Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fourth Sunday of Lent 2026

In many churches, today is celebrated as Mothering Sunday, or Laetare Sunday: a moment when the disciplines of Lent relax a little. We are encouraged to remember our mothers, living or dead, and all those who care for others. This is also a day when we give thanks for the Church as our Mother, a relationship which begins as the waters of baptism break over our heads, which continues in the sustenance of the Eucharist and reconciliation, in teaching, pastoral care, and healing, and in those final moments around and after death. These are some of the reasons why the Church’s ministry has so often been described as maternal in character.

Since the very early centuries of Christianity, Jerusalem has been known as the ‘Mother of all the Churches.’ This was the City which witnessed the events of Jesus’s passion, death and resurrection, and which after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was the epicentre from which Christian mission flowed. Famously, St Paul organised a collection from his own churches in Antioch and Corinth for the Church in Jerusalem – not only relief for those suffering hunger or hardship, but a gift of fellowship, of tribute, described in the Acts of the Apostles as a ‘communion.’ 

By tradition, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, the leader of that first Christian community, was St James, referred to as ‘the Lord’s Brother.’ Christian tradition has been unclear as to precisely what this word means. Was James Jesus’s brother as such, or simply one of his closest followers? Can that word also be translated as ‘cousin’ or ‘kinsman’? This was certainly the belief of many in those early years. Either way, James’s role was profoundly significant in those first decades of Christianity. He was known as ‘the Just’ or ‘Righteous’, so-called for his piety and faithfulness, and was eventually martyred by beheading, according to the Acts of the Apostles, in the mid-40s AD.

In December 1945, a large number of 2nd, 3rd and early 4th century documents were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. One of these is a 2nd century text known as The Apocryphon of James, a so-called ‘gnostic’ writing, because it relies on sayings of Jesus which were supposedly passed down to James and Peter. These sayings were believed by some at the time to represent a record of some of Jesus’s most intimate post-Resurrection teaching. Much gnostic material is profoundly esoteric and has not found a home within the authoritative tradition of mainstream Christianity. But sometimes, there are simple sayings recorded in this material which amplifies what the whole Church has come to believe. In one passage of the Apocryphon Jesus exhorts James and Peter, ‘Remember my cross and my death, and you will live.’

The Letter which bears James’s name in the New Testament, from which we heard read as our second lesson tonight, is stylistically unlike the other New Testament epistles. Its language and context feel different, and there appear to be direct allusions to some of the sayings of Jesus. It is perhaps most famous for the insistence that faith, without such faith being demonstrated by works – by good practical action – should be regarded as ‘dead.’ For many of the reformers, schooled by St Paul in theological first principles and therefore insistent in their emphasis on ‘faith alone’ being that which justifies us, this made the Letter of James suspect at the least. Martin Luther famously derided it as the ‘Epistle of Straw.’ But James’s letter reveals a passionate Christian vision of God which is entirely harmonious with the Jewish prophetic tradition. He rages against injustice and the oppression of the poor by the uncaring or exploitative rich; and he encourages the taming of the tongue as an essential discipline, ‘From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. Brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water?’ Today’s second reading, which comprises the final twenty verses of book, offers warnings for the rich, exhortations to patience, and encouragement to prayer. Today, on Mothering Sunday, in the middle of Lent, we are given a letter from the Mother Church. 

James’s letter is full of practical advice. After all, this is the man who insisted that faith without good words is essentially dead, possibly indicating some level of serious disagreement with St Paul. The passage we heard this afternoon opens with a warning about riches which fizzes off the page as if it has been taken straight from the prophet Jeremiah. The rich who have kept back the wages of their farm labourers and harvesters have ‘miseries’ coming to them. Their clothes are moth-eaten and their treasure has rusted. James’s community in Jerusalem would have been a Jewish-Christian community, following Jesus’s own pattern of ministry and evangelism within that context. Such prophetic rage against injustice and care for the poor is a key theme in this tradition, which condemns those who trample on others, promising that they will be held to account. But extending the agrarian metaphor further, James goes on to exhort patience among the believers as they await Christ’s coming. The farmer must learn patience with the crops, awaiting the rain and learning endurance. This very practical letter is partially focused on the building of character, those practical elements of life which contribute towards a person’s whole outlook and behaviour. 

James continues with teaching for those who suffer or are sick. Right at the heart of this is a straightforward reliance on the power of prayer. It is prayer, James writes, which will relieve suffering  and heal the sick. But note how this is all set very naturally within the context of a community. The sick should send for the elders of the Church for anointing and prayer. Sins should be confessed to one another. A special place is given to those who accompany people who have left the Church back into its life and truth: their loving action will ‘cover a multitude of sins.’ Such reconciliation is truly grace in action.

So, what should we take from this letter from the Mother Church at this point in Lent? Firstly, the reminder that whatever personal, spiritual disciplines we may have taken up for this holy season, important though such commitments are in shaping our character and renewing our faith, need to be balanced with basic attention to how we treat those around us. That is especially so for how we treat the poor, those who provide for us in society and who so often do not have the privileges we enjoy. Our Christian character should shine through our actions, and our faith should be revealed by how we behave.

We know it is not always that simple. We know how we need the reconciling love of God in Christ to cut through our selfishness and greed. And so we need encouragement in prayer and penitence to throw ourselves again and again on the Lord’s mercy as we seek to live a better kind of discipleship. This Lent is a good time to resolve to take our own sin seriously, but to take God’s love and mercy even more seriously. James’s letter reminds us that we have responsibility not just for ourselves, but for one another. As Christian communities, we should learn afresh graceful, humble ways of encouraging one another in the love of Christ. 

This letter is the only authoritative scriptural testimony we have attributed to James himself. It is the only letter to survive directly from the earliest Mother Church of Jerusalem.  We have some of that other, gnostic material, which needs to be read with care and scrutiny. Some of that material is more faithful to revelation than other elements. ‘Remember my cross and my death, and you will live’, says Jesus to James and Peter in the Apocryphon. Perhaps today we might speculate that this particular tradition, which harmonises with so much of what we receive from the early Church, might be the central tradition which the Mother Church of Jerusalem has handed down to the rest of us across two millennia. As we approach Passiontide, Jesus says to us all, ‘Remember my cross and my death, and you will live.’ In that remembrance, how we behave, how we rejoice, how we deal with sickness, and how we hope, will all find its meaning. ‘Remember my cross and my death, and you will live.’