The Buddha and St James

Propers: Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25), 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.

Siddhartha Gautama—better known as the Buddha—lived some 500 years before the birth of Christ, and his teachings may be summed up in Four Noble Truths.

1. The world, alas, is full of suffering.
2. Suffering arises primarily from our own selfish cravings and desires.
3. To alleviate suffering, we must learn to let go of our self-centeredness.
4. And the way to do this is to follow a spiritual path of lovingkindness.

One can certainly see the appeal of these simple, elegant, indeed noble truths. They have parallels in every major religion, including of course Judaism and Christianity. And they’ve deeply influenced art, culture, and philosophy throughout the Far East. This, I am told, is why the Epistle of James proves so popular in Far Eastern Christian communities. If you want to preach the Gospel to the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, you don’t start with Paul or Luke. You start with James.

James is an epistle about how to be Jesus for the world: how to think like Jesus, act like Jesus, speak like Jesus. Which makes sense, because James is Jesus’ closest living male relative: “the Brother of the Lord,” according to St Paul.

Luther famously did not like James—called it an “epistle of straw”—because he said it does not preach Christ crucified. James is all about what we have to do, rather than what Christ has done for us. And Luther wanted faith, not works. He knew we needed grace. “I can’t let go of my sin,” Luther confessed. “And so I need forgiveness. I need a Gospel that abolishes the Law”—even a Law of noble truths.

Later in life, however, Luther came to realize his error. The elder Luther began to encounter people who thought that since Jesus died for me, I can do whatever. I can lie and cheat and steal and kill. I can sin that grace may abound the more. And this of course is anti-Christ. People running around, calling themselves Christians, whilst gleefully doing horrible, hateful things, are the reason why so many in our world today are repulsed by the Church and anyone in it. Christians hurt people.

Now obviously our faith is in Christ, not in Christians. And obviously we shouldn’t be terribly surprised when Christ calls a bunch of sinners together, and what do we do? We sin. That’s kind of why we’re here in the first place.

But faith in Christ is not the same thing as faith in an idea about Christ. Christianity is a way of life. Indeed, Christianity is eternal life—which begins not in some heaven lightyears away, but in bringing heaven to earth; so that we, the Church, the Body of Christ, can be for the whole world a foretaste of the feast to come.

It’s not that you have to live like Christ in order to earn salvation, in order to gain admission into a future Kingdom of heaven. Rather, to live as Christ—as one in His Body, as partakers of His Spirit—that’s what salvation actually is. That’s how we live as though we’re already in heaven while yet we’re still on this earth.

The Gospel doesn’t free us from the Law, says James; it frees us to fulfill the Law. And even this is grace. Because it’s really the Word now in us, it’s really Christ within us, who fulfills the Law of lovingkindness. And this is our salvation.

Who is wise and understanding among you? asks James. Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish.

Now this is countercultural. Anybody remember Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good,” back in the 80s? How about billionaires claiming that tax evasion makes them smart? America is a nation built on desire, on profit, on ceaseless consumption. No matter how much we have, we’re told we need more. And should we ever come close to some sort of satisfaction, advertising is designed to invent new needs. It’s called boosterism: first you make a product, then you make them want it. Thus the answer to what it is we want is always the same: It’s always more.

We fill our hearts with bitterness, envy, and selfish ambition, James laments. And what’s worse, we boast about it! We boast in how much we have and how much we want. Such so-called wisdom, he admonishes, is earthly, unspiritual and devilish. Let it go. That’s what forgiveness means, for James and for Jesus: it means letting go, and committing instead to Jesus’ Way of selfless lovingkindness.

For where there is selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Kids these days have some pretty good crap detectors. Having grown up with the internet, they’ve had to learn to sort the wheat from the chaff, the diamonds in the rough. They’re better at sniffing a scam, and calling out a con, than a lot of us older folk. And they can tell, can’t they, when someone’s religiosity is bosh? When the trappings of respectability and piety are just excuses to pilfer your pocketbook, manipulate your vote, or regulate your bed.

Authenticity is the name of the game. If you can fake that, you’re golden.

But the real thing really does shine through in the end, doesn’t it? Once all the conmen have left the stage, when the priests and politicians have all retired to the penthouse or penitentiary, then is wisdom truly vindicated by her deeds. Beyond the robes and rings, the collars and the crosiers, one who is pure and peaceable, gentle and yielding, full of mercy and of good fruits without a trace of partiality, this is the truly religious person. This is the saint and the sage.

Such is the perennial appeal, really, of both the Christ and the Buddha. The parallels are striking. Neither Christ nor Buddha could boast of riches or power in any worldly sense. Neither wrote anything down but left that to their apostles. Both were wanderers upon the earth, who taught by example and by preaching. Both gathered disciples and inaugurated their ministries with sermons summarizing their basic teachings: the Noble Truths of Buddha, the Beatitudes of Christ.

Both turned the world upside-down, inverting traditional hierarchies of power and prestige. Both hailed from royal families no longer on their thrones. Both worked miracles, yet only as lessons and signs. And both preached a scandalous lovingkindness, and care for the poor and oppressed. Both terrified the demons. And both, when encountered by people astonished with their teachings, were consistently asked not “Who are you?” but “What are you?”

The major difference, in my estimation, between the Buddha and the Christ, is that the Buddha said, “Do not worship me, for I am but a man.” And the Christ said, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe?”

As Christians speak of the Image of God within all of humanity, so Buddhists speak of a Buddha-Nature within us all, indeed in all of sentient life. They refer to it as a “womb” or a “seed”; that is, the potential for anyone to achieve enlightenment and so become a buddha for themselves. In the same way, James speaks to us of the implanted Word of God, like a seed from Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, which frees us from our ungoverned passions and saves our souls—if only we allow it to gestate and come to fruition.

We all have the Image of God within us, obscured though it may be. And the Image of God is Christ. We are His Body now. We house His Spirit now. St Paul would go so far as to say that it’s no longer we who live, but Christ who lives within us. And so we are entrusted to be Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him, in need of the resurrection and the life.

Put aside envy and ambition. Put aside all worldly and selfish desires, the clingings and the cravings that shackle us in the midst of this valley of death. Cultivate instead the implanted Word, the Holy Spirit, the Image and Christ of God within. Let Him grow, let Him increase as we ourselves must decrease, until all the world sees Him in us, sees Christ in every Christian. Thus does Jesus save our souls, all the world around us.

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