Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
8 September 2024

James 2:1-10, 14-17

We are in our second week of reading through the Letter attributed to Jesus’ brother, James the Righteous, leader of the church in Jerusalem. Last week I mentioned Martin Luther’s abhorrence of this letter, which he called ‘an epistle of straw’. Today we come to my favourite part of the letter, and the part that I think, more than any other, made Martin Luther fume: ‘What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill”, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.’

As I said last week, in this Letter of James there is a surprising absence of Jesus; he is mentioned by name only twice, in the very first verse when the author describes himself as, ‘James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (James 1:1), and in today’s reading when the author asks, ‘My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?’ Here I am going to take us on a short grammatical excursion, so feel free to temporarily drift off if you do not find grammar exciting. The phrase that the New Revised Standard Version translates as ‘believe in our glorious Lord Jesus’ is literally ‘faith in/of our Lord Jesus’: pistis tou kuriou hemon iesou. The author could be asking his readers whether they believe in Jesus, which is the way the NRSV and most Bibles translate it, or whether they have the same faith that Jesus had, the faith of Jesus, which is the way many biblical commentators translate it. Given the rest of the letter, I think it is more likely that the author is telling his readers that they need to imitate the faith of Jesus, not have faith in Jesus. Whichever way we translate it, the author is clear that followers of Jesus cannot unite their faith with the favouring of the rich over the poor. End of grammatical excursion.

The gospels are rife with examples of Jesus’ care for the poor and oppressed, unsurprising given that the Hebrew Scriptures are equally clear that God is on the side of the poor and oppressed. The people of Israel worshipped the God who freed the slaves in the Exodus; sent prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Amos to condemn the oppression of the poor by the rich; and finally destroyed the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and sent their people into exile because they had trampled on the needy and brought to ruin the poor of the land. Jesus’ teachings about the poor drew on the Hebrew Scriptures and the words of the prophets, and this letter draws on Jesus’ teachings. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt 5:3) and in today’s passage James writes, ‘Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?’ When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment he replied ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matt 22:37-40) Today we hear from James that: ‘You do well if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”’. James is writing to a community of people who knew Jesus’ teachings and agreed with them. They know that the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ was faith in the God who cares deeply about the poor, and so those who seek to follow Jesus are also to care for them.

But when in today’s passage James describes the arrival of the rich person and the poor person into the assembly, and their different treatment by the community, he is probably describing something he has seen happening. The teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and of Jesus that God is on the side of the poor and that they are to be respected and honoured were just as counter-cultural in the first century as they are now. In Greco-Roman culture honour was to be given to the rich and powerful. Our culture is the same. We too place praise and reward the rich, while ignoring the poor or blaming them for their poverty. There is a reason that the media recently reported on Gina Rinehart’s opinions about the curriculum taught in Australian schools and it is not because Ms Rinehart has any particular qualifications or expertise in education. We still take more notice of ‘the one wearing the fine clothes,’ and thus we still make distinctions among ourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts.

In the church, James argues, honour is to be given to both rich and poor, neither is to be honoured at the expense of the other, neither is to be dishonoured. Favouritism based on wealth, James argues, is a sin not to be committed by those who believe in the glorious Lord Jesus Christ, or by those who wish to have the same faith that our Lord Jesus Christ had. Praising the rich is self-defeating, anyway, James points out. ‘Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?’ Yet again and again throughout the ages the church is condemned for favouring the rich. One of my favourite examples of this comes from St. Neilos of Sinai, writing in the fifth century about how far the monks of his time have fallen from the example of the apostles:

as for us, when we lack something, instead of struggling courageously against our difficulties, we come fawning to the rich, like puppies wagging their tails in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs. To get what we want, we call them benefactors and protectors of Christians, attributing every virtue to them, even though they may be utterly wicked. We do not investigate how the saints lived, although supposedly it is our aim to imitate their holiness.

I do not know whether we should be comforted or discouraged by knowing how widespread the ‘acts of favouritism’ that James condemns have been throughout Christian history. If we sin in this way, we are not alone.

The second situation that James condemns in today’s passage is a belief that faith can be real without leading to deeds. James is not arguing that works without faith are sufficient; he is arguing that if belief in Jesus does not lead to action in the world, then it is not actually faith. Just as favouritism is contrary to the example of Christ, so spiritual words without physical deeds are contrary to the example of the Jesus who fed both the spiritually and the physically hungry, and healed both the spiritually and the physically sick. James is appalled that a so-called Christian could tell a brother or sister who was naked and lacking daily food, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ without doing anything to care for them. He knows that those who say such things do not truly hold the faith they profess.

It is because we know that ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’ that every Sunday, in the middle of our service of worship, we take out our wallets or purses, put money in a collection bowl, and then offer it to God with a prayer. Of course, we now live in a world in which many of us do not put any money in the bowl when it comes around because our offering is silently and electronically transferred from our bank account to the account of the church, and no actual money changes hands. Yet we still pause in the middle of worship and acknowledge that some of what God has given us has been given in trust for those in need. To those not used to it, taking up a collection during a service, dealing with something as practical as money in the middle of a spiritual event, can seem unseemly. But as James reminds his readers, being a Christian is not simply a matter of mind and spirit. It is not just about what we believe, it is also about how we behave. That includes how we deal with our money. Budgets are moral documents. What we spend our money on shows what is important to us. Having an offering of money in the very middle of a service reminds us that how we deal with our money is a theological issue.

The faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is faith in the God who lifts up the poor and liberates the oppressed. Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is faith in the one who defined our neighbour as anyone in need. However we translate the opening sentence of today’s passage, its meaning is clear. May God be with us as we seek to follow Jesus’ example, living as those who truly believe in him. Amen.