We’re back in the letter of James that we started reading last week. If you remember from last Sunday, we discovered in Chapter 1 James’ intentions in writing this letter to his congregation. One of the things we saw is that James is not preoccupied in doing in-depths theology, neither he is preoccupied with regulating the life of the church, whether in its administration or in its liturgy. What James claims to be concerned about is that the followers of Christ would practice true religion – that he opposes to a shallow religion. And to James, practicing the true religion is not necessarily about having all the correct beliefs or doing worship in a way or another. According to James “true religion”, the religion that really connects us to the heart of the faith of Christ, is about obeying the law of love, it’s about loving each other. This love, though, isn’t about tender emotions… James isn’t a dreamer or even a romantic, James is a very practical, down to earth person and he asks the followers of Christ to love each other and every person in the concrete circumstances of everyday life. To James, love is not so much about the feelings we have, rather it is about the way we treat each other.
So how are we to treat each other? Well, James being this very practical, down to earth person, gives us in our reading this week a vivid example of a “real life situation” (actually a lot of commentators have found this example so vivid and true to life that they notice it can make it difficult to hear). James takes the example of the congregation gathered in the synagogue – which would be the place where first Christians came to worship but also to deal with some legal issues (and it is not clear from James’ example if we are in the context of worship or litigation). Yet the context does not matter because it’s really about the way believers behave and interact with one another. And so this is what James says: Two persons show up in the assembly, and because one looks wealthy and nice (“wearing gold rings and fine clothes”), they are well received and given the seat of honor, and because one looks poor and dirty, they are left standing or made sit on the ground. I think we would all agree that this is unfortunate and that this kind of behavior should not happen among Christians…Yet to James, this is much more than an unfortunate situation, rather this should be a serious concern for all of us. James says that in doing so, when believers show partiality or favoritism, they dishonor the poor and they transgress God’s law. James goes even as far as saying that, when we show partiality, we transgress God’s law in the same way that if we’d commit murder or adultery.
That’s of course difficult to hear! And we may feel a bit sorry for these believers James is talking about! Maybe because we can easily identify with them…Who among us never judge people based on their appearances, even unconsciously? And so we think maybe those believers giving the best seat just wanted to be polite or helpful to the beautiful people, and on the other way around, maybe those believers asking the poor to stand were just distracted, or maybe they were a bit scared of them! It may feel a bit unfair to us that they end up being accused by James of a deadly sin…But to really understand James’ intentions with this example, maybe we should resist the temptation to be defensive and ask ourselves: What is at stake in here exactly?
Well, the thing we need to notice is that, in James’ example, the poor and the rich show up in the assembly at the same time. And to me, what James criticizes it’s not so much that we give a good seat to the wealthy and good looking person. He is not asking us to ignore them instead, or to not be too welcoming. And I don’t think James is overly concerned with the fact that some people need to stand in the congregation or sit on the floor when there is no room left. What James is concerned about is favoritism and the injustices they create. It’s because the believers have given the seat of honor to the wealthy that the poor has to remain standing or to sit on the floor. Because they have honored the powerful, the powerless is humiliated. The dignity they have given to one has been taken away from another, and that is what’s wrong with this behavior. So James isn’t asking believers to be unpleasant with people who look good or with people who have money, but he is asking believers to be as pleasant and accommodating with the poor and powerless as they are with people more fortunate, and not make a difference between them, because God does not make differences between people – and when God does make a difference, God would choose the little one over the great (as, for example, God chose Joseph or David against their elderly brothers). This is indeed God’s justice: God empowers the powerless and strip of their power the powerful, and this what the law of Moses and the Gospel of Christ is all about…
And so, in this chapter and beyond this specific example, James asks us to conform the way we behave to the beliefs we profess. True faith is not about having a correct set of beliefs. True faith is about practicing what we say we believe in. James is not teaching his congregation to be mean to rich people, he is teaching them to be fair to everyone and to pay a special attention to those to whom they normally wouldn’t pay attention to. As Christians, we shouldn’t behave according to our “natural tendencies”- according to James, acting like that is the way of the world that is always fascinated by the bright and shiny. Because we admire them or because we fear them or because we expect to receive something from them, we have a tendency to treat better the powerful and the beautiful. Because we are not attracted to them or because they have no power over us or maybe because we just don’t see them, we neglect the poor – but if we truly believe that we are all children of God, then we shouldn’t treat people based on how they make us feel or based on what we expect they would do for us. Moreover, each time we confirm the riches’ privilege we perpetuate the cycle of oppression human societies live by, when our Christian responsibility would be to break the cycle (James asks: “Isn’t it the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?). This goes beyond what happens in our own faith congregations…in reality, it asks us: what kind of society is it that we do want to live in?
So no, it’s not easy to treat all people as equal and we have to work on ourselves to get there, yet this is what true religion requires of us: It requires that we won’t stay on the surface with what we profess. It is to believe with all our being. James wants to show us that it does not matter if we agree with Christian beliefs just because it’s a beautiful thing to believe in – what we have to do is to practice this belief. We can all agree that it is a beautiful thing to believe in justice and equality for all but if we’d truly believe in the beauty of justice then we have to practice it. What would you think of someone who would tell you that ecology is important to them, but then you see that they don’t even bother to recycle their trash? Well, you would probably think, and rightly so, that it’s probably because ecology isn’t that important to them! They don’t really believe in it! James says, well, it’s like when we say to a person who is naked and hungry to stay warm and have a good meal and then do nothing about it. If we really wanted them to stay warm and have a good meal, then we should give them clothes and something to eat, if it’s in the range of our actual possibilities!
James is not criticizing people for saying nice words, or wanting to be polite or comforting, James is warning us, he tells us to beware not to stay on the surface of things. Christianity is not wishful thinking, it is love in action or as the proverb goes, it’s about putting our money where our mouth is! Our faith should change us and change the way we live, change the world starting with the little world we all have around us.
I love it that James asks us if that kind of “faith” (to profess but then not doing anything) can save us. Because we always talk about “the faith that saves” right? Yet when we do that, we always refer to the faith that saves us, personally. But James isn’t asking us if our faith is saving us personally, I think James is asking us if our faith is saving others! And when James is asking us if our faith is saving others, he does not mean if our faith provides a good example to others…James is asking us if our faith is of any good to those around us, and especially to those in need!
Is our faith saving anyone? Is our faith of any good to those around us or in the midst of us? Is our faith accomplishing anything? “Faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead”. Indeed.
Yes, those words are hard words to hear – But as we mentioned last week, James is asking us to have a look in the spiritual mirror, this mirror being our everyday life, James is asking us to become more self aware and consider our unexamined prejudices, our unexamined behavior and all the things we say are important but we just don’t do. And it’s difficult. Yet we need to remember that James is not trying to put his people down when he calls them out on their behavior. James is trying to lift them up and to make them whole. So they can really be one with themselves, so they can be, so they can incarnate, what they believe in with all their beings.
If we believe in the beauty of the message of Christ, then why wouldn’t we try harder to be living witnesses of it?