The Way of St James

Propers: Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 22), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We don’t talk nearly enough about Jesus’ brother.

James the Righteous, James the Just, is called by Paul “the brother of the Lord” in his Epistle to the Galatians. Now, whether that means full brother, half-brother, stepbrother, or cousin depends upon your tradition and denominational commitments. Suffice to say that James was Jesus’ male next of kin. And as would be expected for religious movements of the day, James then inherited the  leadership of Jesus’ disciples and the early Church.

This likely would surprise most Christians in the West, accustomed as we are to focus on Peter and on Paul. But it was to James that both deferred. He presided over what’s come to be known as the First Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, when early Jewish Christians had to decide the rather thorny issue of whether non-Jews could be baptized to follow the Way of Jesus Christ. Back then a Christian who was not first Jewish remained a novel and shocking notion.

James appears not to have been a Christian until after Jesus’ Resurrection. Seems fair enough. Who could believe that a brother or annoying cousin could possibly be God incarnate without first witnessing hell harrowed to raise the ransomed dead? And James’s take on Christianity was decidedly different from Paul’s. Not so different as to constitute a separate religion—they were both still Jews, after all—but separate enough to be held in tension with one another.

The Epistles of Paul and Epistle of James offer differing perspectives, differing interpretations of faith in the light of Jesus Christ. In many ways they balance. Paul is writing to a Gentile audience, James to a Jewish-Christian one. But we must keep in mind that this is the way of the Scriptures. The biblical books do not produce a single unified image of God, or wisdom, or morality, or faith. Rather, they are in constant conversation with one another, constant debate.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the Wisdom literature, in which Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are juxtaposed specifically because they’re at odds with one another. Or look to the Gospels, which we have preserved as four separate witnesses rather than harmonizing them into a whole. The Bible is a conversation, a disputation, even an outright argument, over our evolving, developing understandings of God.

Paul’s the one that we’re used to. He wrote the most, after all. Paul’s the reason why Lutherans always think in terms of Law and Gospel. In Paul’s interpretation—or perhaps our interpretations of Paul—Law and Gospel are opposed. The Law kills, while the Gospel resurrects. The Law convicts, while the Gospel forgives. The Law reveals to us our sin, our unworthiness, our inability to satisfy the righteousness of God, while the Gospel reveals God’s graciousness and mercy, Christ’s infinite merits imputed over and against our own: a glorious exchange.

The Law is the truth of sin; the Gospel is the truth of grace. The former, for Paul, and for Luther, exists first and foremost to drive us to the latter, from Law to Gospel. We are really in need of salvation, and we are really, truly saved. Thanks be to God!

Now, these are loaded terms, I know, and I don’t mean to throw buzzwords at you. I realize that for most of us it’s been a long time since Confirmation. “Law” is how we translate Torah, which really means “teaching.” Torah refers in one sense to the Five Books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—but more broadly to the moral, ethical, ritual, religious, and civil commandments found in the Hebrew Bible.

There are 613 of them, by traditional reckoning, covering everything from murder to dress codes. And they define the relationship between God and His special chosen people, Israel. We are familiar, I assume, with the Ten Commandments. These are the heart of the Law. All the others exist to apply the Ten to daily life. But did you know that seven—only seven out of 613 commandments—apply to non-Jewish peoples? They’re called the Seven Laws of Noah, and they go like this:

Don’t worship idols. Don’t curse God. Don’t murder. Do not abuse your sexuality. Don’t steal. Never be cruel to animals. And establish just courts. That’s it. That’s the whole Law for people like you and me. It’s not even the full Ten Commandments. And if you really wanted to, you could break it down even further, as Jesus Himself does: “Love God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Simple, right? But simple can be awfully hard. 

How do you think that we’re doing? How are those just courts going? Have we loved our neighbors as ourselves today? Have we refrained from worshipping idols, on which our entire economy is based? See, Paul knows that we don’t keep the Law. We don’t love God with all we have and all we are. We don’t love our neighbors as ourselves. And so for him the Law brings condemnation. It holds up our sins to the light. It sets our pride on fire. The Law shows us everything we cannot be.

Thus we turn instead to the Gospel, to the Good News of Jesus Christ our Lord: the Good News of mercy, grace, forgiveness, salvation; of God’s infinite superabundant generosity inundating and washing away the monotonous banality of our sin. We cannot rely on the righteousness of men. The Law proves that plain as day. We can only rely on the graces of God—and those He pours forth from His Cross.

That’s Paul’s take. It’s the take that saved Luther, the take on which our entire tradition is founded within the greater Christian Church. And it is most certainly true. But James has a different interpretation; not one necessarily set against Paul’s writings, but one that is also quite true. James opposes Paul the way your thumb opposes your forefinger: that between the two of them, we may yet grasp the Gospel.

For James the Law is good. It is the very Word of the Lord, revealed atop Mt Sinai, and implanted now within our souls. The Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, is not some new revelation set against the Law, to complete it or replace it. Rather, the Gospel is the Law, in its truest, purest form. Jesus reveals what was hidden all along: the gracious love of God forever present from Adam through Jacob to Moses. And as such, the Gospel calls us each to a higher Law of life.

For James this isn’t really about the civil laws or the ritual laws or the dietary laws, though by all accounts he kept those as a faithful practicing Jew. (It wasn’t just the Christians who called him James the Just.) But it’s the moral Law that counts. Jesus is the definitive interpreter of Torah because He is the Christ of God. The Gospel is His halakha, His teaching of the teachings. Christians are called to the pure Law, the Law revealed, the Law of love as lived and taught by Jesus Christ Himself.

James does not deny grace. By grace we have been, are being, and will be, made one with Jesus. So we must then live as Jesus, must we not? And to him that means the following: “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” Which is not to say that James and Jesus don’t get angry. But their wrath is not personal. Jesus only ever displays a righteous indignation against injustice and exploitation. We then are called to do the same.

“Rid yourselves,” he continues, “of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word”—the Word that is Torah and Gospel and Jesus—“that has the power to save your souls,” to pull you up from the abyss of chaos and nothingness to new birth as sons and daughters of God. “Be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For [such people] are like those who look at themselves in a mirror … and on going away immediately forget what they are like.” You have seen your true face in Jesus; He is what we are all meant to be. Live, says James, as though you know it’s true.

“If any think they are religious and do not bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless,” James writes. “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.” In other words: charity, purity, and peace.

If we do not live out the Word of God within us, the Word given to us in grace—if it is not a Gospel of hearts and hands as well as heads—then faith in Christ becomes faith in an idea about Christ. We must incarnate God’s Word in us. This is a Law not of condemnation but of liberty: the liberty to live as Jesus lives, to love as Jesus loves, and to rise as Jesus is risen! We all think that we have to believe in something in order to be saved, but for James to live as Jesus is salvation. We are already freed, already saved, because we have the Word—if only we will live it!

Jesus is alive in you, in what you say and what you do.

This is our Law and our Gospel.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.