James Brother of Jesus: When Familiarity Breeds Contempt

What if the person who knew Jesus best completely missed who He really was? In this powerful G-Drop episode, we explore one of the most sobering relationships in Scripture: James brother of Jesus. They grew up together, worked together, lived together, and yet James missed the entire ministry of Christ. He was so familiar with Jesus that he became blind to the truth standing right in front of him.

The phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” isn’t just an old saying. It’s a spiritual warning that echoes through the ages and speaks directly to our situation today. James’s story forces us to ask uncomfortable questions: Are we so familiar with church, with Christianity, with the idea of Jesus that we’ve become blind to who He actually is?

The Unique Bond: James Brother of Jesus Growing Up Together

James brother of Jesus shared something extraordinary with the Messiah. They weren’t just brothers; they were companions in every sense of the word. Growing up in first-century Nazareth, they would have experienced life side by side in ways we can barely imagine today.

Brothers in that culture developed deep bonds. They were physical with one another, with their environment, constantly testing themselves against the world around them. As boys, they would have come up with ideas that seemed brilliant at the time but often ended in scrapes and bruises. That’s how young men figured out who they were and how they fit into the world.

Jesus and James grew from childhood into manhood together. They shared the same home with their mother Mary. After Joseph, their father, taught them the carpenter’s trade, they most likely worked side by side every day, shaping wood and building things with their hands. This wasn’t like our modern world where you can explore different career paths or change your mind about what you want to do. In their time and place, you learned your father’s trade, and that was your life.

For roughly thirty years, until Jesus began His ministry, no one on earth was closer to Him than James. And James absolutely believed, down to his core, that nobody on earth knew Jesus as well as he did.

He was 100% wrong.

We have an expression in our culture: “There is none so blind as he who will not see.” This phrase appeared in a 1960s song, but it was taken from a poem written in the 1540s by an English poet. And that poet? He borrowed it from the book of Jeremiah, chapter 5, verse 21:

Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding, which have eyes and see not, which have ears and hear not.

That verse is an explanation of James. It may also be an explanation of us.

Everything was going along as a normal life for James and Jesus. They had their trade, they had their home, they were together as a family. Everything was fine. Until Jesus got to be around 30 years old, and then all of a sudden, He walked off.

When Jesus Began His Ministry

Jesus walked away from the carpenter’s shop and started a ministry. He began preaching to people about the good news, about salvation, about being able to live in heaven with God for eternity. That was just the beginning. He spent hours and hours teaching, and then the miracles started.

People came to Him because He was a teacher, and they started asking, “Can you help me? I have someone who’s been crippled for life. I have people with diseases that can’t be cured. They’re blind or deaf or unable to speak.” And Jesus healed them. Every single one.

That healing power started to spread like wildfire. More and more people started coming. Thousands of people. The disciples later described crowds so thick that you couldn’t even raise your hand to your mouth because your arms were pinned to your side. There were so many people trying to get near to Jesus. Why? Because they were finding out that if they could just touch the hem of His garment, whatever their infirmity was, it was healed immediately.

It was the most amazing thing any of them had ever seen. It got to the point where Jesus told His disciples, “You’ve got to get me a little rowboat because I’m going to get crushed to death by the zeal of these people.” So He started pushing out from shore in a rowboat and speaking to them that way.

Now eventually, all of this was getting back to His family. And James was thinking, “What on earth is going on? What is wrong with my brother? He’s not a preacher or teacher. And yet now I’m hearing that he’s saying he’s the son of God. We have to go and get him before something bad happens.”

The Family Intervention

They decided to perform a family intervention. This is described in Mark chapter 3, verse 20:

Then the multitude came together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. But when his own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”

This is where we get the expression “you’re out of your mind.” James and the family thought Jesus was mentally ill. They were going to physically drag Him home. This was an intervention over 2,000 years ago. They went out to lay hold of Him because they said He was out of His mind.

This is how firmly James believed that there was something mentally wrong with his brother. Something had gone off the rails, and they wanted to intervene and take Him away. Of course, that didn’t happen. Jesus was on a mission because God had a beginning and an end plan for it, and He knew that. He had limited time to get the information to as many people as possible.

The only thing James was right about was this: we’ve got to stop this or it’s going to end badly.

The Moment Everything Changed

James missed the entire ministry. He missed the entire truth about Jesus being the Son of God, the Messiah. And James probably watched his brother die on the cross on that Friday. He went home that night after seeing that horrendous scene, after seeing somebody that he loved so dearly die an agonizing death.

He must have laid on his mat that night and said, “Why didn’t you just come home and shut up? If you had just come home and shut up, the leaders would not have killed you. But you got so many thousands of people following you, you became a threat to them. And so they determined to kill you in a very public way to stop everything that you were saying. Why wouldn’t you listen?”

It’s the same thing today.

James was having a horrible night. But there was a worse one coming. Three days later, Jesus was out and about, risen from the dead, being seen over several days by over 500 people. Personally, I believe James was somewhere in that throng.

Imagine what was going on in his mind. Everything that he knew as the person who had the best vantage point, the person with the best chance to know everything about Jesus, he knew nothing. Nothing about who Jesus really was. And he denied all of it. And now he’s seeing Him risen from the dead and continuing to minister and teach.

Imagine if their eyes met in those crowded situations. James would have felt incredible shame and incredible confusion. And I’m sure that Jesus would have looked at him with a look of understanding and compassion. And then Jesus was gone.

So for the whole time Jesus was alive, James was a denier. And now he knows he was completely wrong about his brother, this person that he was so close to. He did not know who he was.

What James Brother of Jesus Did After the Resurrection

So what do you do in that situation? James did two things. He started the first church in Jerusalem and he wrote the first book of the New Testament. Understanding the books of the Bible and their historical context helps us appreciate the transformation that led James to write his powerful Book of James. This is how he starts his Book of James, greeting to the twelve tribes. Remember, all the early Christians were Jews, and so he’s addressing the twelve tribes of Israel because he’s a good Jew and he’s found something out and he wants them to know what he’s found out.

He says:

James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

First of all, a bondservant is a slave. He’s saying now I’m a slave to God and I’m a slave to not my brother Jesus, but the Lord Jesus Christ. Then he calls himself a bondservant, which is a slave, but a bondservant is somebody back then who could speak legally for their master. They could sign documents for their master. They could transact for their master because they were so trusted by their master.

So he’s no longer deluded by the familiarity of this brother to brother thing which caused him to be absolutely blind to who Jesus was. Now he says, “I’m a bondservant to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

He says, “To the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greetings.” And then he titles the next few lines “Profiting from Trials.”

Profiting from Trials

Does that have something to do with today? We’ve been in trials basically for almost four years now. Trials in 2020, trials in 2021, and many more coming now in 2024 and 2025. James writes:

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.

Think about that. Count it all joy. Does that occur to you? Our society is rife with anxiety, and yet we should count it all joy that we’re going through trials? Why would you count it all joy that you’re going through trials?

He continues:

Knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

Imagine the trials of someone who grew up with Jesus, denied His whole ministry, denied that He was the Son of God, watched Him die on a cross, and then saw Him risen from the dead and knew that he was 100% wrong about everything. He had to make up for that. He had to do something because he had been so wrong.

So he started the church, and the church had a lot of people trying to stomp it out. A life of trials is what James was taking on for that denial. But he’s saying count it all joy because when you go through trials and you go through them with God, when you go through them as a bondservant to Jesus Christ, going through the trials allows you to actually see how God works in your life. You see how the truth actually performs.

He’s saying don’t spend your time trying to make the trials go away. He’s saying the trials do something for you. They grow patience in you. And if you embrace that, he says patience will have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

Lacking Nothing

Imagine what that would feel like, someone from our culture lacking nothing. Every measure in our culture is telling you that you’re not good enough. You don’t have enough. You’re not rich enough. You’re not smart enough. You don’t have a good enough job. Your title’s not high enough.

He’s saying you’ll find out that you’re complete and lacking nothing. He says:

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.

Liberally means as much as you want. And without reproach means He’s not going to punish you for being a guy like James who had every reason to understand and believe, but his human understanding would not let him. It blinded him to the whole thing.

He’s saying God’s not going to hold that against you if you’ll ask God for wisdom. Not man. Man’s wisdom is foolishness to God, and God’s wisdom is foolishness to man. James employed all of man’s wisdom in assessing who his brother was, what his problem was, and decided he was mentally ill and needed to be dragged home.

It’s God’s wisdom that we’re after here that completes us so that we’re lacking nothing.

The Danger of Doubt

He continues:

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.

Does James know about that doubt? He sure does. He went past doubt to denial. He denied everything his brother was teaching. He denied who his brother said he truly was.

So he’s saying, “Let him ask in faith with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” He’s describing somebody who’s anxious all the time. You’re anxious and you’re trying to find a remedy. Well, maybe I’ll do this to fix it. No, that’s not going to work. Well, maybe what if that other thing happens? He’s describing a wave on the sea. You’re just flipping and flopping and moving all over in the wind. You have no control over it.

He goes on:

He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

And he knows because his world got rocked. He was so sure he knew who Jesus Christ was. It was Jesus his brother. It was Jesus His companion. It was Jesus his fellow worker in the trade of carpentry. It was Jesus. They worked all day. They were in the house all day around their mother. If He was the Son of God, his mother would have told him. Nobody mentioned this. Nobody said anything like it. They just said, “Let’s go get Him and drag Him home and make this stop before something terrible happens.”

The Church and Familiarity

That’s what the church is for most of us. We were around it growing up. We’ve seen it in our towns. There are steeples everywhere. That church, a church that is too familiar to you, that you may even have contempt for, that church has in its DNA the first church that James started in Jerusalem. If you’re searching for a faith community where you can grow in understanding and fellowship, consider connecting with others who are examining these same questions.

Remember, the man with the best chance to truly know Jesus missed the whole thing. Is that going to be your situation? Are you so familiar with what you think that church is and what you think Christianity is that you’re going to miss the whole thing?

What James did was found the first church and write the first book, the Book of James, in the New Testament. For deeper study of Bible messages like the one James wrote, explore verse-by-verse teachings that illuminate Scripture’s timeless wisdom. There are two kinds of people that are going to come out of this situation. They are the people that God calls “my people” because they’ve embraced Jesus Christ. And there are the people that Jeremiah describes as “the foolish people.”

A Fork in the Road

God loves us and He has given us the ability to choose. We have free will. We’re standing at an amazing fork in the road right now in the history of our country.

Learn from James. Don’t make the same mistake.

The very person who should have known Jesus best was blinded by familiarity. He thought he knew everything there was to know. He thought his proximity gave him understanding. But knowing about someone and truly knowing them are two completely different things.

James learned this lesson the hard way. He watched his brother die for claiming to be who James refused to believe He was. And then he saw Him alive again, and everything changed.

The question isn’t whether you’ve been around church. The question isn’t whether you grew up hearing about Jesus. The question is whether familiarity has bred contempt in your heart. Has your closeness to Christian culture actually blinded you to Christ Himself?

This isn’t just a warning for those outside the faith. This is a warning for those of us who have been in church our whole lives. We can become so familiar with the stories, so accustomed to the language, so comfortable with the rituals, that we miss the Person at the center of it all.

James’s transformation from denier to bondservant didn’t happen because he got more information. He had all the information he needed growing up with Jesus. It happened because he finally saw the truth that had been in front of him all along. He stopped relying on his own understanding and submitted to the reality of who Jesus actually is.

The Call to Action

Where are you in this story? Are you standing where James stood when he tried to drag Jesus home? Are you convinced you know exactly who Jesus is based on your proximity to Christian culture? Or have you, like James after the resurrection, come to see that everything you thought you knew was wrong?

The beauty of the James brother of Jesus story is that it didn’t end with his denial. God didn’t give up on him. Even though James missed the entire ministry, even though he called Jesus mentally ill, even though he tried to stop the very work of God, James was given another chance. He saw the risen Christ, and everything changed.

That same opportunity stands before us today. We can continue in our familiarity, comfortable in our assumptions, blind to the truth. Or we can do what James did. We can humble ourselves, admit we were wrong, and become true bondservants of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This message from the G-Drop series calls us to examine our hearts. It challenges us to look beyond the familiar and see Jesus for who He truly is. It reminds us that being close to Christianity is not the same as knowing Christ.

As we face trials in our own time, as our culture shifts and changes, as anxiety threatens to overwhelm us, James’s words ring true: count it all joy. Not because trials are fun, but because trials reveal what we truly believe. They strip away the familiarity and force us to confront reality. For more biblical perspective on today’s concerns, explore how Scripture speaks to our modern challenges.

James learned the hardest way possible that human wisdom fails. He learned that proximity doesn’t equal understanding. He learned that you can grow up with Jesus and still miss everything. But he also learned that it’s never too late to truly see, to truly believe, to truly follow.

Don’t let familiarity blind you. Don’t let contempt keep you from truth. Learn from the story of James brother of Jesus. The man who missed everything became the man who started everything. The denier became the bondservant. The blind became the one who saw most clearly.

The fork in the road is before us. Choose wisely.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

Was James really Jesus’s biological brother?

Yes. Mark 6:3 specifically names James along with Jesus’s other brothers: Joses, Judas, and Simon. As James brother of Jesus, he grew up in the same household in Nazareth with Mary and Joseph. This makes his rejection of Jesus’s ministry even more remarkable since he witnessed Jesus’s character firsthand from childhood through adulthood.

Why didn’t James believe in Jesus during His ministry if he saw Him perform miracles?

John 7:5 tells us “even his brothers did not believe in him.” James’s disbelief wasn’t due to lack of evidence but rather familiarity breeding contempt. He was so accustomed to seeing Jesus as his brother and fellow carpenter that he couldn’t see past the familiar to recognize the divine. Human wisdom and proximity blinded him to spiritual truth, which is exactly the warning this episode delivers to us today.

What changed James from a denier to a leader of the early church?

The resurrection changed everything. First Corinthians 15:7 mentions that the risen Christ appeared specifically to James. Seeing his brother alive after witnessing His crucifixion shattered every assumption James held. This encounter transformed him from someone who thought Jesus was mentally ill into a bondservant who would lead the Jerusalem church and write the Book of James.

What does it mean that James called himself a “bondservant” instead of Jesus’s brother?

By calling himself “a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” James made a profound statement. A bondservant was a trusted slave who could legally represent their master, sign documents, and conduct business on their behalf. By using this term instead of claiming his biological relationship, James showed that spiritual relationship trumps family connection. He no longer related to Jesus as a brother but as Lord and Master.

How does the story of James brother of Jesus apply to Christians today?

The story of James brother of Jesus is a warning against spiritual complacency and familiarity. Many people grow up in church, hear about Jesus their whole lives, and become so familiar with Christian culture that they miss Christ Himself. Just like James knew facts about Jesus but didn’t truly know Him, we can know about Christianity without knowing Christ personally. James’s transformation challenges us to examine whether we truly know Jesus or just know about Him.

James Brother of Jesus: When Familiarity Breeds Contempt (G-DROP)

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