James 2: 14 – 17
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.
Reflection
“Many have mightily laboured to reconcile James with Paul…” grumbled Martin Luther, “but with no real success.
These are at odds: faith justifies, faith does not justify…”
Rather than promise to eat his hat, Luther instead offered to hand over his doctoral cap to whomever could reconcile these competing biblical perspectives, and let them ‘scold me as a fool.’ So far as I know, nobody ever claimed the prize.
Perhaps the real problem here is the determination to reconcile these two contrasting views on what Sallie McFague described as ‘the unprecedented task’ of having to ‘think about “everything that is.”’
Christianity has been, from the very outset, a community of people with different perspectives. A place of plurality. Here we find James’ perspective coming to the fore – elsewhere we find Paul’s, we shouldn’t be surprised to find them different.
The Samoan theologian Upolu Vaai laments the effects of what he calls a colonial ‘one truth ideology’ – a way of seeing the world which insists that there can only be one correct perspective, one ‘right’ or ‘true’ way of understanding things. This ideology, Vaai insists, doesn’t mesh well with an indigenous Pacific way of understanding the world and instead “promotes top-down hierarchical frameworks…”
Perhaps we want the Bible to do all the work for us, to tell us exactly how to think and act – maybe we turn to it as if it were an inexhaustive book of rules, complete in and to itself. Instead James urges us to look beyond the page to the world around us: Look! Here are people with no clothes, no food, we must reckon with this reality. Barth seemed to agree, urging that we preach ‘with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.’
We live in a busy, messy, complex world where our answers generate ever more questions, and where people lead, as Thoreau put it, ‘lives of quiet desperation,’ faced with that reality we must learn to take responsibility for how we live – that we may come to different conclusions is no great surprise.
Prayer
God save us from the false hope of easy answers.
Forgive our tendency to demand simple solutions to complex problems.
Free us from prisons of perfection
Help us to see the frail beauty of difference.
Light our path as we try to respond to the challenges we encounter,
And teach us to listen when others speak.
Amen.