Reading with Imagination: Life as Jesus’s Brother

If there’s anyone on this earth who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m not God, it’s my sister.

That’s why James 1:1 helps to bolster my faith that Jesus is exactly who he said he was. Jesus’s little brother James calls himself “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.” If there was anyone who had irrefutable evidence that Jesus wasn’t worthy to be called Lord, it’d be the guy he had to share a room with growing up.

I wonder what this process looked like for James—the process of going from Jesus’s kid brother to his servant. Was he one of the brothers who came with Mary to the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned the water to wine? Was that the start of it all? Or was it a bunch of little things from their childhood? Or was it his brother’s death and resurrection that moved him to call his own brother the Christ? In any case, if James believed it, I do too.