Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
1^st of September 2024

James 1:17-27

For the next month we are going to be reading our way through one of my favourite books in the Bible, the Letter of James. ‘James’ only became part of the biblical canon in the late second or early third centuries, and into the fourth century it was still described as one of the Bible’s disputed books. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther notoriously described it as ‘an epistle of straw’ and an influential commentary published in 1921 still saw it as simply a collection of slogans without a unifying theme.[1] The letter’s poor reputation among Christians is probably because it could easily have been written by a Jew who revered Jesus merely as a human teacher. Jesus is mentioned only twice and there are no references to his crucifixion or to the resurrection. Despite its poor reputation, I love this letter, and we are going to spend the next month learning from it.

The letter is attributed to the brother of Jesus named in the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew, when people scoffed at the idea of Jesus being anyone special. ‘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?’ (Matt 13:55, also Mark 6:3) In his First Letter to the Corinthians Paul lists James individually among the people to whom the resurrected Jesus appeared. (1 Cor 15:5-8) Describing the beginning of his ministry in his Letter to the Galatians Paul says that the only two apostles he saw were Cephas [Peter] and ‘James the Lord’s brother’ (Galatians 1:18).

We also hear of James in the Acts of the Apostles when Peter is released from prison by an angel and goes to the house of one of the believers. Peter tells them ‘Tell this to James and to the believers’. (Acts 12:17) When Paul and Barnabas tell the Jerusalem church about their ministry to the Gentiles it is James who answers, saying that he has decided that Gentile Christians do not need to become Jews. (Acts 15:19-20) James is obviously a person of importance in the Jerusalem church.

Later Christian literature tells us that James was martyred. Eusebius wrote his History of the Church in the fourth century, quoting from earlier material that we have now lost. Among his sources are the memoirs of someone called Hegesippus who wrote in the second century. As quoted by Eusebius, Hegesippus writes, ‘Control of the Church passed to the apostles, together with the Lord’s brother James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has called the Righteous, … He used to enter the Sanctuary alone, and was often found on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, so that his knees grew hard like a camel’s from his continually bending them in worship of God and beseeching forgiveness for the people.’[2]

Apparently the scribes and the Pharisees asked James to make the facts of Jesus clear, that he was not the Christ. Everyone would believe James, they said, because of his well-known righteousness. Instead James stood on the parapet of the Temple and told the people that Jesus was now ‘sitting in heaven at the right hand of the Great Power, and he will come on the clouds of Heaven’.[3] So the scribes and the Pharisees threw James down from the parapet and stoned him. Eusebius says that many intelligent Jews believed that the siege of Jerusalem was punishment for James’ martyrdom.

Whoever the author of the Letter is, it seems that he had access to the collection of Jesus’ sayings that the author of the Gospel according to Matthew used in his writing, and the Letter expands on the teachings of Jesus that Matthew presented as the ‘Sermon on the Mount’. Despite the belittling of this Letter down the centuries it does have a central theme, it is not simply a collection of wisdom sayings, and that central theme can be summed up in words of Jesus from the Gospel according to Matthew: ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 7:21) The theme of the Letter of James is that what we do matters just as much as what we say we believe.

Today’s passage sets the context for all James’ advice throughout the Letter on how we can be ‘doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive [our]selves’. We can live as God’s holy people because God’s generosity is at the heart of the universe: ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.’ God is the Creator, the Father who made the sun, moon, and stars. But while those lights are changeable, the light of the Creator shines on us forever. Born anew by God’s Word, we have become ‘a kind of first fruits of his creatures’ able to live the ‘pure and undefiled’ lives that are God’s intention for the whole creation. Our religion need not be worthless, because we have been given God’s perfect law, the law of liberty, and so we are free to live as God intends.

After telling us that we are God’s first fruits, those belonging to a new order of creation, huge, cosmos-level, statements, James goes into minute detail about how we should behave. ‘Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger’. After my discussions about the Letter to the Ephesians’ potential encouraging of righteous anger the Letter to James is very clear: ‘Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness’. (I am so lucky that the Epistles contain both Ephesians and James.) The author of this Letter, whether James or someone else, would have known what he was talking about. He was certainly a Jewish Christian, one of the followers of Jesus who remained part of Judaism. These Jewish Christians clashed with their fellow Jews over what the true form of Judaism should be; they had also experienced conflict with Paul and the Gentile Christians over whether Gentile followers of Jesus needed to become Jews. Given that they were involved in arguments with two different groups of their fellow believers, James’ advice to his readers to listen, be slow to speak, and avoid anger would have been deeply important. An American commentator I read this week described James’ advice as ‘diametrically opposed to the superior, declamatory, commanding and dismissive rhetoric of much of the self-styled Christian right’ and said that it would ‘transform current disputes among Christians if it were observed’.[4] Not just the Christian ‘right’ and not just in the USA.

James knows how important it is to speak well; in a couple of weeks we will hear him on the tongue as a fire that can set a forest ablaze. (James 3:5-6) He is also aware that listening well is as important a skill, that listening is more than merely hearing. I recently talked to the Elders about listening as an essential skill for spiritual nurture and care. Good listening is a combination of hearing what another person says, and signalling to them that they have been heard. Often when someone we care for is in difficulties we want to try and ‘fix’ things for them, when that is not what they need. We want to do something more active than just ‘listen’ but James, who knows that ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead,’ (James 2:17) also knows that what we see as ‘merely’ listening is a ‘work’ that shows that our faith is alive. Be quick to listen, knowing that what those in trouble most often need to someone to truly hear them.

Today’s passage ends with one of my favourite verses in all Scripture: ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.’ I frequently return to it: when people have told me that I believe the wrong things or that the way I live is offensive to God. No! I have said to those who have written me nasty letters or tried to get me fired, my faith is pure and undefiled before God because I have, to the very best of my ability, sought to care for the orphans and widows in their distress. (Then I just hope that they do not ask me whether I have also bridled my tongue, which to James is equally important.)

Over the next few weeks James is going to give us lots of advice. Scholars say that in the 108 verses and five chapters of this letter there are at least fifty commands. Some we will find easy; some difficult. I, for instance, am good at sharing what I have with the poor and dreadful at keeping my tongue still. You will have your own strengths and weaknesses. But James is absolutely certain that we can be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive ourselves, because our generous God has given us every perfect gift. Let us follow the law of liberty and welcome with meekness the Word of God that we know as Jesus, that has the power to save our souls. Amen.

[1] Patrick J. Hartin, ‘The Letter of James: Faith Leads to Action (The Indicative Leads to the Imperative),’ Word and World volume 35, number 3 (2015), pp. 222-230.

[2] Eusebius, The History of the Church (1989), p. 59.

[3] Eusebius, p. 60.

[4] L William Countryman on ‘James’ in The Queer Bible Commentary (2007), p. 720.