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. James 2:15-17
Despite appearances, I do not think James is ultimately talking about helping others with food and clothes. He is reasoning with us so that what is obvious in one context should prompt us to reach the same conclusion in other matters as well. He assumes we recognize the necessity to help others with what their bodies require, and how it would be ridiculous to wish people well while neglecting to aid them in any real manner. But his real purpose is to get us to see that wishing people well in any matter, without really doing anything substantial to help them, is just as irresponsible and incomprehensible.
His concluding point is that the content of what we believe in, the apparent concerns of our faith, must result in new ways of treating others. These are the works that must accompany faith and be the practice of all we claim to believe in, or else our faith is essentially lifeless.
What is the impetus of James’ call for works to accompany our faith? Notice the subject that James had previously discussed in his letter.
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? James 2:1-4
James has been talking about discrimination and its opposite, favoritism, with regard to a person’s social class, whether they are rich or poor. His haunting opening question is do we, if we show favoritism, actually believe in Jesus. The answer is clearly “no”.
The same could be said about discrimination and favoritism involving race, education, gender, or anything else. James, the brother of our Lord, says that the making of distinctions among ourselves happens because we are “judges with evil thoughts”. This judging is a prejudice based on what is irrelevant in the Kingdom of God, and results in discrimination. The evil thought patterns involve both any reckoning of human value based on such characteristics, and the process of reasoning that leads us to discriminate against people on this basis. Diversity exists both because of God’s creation and human actions, but none of it is a cause to discriminate. To treat people differently on these grounds is a denial that we all bear the image of God, experience the indwelling of the Spirit of God, and that Christ died for all.
James is not a writer who is subtle. Such distorted, corrupt reasoning is evil and of the devil and not God. It is evil, but obviously common in the world and in the church. If only the church James addresses were the only one! His words ought to prompt us not to be defensive but to examine ourselves humbly.
James, though pointing out the evil thoughts and judgments of some, does not then discriminate against those who have discriminated against the poor. He is teaching and calling them to raise their actions to reflect a true living faith, but he is not running them out of the church because they have shown favoritism. He calls for more just treatment of the poor but not for mistreating those who have been wrong in how they mistreated the poor. James is the one who tells us, sandwiched between his condemnation of discrimination and call for works to accompany our faith, that “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13). An enthusiasm to root out discrimination and prejudice cannot become a new occasion of its propagation.
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