HEARING AND DOING
James 1:22–4
Prove yourselves to be doers of the word, and not only hearers, for those who think that hearing is enough deceive themselves. For, if a man is a hearer of the word and not a doer of it, he is like a man who looks in a mirror at the face which nature gave him. A glance and he is gone; and he immediately forgets what kind of man he is.
AGAIN James presents us with two of the vivid pictures of which he is such a master. First of all, he speaks of those who go to the church meeting and listen to the reading and expounding of the word, and who think that that listening has made them Christians. They have shut their eyes to the fact that what is read and heard in church must then be lived out. It is still possible to identify church attendance and Bible-reading with Christianity, but this is to take ourselves less than half the way; the really important thing is to turn that to which we have listened into action.
Second, James says such people are like those who look at themselves in a mirror – ancient mirrors were made not of glass but of highly polished metal – see the smuts which disfigure their faces and the dishevelment of their hair, and go away and forget what they actually look like, and so fail to do anything about it. Listening to the true word reveals to individuals what they are and what they ought to be. They see what is wrong and what must be done to put it right; but, if they are only hearers, they remain just as they are, and all the hearing has been to no avail.
James does well to remind us that what is heard in the holy place must be lived in the market place – or there is no point in hearing at all.
THE TRUE LAW
James 1:25
He who looks into the perfect law, which is the law in the observance of which a man finds freedom, and who abides in it and shows himself not a forgetful hearer but an active doer of the word, will be blessed in all his action.
THIS is the kind of passage in James which Martin Luther disliked so much. He disliked the idea of law altogether, for with Paul he would have said: ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Romans 10:4). ‘James’, said Luther, ‘drives us to law and works.’ And yet beyond all doubt there is a sense in which James is right. There is an ethical law which Christians must seek to put into action. That law is to be found first in the Ten Commandments and then in the teaching of Jesus.
James calls that law two things.
(1) He calls it the perfect law. There are three reasons why the law is perfect. (a) It is God’s law, given and revealed by him. The way of life which Jesus laid down for his followers is in accordance with the will of God. (b) It is perfect in that it cannot be bettered. The Christian law is the law of love, and the demand of love can never be satisfied. We know well, when we love someone, that even if we gave them all the world and served them for a lifetime, we still could not satisfy or deserve their love, (c) But there is still another sense in which the Christian law is perfect. The Greek word is teleios, which nearly always describes perfection towards some given end. Now, if men and women obey the law of Christ, they will fulfil the purpose for which God sent them into the world; they will be the people they ought to be and will make the contribution to the world they ought to make. They will be perfect in the sense that they will, by obeying the law of God, achieve their God-given destiny.
(2) He calls it the law of liberty; that is, the law in the keeping of which people find their true liberty. All the great philosophers and scholars have agreed that it is only in obeying the law of God that an individual becomes truly free. ‘To obey God’, said Seneca, ‘is liberty’ ‘The wise man alone is free,’ said the Stoics, ‘and every foolish man is a slave.’ Philo said: ‘All who are under the tyranny of anger or desire or any other passion are altogether slaves; all who live with the law are free.’ As long as human beings have to obey their own passions and emotions and desires, they are nothing less than slaves. It is when we accept the will of God that we become really free – for then we are free to be what we ought to be. God’s service is perfect freedom, and in doing his will is our peace.
TRUE WORSHIP
James 1:26–7
If anyone thinks that he is a worshipper of God and yet does not bridle his tongue, his worship is an empty thing. This is pure and undefiled worship, as God the Father sees it, to visit the orphans and the widows, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
WE must be careful to understand what James is saying here. The Revised Standard Version translates the phrases at the beginning of verse 27: ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled is . . .’ The word translated as religion is thrēskeia, and its meaning is not so much religion as worship in the sense of the outward expression of religion in ritual and liturgy and ceremony. What James is saying is: ‘The finest ritual and the finest liturgy you can offer to God is service of the poor and personal purity’ To James, real worship did not lie in elaborate vestments or in magnificent music or in a carefully planned service; it lay in the practical service of others and in the purity of one’s own personal life. It is perfectly possible for a church to be so taken up with the beauty of its buildings and the splendour of its liturgy that it has neither the time nor the money for practical Christian service – and that is what James is condemning.
In fact, James is condemning only what the prophets had condemned long ago. God, said the psalmist, is ‘father of orphans and protector of widows’ (Psalm 68:5). It was Zechariah’s complaint that the people pulled away their shoulders and made their hearts as unyielding as stone at the demand to render true justice, to show mercy and compassion to one another, not to oppress the widow, the fatherless, the stranger and the poor, and not to entertain evil thoughts against another within the heart (cf. Zechariah 7:6–10). It was Micah’s complaint that all ritual sacrifices were useless if the people did not do justice and love kindness and walk humbly before God (cf. Micah 6:6–8).
All through history, people have tried to make ritual and liturgy a substitute for sacrifice and service. They have made religion splendid within the church at the expense of neglecting it outside the church. This is by no means to say that it is wrong to seek to offer the noblest and the most splendid worship within God’s house, but it is to say that all such worship is empty and idle unless it sends people out to love God by loving one another and to walk more purely in the tempting ways of the world.
FAVOURITISM
James 2:1
My brothers, you cannot really believe that you have faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, and yet continue to have respect of persons.
‘RESPECT of persons’ is the New Testament phrase for undue and unfair favouritism; it means pandering to others because they are rich or influential or popular. It is a fault which the New Testament consistently condemns. It is a fault of which the orthodox Jewish leaders completely acquitted Jesus. Even they were bound to admit that there was no favouritism with him (Luke 20:21; Mark 12:14; Matthew 22:16). After his vision of the sheet with the clean and unclean animals upon it, the lesson that Peter learned was that with God there is no partiality (Acts 10:34). It was Paul’s conviction that both Gentiles and Jews stand under the same judgment in the sight of God, for with God there is no favouritism (Romans 2:11). This is a truth which Paul urges on his people again and again (Ephesians 6:9; Colossians