Nathanael went along, and remained with Christ forever.

We're also called to say those same words to our friends, “come and see”—to invite them, to share the good things with them, to open our heart to them. Tell them the treasures that we have encountered.

Our Lord never disappoints. Apostolate always entails leading those around us, relatives and friends, acquaintances, to Our Lord. Our task consists in clearing the way for them and removing any obstacles blocking their view.

There was a story of a fisherman who was fishing one day. He happened to notice that suddenly there was a snake that had come up out of the water. And the snake had a frog in its mouth.

Of course, for the fisherman, a frog was a very useful bait for him to use in his fishing, and so he was wondering, How could he get the snake to loosen his grip on the frog so that he could get the frog to use as his bait? Also, how to get rid of the snake at the same time.

Then he had an idea. He had a bottle of whiskey beside him. He took quite a bit of the whiskey on his finger, and he began to rub it around the mouth of the snake, to see if that might make the snake loosen its grip on the frog.

After a few minutes, true enough, the snake loosened its grip on the frog. The man was able to get the frog and the snake slithered back into the water and disappeared.

The fisherman was very happy with himself. He used the frog for his bait. He began to fish again.

After about five minutes, the snake came back, knocked at his foot, and this time the snake had two frogs in his mouth.

The moral of the story is that we have to use all sorts of bait in our apostolate. We are called to be a fisher of men and we have to be clever—clever in getting the right bait, clever in using it, clever in going after the specific fish that God wants us to go after.

Christ, who has already called us, wishes to enter into the souls of the people who approach Him, just as He did with Nathanael.

Notice how Nathanael, who was to become Bartholomew, afterwards became one of the chosen Twelve in spite of his initial unwillingness to believe in his friend's claim.

We don't know the plans that God has attached to the efforts of our fishing, and to the effort that we make to get the right bait.

The first reaction of Nathanael to Philip's invitation was, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). It's a sort of a geographical slur.

Frequently too, it's our role to say to the people that we want to bring closer to Our Lord, “Come and see!”

Anyone who ever took us at our word and came to Jesus never felt cheated, because Our Lord never disappoints.

Today, Philip and James are our intercessors before Jesus. We can entrust to them in a special way the personal apostolate that we are going to try and do these days, this May, with our personal friends.

Our Lord was always close to His disciples, and now He’s close to us.

At the Last Supper He explained to His disciples that He had prepared a place for them in heaven, so that they could be with Him forever. They “already know,” He said, “how to get there” (John 14:2-4).

Then the conversation continues—the disciples asking questions, and Our Lord answering.

At a certain point Philip intervenes with a request that seems to all of them to be out of place: “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

Our Lord seems to chide the disciples affectionately, specifically Philip: “Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:8-9).

Possibly Jesus has to make the same reproach to us as to Philip. ‘How often have I been beside you and you have not noticed?’

‘How often have I pointed out certain souls to you, certain initiatives, certain openings, opportunities that I want you to follow?’

Possibly Our Lord could list for us one occasion after another, times perhaps when we found ourselves under pressure from circumstances and let ourselves get flustered by losing our sense of divine filiation and our closeness to God, and our apostolic focus.

We find Our Lord's reply to Philip wonderfully reassuring: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Jesus reveals the Father. Christ's Sacred Humanity is the means whereby we get to know and love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The normal way we have of reaching the Blessed Trinity is through contemplating Christ. In Him we have the supreme revelation of God to mankind.

In one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, it says, “He himself completed and perfected revelation, and confirmed it with divine guarantees.

“He did this by the total fact of his presence and self-manifestation—by words and works, signs and miracles, but above all by his death and glorious resurrection from the dead, and finally by sending the Spirit of truth.

“He revealed that God was with us to deliver us from the darkness of sin and death, and to raise us up to eternal life” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965).

He fills our life completely. “He is sufficient for you,” says St. Augustine. “Apart from him, nothing can be said to be at all. Philip knew this well when he said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied’” (St. Augustine, Sermon 334).

We need to have the same conviction. We're called to spread the message of the apostles. Our apostolate is based on a very supernatural foundation.

St. Paul says to the Christians at Corinth: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas” (1 Cor. 15:3-5).

Paul received from the apostles a divine message which he also passed on. It was the same message preached by Philip and James, who gave their lives as a witness to it.

These days I've been reading a book called The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century. Very well worthwhile reading.

When Pope St. John Paul II announced at the start of the third millennium that the twentieth century had been a century of martyrs, it was news to me—having been brought up in the era of the Beatles.

This wonderful book written by a man called Robert Royal documents all the brutality, particularly in the communist nations, the eastern bloc countries of Europe. He goes through them one by one, starting with Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Lithuania.

Each story is more horrific than the previous, with the refinement of human cruelty inflicted on Catholics, lay people, priests, bishops, nuns. It's very interesting reading.

You can see how the communists closed down schools, hospitals. They wanted to remove every single trace of Catholicism in the country.

From the number of schools and hospitals and other apostolates there, you can see the incredible work that the Church had done in previous centuries to build up all of those places.

We have an awful lot to be proud of. We have an awful lot to be grateful also to God for our freedom, for the Church who preaches the truth.

Reading this book makes you give thanks for so many things. It's also very enlightening to see how our brothers have given everything.

There was hardly a single apostate in each of these countries. Tremendous fidelity, heroism, great sanctity. This is what it means to be an apostle.

We can learn from all those that have gone before us, from their example, from their heroism, of how we have to be the apostles in the 21st century that God has called us to be.

Philip and James, like the apostle of the Gentiles, knew well what the core of their preaching had to be: Jesus Christ, the Way to the Father. “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6).

This is the Good News that's handed on from generation to generation. “Day unto day takes up the story, and night unto night makes known the message” (Ps. 19:2).

This book is particularly interesting because fifty years after these events, there's a lot of documented historical data.

At one point, this author says that the number of Catholics who died in Auschwitz was similar to that of the Jews.

Many Jews died in many other places. But if you push the Catholic Holocaust together, not just in Nazi Germany, but in all these other communist countries, the numbers of Catholics who gave their lives for the faith is something enormous. It's an aspect of our history that we need to know more about.

We don't have any new message to announce, because the Good News is unchanging: that Christ died for our sins, that He rose again, that He lives beside us, that He loves us as nobody can ever love us, that He has destined us for eternal happiness beside Him, when we shall see Him face to face.

A Nazi commander told a Catholic nun in a concentration camp one time that she should adore Hitler. She said, “When he dies for the sins of mankind on a cross, and he rises from the dead three days later, then I will be willing to worship him in our altars, but not until then. Until then, I focus on Jesus Christ.”

It was a very daring answer that she gave to that Nazi commander. Probably she lost her life later on. But it shows you the consistency of the heroism with which those who have gone before us lived their faith.

Our apostolate consists in proclaiming to the four winds, in every conceivable way, the same doctrine that the apostles preached: that Christ lives, that only He can satisfy the anxieties of the human mind and heart, that only in Christ can one find happiness, that it is He who reveals the Father.

Reading this book, you also see how, in the terrible circumstances that an awful lot of these persecuted people found themselves in prison, tortured, a great solace that was given to them by their faith in Christ, their trust in the Father.

The apostles, like those who followed them, encountered difficulties and obstacles in trying to spread Christ's kingdom.

All of these people in those Eastern Bloc countries have given us a wonderful legacy. You also see the brutality that takes over in any country where the Church is silenced.

If the apostles had decided to wait for a more suitable occasion, then the message which has so transformed our entire existence might never have reached us.

When, later on, the apostles found themselves bereft of resources and faced with the resistance of those who heard them, the apostles, and especially Philip, perhaps recalled the day they were called upon to feed a great multitude while having no food, and no possibility of obtaining any.

“Jesus saw the crowd approaching him and said to Philip, ‘How are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?’”

Philip made a rapid estimate. “He said to the Master, ‘Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little’” (John 6:6-7).

He did his calculations, and quickly realized that the means at their disposal were quite insufficient to meet the needs of the multitude.

Once again we see how Our Lord is moved and filled with pity for the crowd (Matt. 9:36, 14:4), which was so much in need of comforting and understanding.

But He also wants His disciples not to lose sight of the fact that He is always by their side: “I am with you until the end of the earth” (Matt. 28:20).

“Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me, Philip?” (John 14:9).

God is the indispensable factor that we have to rely on to get our accounts to balance.

In our apostolate, with friends, relatives, acquaintances, clients, it's true that we have to reckon with the “two hundred denarii” (John 6:7), the human means, which is never enough.

But we can always remember, can't forget, that Our Lord is always present with His power and with His mercy.

He is beside us now also. The greater our needs and difficulties in the apostolate, the more Our Lord offers to help us. We can't shrink from having recourse to Him.

Philip was from Bethsaida, like Peter and Andrew. He was first of all a disciple of John the Baptist, and afterwards followed Jesus, who called him to form part of the Twelve. He was the one who announced to Nathanael that he had met the Messiah (John 1:43-46).

We know from St. John that Philip was present when Our Lord worked the first miracle at Cana.

From the account of the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, we can suspect that Philip was in charge of provisions. He's the one who quickly calculates how much is needed—two hundred denarii—to satisfy the hunger of the crowd (John 6:5-7).

He intervenes along with Andrew in the episode of the Greek pilgrims—devout Gentiles—who wanted to meet Jesus (John 12:20-22).

Philip is also the one who at the Cenacle asked Our Lord to show them the Father (John 14:8-9).

Tradition tells us that he was the Apostle later in Phrygia in Asia Minor, and that he suffered martyrdom by crucifixion.

James was a blood relative of Jesus. He's called the Less, to distinguish him from the brother of John. He was the first bishop of Jerusalem and carried out an intense work of evangelization among the Jews of that city.

Tradition depicts him as a man who was personally very austere and full of goodness towards others.

Peter, John, and James the Less were known as the pillars of the primitive Church. James died a martyr's death in Jerusalem around the year 62 AD and is the author of one of the Catholic Epistles.

So as we start this month of May, we could ask the apostles to give us the fire of the Holy Spirit, so that we might see the souls around us that God wants us to bring closer to Him during this month—perhaps particularly by visiting some shrines of Our Lady during this Marian month, maybe going on a pilgrimage saying the Rosary, taking care of our own personal Rosary, helping our families to be more aware of the shrines of Our Lady around us, and also instilling a great apostolic spirit in all the people that we meet, so that we can also transmit to all of them the same spirit that fired St. Philip and St. James.

Mary, Queen of Apostles, pray for us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

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

GD