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This Sunday - Veneration of the Relics of St. James of Nisibis
This Sunday, we will be blessed with a rare opportunity to venerate the relics of St. James of Nisibis (Ս. Յակոբ Մծբնացի), a revered father of the Oriental and Eastern Orthodox Churches, and also of the Roman Catholic Church, who lived during the third and fourth centuries. Through the veneration of relics, we are invited to draw near holy men and women of great example and receive their spiritual blessings and intercessions. These opportunities also invite us to learn more about their lives and works for the Church of Christ.
Born into a noble Parthian family in the mid-third century, St. James is said to have been a first cousin to St. Gregory, the Illuminator of the Armenians. St. James became a monk as a young man, embracing a hermetic life by which he chose to live in isolation, allowing himself little in terms of food, clothing, and shelter. In 308, he was made the bishop of Nisibis, a city near the modern-day border of Turkey and Syria. A trusted leader of the early Christian Church, he attended the Ecumenical Council held at Nicaea in 325. Also respected as a pastor, wonderworker, and teacher of the Orthodox faith, St. James was the spiritual father of the theologian and hymnographer St. Ephrem the Syrian (+373), and founded a theological school at Nisibis. In 338, St. James died peacefully in his old age.
The Armenian Church commemorates St. James each year with a five-day period of fasting in anticipation of his feast day, which occurs on the Saturday falling between December 12th and 18th. His life and feast are of particular interest to Armenians not just because of his familial ties to St. Gregory, but also for his special connection to the historical lands of the Armenian people. St. James is known to have ascended Mount Ararat seeking evidence of the great flood described in the Book of Genesis. While on the mountain, an angel revealed to him a piece of Noah's Ark. A portion of that wood remains in the treasury at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin today. In our own Eastern Diocese, St. James is the spiritual patron of four parishes: Watertown, Massachusetts; Evanston, Illinois; Richmond, Virginia; and St. Petersburg, Florida.
The relics of St. James held by our community here in Detroit are encased in a small hand cross. The body of St. James was moved from his original tomb in Nisibis to Edessa in 363, and then to Constantinople in 970, from which portions of relics were taken and transferred throughout Christendom. Those relics within our cross probably resided in Historical Armenia for centuries, likely at the monastery on the island of Aghtamar. In 1868, Catholicos Khachadour Shiroyan of Aghtamar (+1895) brought them to Constantinople, where the cross in which they were encased was likely manufactured and initially used. An inscription on the cross places it in Nicomedia (Izmit in modern-day Turkey) after the turn of the twentieth century. Shortly before the Armenian Genocide, the cross was re-gifted to a village church near Moush, then later made its way to the US.
Father Aren will use this hand cross during this Sunday's Divine Liturgy, after which we will have the chance to venerate the holy relics of St. James of Nisibis. We eagerly invite our community to come and receive the blessings and intercessions of this great patriarch of the early Christian Church.
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