On 23 October, the Greek Orthodox Church commemorates Saint James (Iakovos), the Brother of the Lord, with a Gospel reading that shows how familiarity can sometimes make understanding more difficult, not less.
In Matthew 13:54-58, Jesus returns to his own country and teaches in the synagogue. The people listening are astonished. They recognise the wisdom of what he is saying and know of the mighty works associated with him, yet their response is not simply admiration.
They begin asking questions.
“Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?”
They know the family. They know where Jesus comes from. They believe they know enough about his background to understand who he is, and it is precisely that familiarity that becomes an obstacle.
“Where then did this man get all this?” they ask.
Matthew records that they “took offence at him”.
Jesus responds with the observation that “a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and in his own house”, and the passage ends by saying that he did not perform many mighty works there because of their unbelief.
It is a short Gospel, but its point is uncomfortable. The people of Jesus’ hometown are not rejecting somebody entirely unknown to them. They are struggling to accept him because they believe they already know exactly who he is.
Their questions are built around facts. They know his mother. They know his relatives. They know the household from which he comes. None of that information is necessarily wrong, but they use it to reach a conclusion that leaves no room for anything they have not already considered.
Familiarity has become certainty.
The reading takes on another dimension because one of the relatives named in the passage is James, the saint commemorated by the Orthodox Church on 23 October.
Known as James the Brother of the Lord and James the Just, he became one of the most significant figures in the early Church. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America records different traditions concerning the precise family relationship, including accounts that identify him as a son of Joseph from an earlier marriage and others that describe him as another close relative. In either tradition, his title “Brother of the Lord” reflects that close kinship.
What is clearer in Orthodox tradition is the importance of the life that followed.
James became the first Bishop of Jerusalem and was known for his righteousness, earning the title James the Just. The Archdiocese records that he ultimately suffered martyrdom after publicly proclaiming his faith in Christ.
That later history makes his appearance in Matthew’s Gospel particularly interesting.
In the synagogue, James is mentioned as part of the evidence the people use to establish Jesus’ ordinariness. They know his family, including James, and therefore struggle to understand how the carpenter’s son standing before them could possess such wisdom.
Yet the man whose name appears almost incidentally in their questioning would himself become a leader of the Church in Jerusalem.
The Epistle appointed for 23 October brings James into the story again, this time through Saint Paul.
In Galatians 1:11-19, Paul describes the extraordinary change in his own life. Before becoming an apostle, he had violently persecuted the Church and attempted to destroy it. He recalls how deeply committed he had been to the traditions in which he was raised, advancing beyond many of his contemporaries in his zeal.
Paul had not been indifferent to religion. He had been convinced.
Then his understanding changed.
He tells the Galatians that the Gospel he preached was not something he had simply been taught by another person, but had come to him through a revelation of Jesus Christ. After a period in Arabia and Damascus, Paul eventually travelled to Jerusalem, where he spent 15 days with Cephas, or Peter.
He then adds a detail directly connected to today’s feast: “I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.”
The James named by the people of Nazareth in Matthew appears here as one of the established figures of the Christian community in Jerusalem.
Paul, meanwhile, arrives as someone whose own life has become almost unrecognisable from what it had been before.
The persecutor has become an apostle.
That makes the pairing of the two readings particularly effective.
Matthew shows people who cannot move beyond what they believe they know about Jesus. Galatians gives us Paul, a man whose certainty about Christianity was once so strong that he attempted to destroy the Church, only to have his understanding overturned completely.
In both passages, the issue is not simply knowledge. It is what happens when knowledge hardens into an assumption that can no longer be questioned.
The people of Nazareth have genuine information about Jesus. Paul had genuine knowledge of the religious traditions he defended. The problem is not ignorance in its simplest form. It is confidence in a conclusion that turns out to be incomplete.
That distinction remains relevant well beyond the biblical setting.
People are often understood through the version of themselves that others first came to know. Within families, workplaces and communities, someone can remain fixed in an old role long after circumstances have changed. A mistake can become a reputation. A childhood identity can follow someone into adulthood. A person’s family, education, occupation or background can quietly become a limit placed on what others believe them capable of doing.
Sometimes the judgement is positive. Sometimes it is dismissive. In either case, certainty can prevent us from noticing what has changed.
Today’s Gospel does not suggest that familiarity itself is a problem. Knowing another person well can bring insight that strangers do not possess. But the people of Nazareth demonstrate the danger of assuming that familiarity means there is nothing left to discover.
They hear wisdom and immediately try to explain it away through what they already know.
Saint Paul’s story presents the same problem from within.
He is forced to reconsider not another person, but himself and the convictions around which he had built his life. Galatians does not portray that change as a minor adjustment. The man who once persecuted Christians becomes the man travelling through the ancient world preaching the faith he once opposed.
His earlier certainty does not protect him from being wrong.
For Orthodox Christianity, this willingness to recognise the limits of one’s own judgement sits closely with the virtue of humility. Humility does not require abandoning reason or treating every belief as uncertain. It does require allowing for the possibility that our understanding may be incomplete.
The life of Saint James reinforces that point in another way.
The Gospel identifies him through his relationship to Jesus. Orthodox tradition remembers him for what he later became: the first Bishop of Jerusalem, a teacher and leader of the early Church, and ultimately a martyr.
Those later chapters cannot be seen in the brief reference to him in Matthew.
The same is true of Paul. Nothing about the violent persecutor described at the beginning of his account makes his future as one of Christianity’s most influential apostles obvious.
Human lives rarely reveal their entire meaning at once.
That may be the clearest message running through the readings for 23 October. The people in the synagogue look at Jesus and see the carpenter’s son whose family they know. Paul looks back at a former version of himself whose convictions once seemed unquestionable. James appears first as a relative named in a crowd’s sceptical questioning and later as a leader of the Church.
What people know in one moment is not necessarily all there is to know.
The Gospel therefore asks for something more difficult than simply avoiding judgement. It asks whether we are willing to reconsider conclusions that feel settled.
The people of Nazareth are astonished by what they hear, but their certainty about Jesus’ background becomes stronger than the evidence before them.
They know where he comes from.
They know his family.
They think they know who he is.
And that leaves no room for the possibility that there is more to understand.
Read also 16 October Orthodox Gospel Teaches Us to Look Beyond Appearances
The post 23 October Orthodox Gospel Warns Against Judging by What We Think We Know appeared first on Greek City Times.