Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse 16: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation nor shadow of turning.” You may recognize that from part of the prayer behind the amvon at the end of the Liturgy. But notice, see, he’s saying the other side. Don’t be deceived: on the other side, every good thing that comes to us in our life comes from God. Every good thing.

“And with him is no variation nor shadow of turning.” He’s not going to change his mind about us one day. He’s not sending us good things one day and bad things the next day because he’s in a bad mood. [Laughter] He’s not going to turn away from us. We might turn away from him, but he’s not going to turn away from us. That’s what he’s saying.

Verse 18: “Of his own will he brought us forth by the Word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” So “word of truth” isn’t capitalized there but it should be. It’s talking about Christ, the Word of God, which was firmly established for Jewish people in the Old Testament tradition as being a way to refer to the second Person of the Trinity. This isn’t just a thing in St. John’s gospel. St. James would have been aware of this, too. God created everything through his Word, through his Logos, and that’s what he’s talking about. He brought us forth, he created us by his Logos, which we see in Genesis. This is the common interpretation of Genesis. So it should be capital-W, “Word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” Of all the things he created, humanity is the firstfruits, which puts us above angels, referring back to Hebrews, if we’re the firstfruits.

So again, St. James teaching something else and weird, or something different [from] what St. Paul was teaching? Or is it the same stuff we’ve been reading? It’s the same kind of thing. And so what’s he saying here? Again, the evil stuff in our life doesn’t come from God; it comes from us. All the good in our life comes from God. The good stuff comes from God, who is not going to change his attitude towards us, and created us in the first place, and created us out of love, because he loves us and desires us.

That’s what St. James is saying here, and that’s the contrast. So if you take temptation to be like: “Hey, do you want this piece of cake that you’re not supposed to have,” Homer Simpson’s forbidden donut, if you take it that way, that the contrast with all good things come from God doesn’t make a ton of sense. But if he’s talking about the evil in the world that we face as a trial, compared to everything good comes from God, then it does make a lot of sense. Again, sorry Calvinists, that means everything doesn’t come from God.

Verse 19: “So then, my beloved brethren—” This “So then” is serving the same kind of function as St. Paul’s “Therefore.”

Q1: It’s “Therefore” in this translation.

Fr. Stephen: Okay! [Laughter] So this is basically “Therefore.”

“Based on what we just said, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath. For the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God, the justice of God.” So he’s talking about that justice: things being put in order. You getting angry about things is not going to bring about God’s justice.

Q2: Even if you’re angry at injustice?

Fr. Stephen: Even if you’re angry at injustice, that anger is not going to produce justice. This is sort of evergreen, but also very important now. Violence, rioting, revolutions does not produce justice if we’re talking about God’s justice, ever. That includes all violent revolutions, including the favorite one from your own country. That doesn’t produce justice; that’s not how God’s justice is brought about, is by our wrath and anger and violence. It will never produce it.

And therefore, since that doesn’t work, we need to be swift to hear—we need to spend more time listening to God. More time listening to God and less time talking, and even less time being angry. So the anger here is specifically that anger directed towards changing things, towards doing our will, accomplishing our will. That’s why it builds off of speaking. Rather than listening to God and what God says about things, we want to give our own opinion and then try to enforce that through anger and violence on the world around us. That is not what’s going to produce the justice of God; that’s not what’s going to set things right.

Verse 21: “Therefore, lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted Word, which is able to save your souls.” So all that bad stuff, too, obviously, that you’re out there doing, that filthiness, all the uncleanness. I like the “overflow of wickedness.” The imagery there is that we’ve got this sort of wickedness inside us, and it overflows out into actions, out into the world. So we need to get rid of that, we need to get rid of what’s flowing out of us, and instead focus on what God has placed within us: our talking, our anger, coming out from us, versus hearing, listening to God. And now the Word that’s placed within us, the seed that’s placed within us by God that can grow into our salvation, versus us vomiting out what’s in us into the world. That’s the contrast he’s making.

Verse 22: “But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” Again— See, St. James keeps clarifying his points. He’s saying, “I’m not saying by that that you don’t do anything. When I say focus on receiving from God, not on putting what’s in you out into the world, I don’t mean don’t do anything.” [Laughter] So once you’ve heard the word, once you’ve received the word, once you’ve received Christ, you then need to put Christ into action. But do you see how that’s different [from] putting what’s within me into action, out into the world?

What St. James is saying is that I have to acknowledge that I, in and of myself—I, Fr. Stephen De Young, as a human person—have nothing worthwhile to offer out into the world that comes from me. If you read one of my books and in there you find a truly original idea from me, reject it, because it’s false. Anything that’s in there where I’m passing on what I’ve received? That’s what you should pay attention to. That’s what St. James is saying. We need to receive Christ, but then we need to offer Christ out into the world. We need to act and live our lives like Christ, in faithfulness to Christ in the world, not in faithfulness to ourselves, not be true to myself, my own identity, what I have to offer, my unique individuality, my vision, my theorizing, my genius, whatever it is. [Laughter] St. James is saying all that stuff’s garbage. You need to focus on truly receiving Christ, and then on giving Christ out to the world.

But don’t just be one of those people who receives Christ and then does nothing. Does that remind you of anything in St. Matthew’s gospel? Remember the parable of the talents, where they receive the talents of silver, and the one guy goes and buries it? [Laughter] And then loses even what he had.

Verse 23: “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.” So he’s making an analogy. This is like: if you just hear it and you don’t do anything, if you don’t put it out in the world, that’s like being a person who goes and looks in a mirror, and you see what you look like and then you walk away and you forget what you look like.

Q3: He’s writing in an age when there were very few mirrors, so you seldom saw yourself in one, so it was easy to forget.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. My more contemporary example that I give—because this is something I do all the time—is: this is like somebody who looks at their watch or at their phone to see what time it is and then puts it back in their pocket or puts it back down and still has no idea what time it is, and you have to look again. [Laughter] And then you feel kind of dumb, because you’re like— And that’s exactly what St. James is saying: “That’s kind of dumb,” to hear it and not do anything with it.

Verse 25: “But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.” It’s the person who— you look into the law of liberty. “Oh, see, he likes the law and St. Paul hated the law, right?” [Buzzer sound] Thanks for playing. We already talked about that. The one who looks into it and remembers what’s in it and does it: that’s the one who is blessed; that’s the one who is doing what God has called him to do. Like St. Paul says at the beginning of Romans, it’s not the hearers of the law but the doers who are justified. Sounds like pretty much the same thing that St. Paul and St. James are saying.

Of course, both of them are drawing on— This was the problem in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is not a triumphant story of Israel. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. There was a whole generation of people who stood at the bottom of Mount Sinai and received the law, received the Torah, received the commandments. And they even swore that they’d keep all of them, and then they kept none of them. They all heard it; they didn’t do it: they all died in the desert. So this is where they’re getting this. We’re all capable. You can come to Liturgy every Sunday and on feast days and hear all the hymns and hear all the Scripture readings, and then just sort of go about living your life however you want to. It’s not going to do you any good, having been there and heard it. It’s like looking at your phone and still not knowing what time it is. [Laughter]

Verse 26: “If anyone among you thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” So putting the word “religious” is… [Laughter] It kind of skews it.

Q3: It’s “ministry” in this context.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s really more like “piety.” We have a very different… So when we think of somebody being really religious, we think they go to church a lot, they do certain actions: they spend a lot of time praying… Piety in the ancient world was conceived of as a moral virtue, like by Aristotle, say, in the Nicomachean Ethics, just as an example. And piety is that there is a certain sort of reverence that is due to the gods for a pagan, or to God in this case. There’s a certain reverence that’s due; there are certain commandments that he’s placed upon you, demands that he’s placed upon you, especially if we’re talking about a Jewish context. And if you fulfill those, then you’re a pious person, and if you don’t then you’re an impious person was sort of the idea. And if you were an impious person, that was a moral failing; that made you not a very good person, a low-quality person. [Laughter]

So that’s more the idea here, of piety or religion, that St. James is appealing to here. He’s saying if you’re someone who thinks, “Oh, I’ve met my obligations to God, I’ve got that squared away,” but you are a person who does not bridle your tongue—you don’t control your mouth and what you say—then all that box-checking you’ve done on your religious duties is worthless. This is that idea that we were talking about before, that you see in the prophets: “Stop it with the sacrifices. I don’t care about you checking the boxes; your heart is far from me.” [Laughter] This is the same kind of idea. You may be checking all those boxes, but if there’s all kinds of— Like Christ said, it’s from the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks, and there’s all kinds of evil coming out of your mouth—then it doesn’t matter that you checked all those boxes.

St. James then says, “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this.” So if you want to be a pious person, if you want to fulfill that, then this is what you need to do, not show up at certain times and celebrate certain feasts and those kinds of things, but: “Visit widows and orphans in their trouble.” That “visit” isn’t like “stop by and say hi.” “Hi, orphans and widows!” [Laughter] This is “visit” as in “come and assist” widows and orphans. Widows and orphans, all through the Old Testament, they’re sort of the paradigmatic helpless people in that society, because they had no legal rights. They were totally dependent on other people. If other people were kind to them and loved them and showed charity to them, they could have a good life; it people turned away from them, they would die of starvation. Or people could abuse them at will, and they had no legal recourse, even worse. So this emblematic of just the helpless in general, by arguing for the extreme case.

“Assist orphans and widows in their trouble, and keep oneself unspotted from the world.” Don’t become involved in the filth of the world. Again, here’s another parallel to St. Matthew’s gospel. When Christ, in St. Matthew’s gospel, talks about the last judgment that we read on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, the parable of the sheep and the goats, why do the sheep go to heaven and the goats go to hell? [Laughter]

Q1: Because they gave assistance.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that they gave it to the weak, the poor, the sick, those in prison: those helpless people. That’s the criteria for who’s pious and who’s impious, for who’s right with God and who isn’t. St. James is saying the same thing that Christ said. This is emblematic. This is emblematic because “love your neighbor as yourself,” your fellow human as the image of God.

In the ancient world, and even today, what you do to an image of someone you are symbolically doing to them. If I took a picture of one of your family members and spit on it or threw it on the ground and stomped on it in front of you, you wouldn’t not be like: “Ah, it’s just a picture.” [Laughter] You would be insulted, because you would know what I meant by that. And so if every human being we encounter is in the image of God, then whatever we do to them—whatever we say to them, however we treat them—we’re doing to God.

So if you wouldn’t do it with an icon here in the church, you shouldn’t do it to your fellow human being. And if you would do it to an icon here in the church, you should do it to your fellow human being, in terms of caring for them, protecting them. So that’s the idea. That’s why that is an act of piety. As Christ also says, “The one who gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones”— It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. You don’t have to buy somebody a house. I can’t even buy myself a house… [Laughter] But whatever we do, we are doing that to God and for God, and so everything becomes an act of piety, or of impiety, on the flipside.

Okay, so chapter two. “My brethren, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality.” Let’s pause there.

Q3: Mine has the hypocrisy.

Fr. Stephen: The hypocrisy? Yeah. I’m pausing first— We’ll get to that, but I’m pausing first for another reason. So one of our things about those Jewish Christians, those imaginary Jewish Christians back in the past who were this separate group is that they didn’t think Jesus was God, supposedly. They just thought he was, like, a human Messiah, was like a king; and that St. Paul with all this Greek stuff, and starts bringing in all this Trinity stuff and all this polytheism stuff. Except, right here, St. James calls his brother, whom he watched grow up, “the Lord of glory.” Oops.

And we’ve talked before about how “of” is a punt when you’re translating Greek. It means it’s a genitive. What this really means is “the glorious Lord.” This is Old Testament language for Yahweh the God of Israel that St. James is applying to his kid step-brother. So, very clearly, St. James at least, who is supposed to be the leader of these Jewish Christians, thinks that Jesus is divine, pretty clearly.

And that “the faith of” is also, again, punting, because in Greek I’d say punting is you can interpret that a lot of ways. “The faith of our Lord Jesus Christ”: is that saying Christ’s faith, like his faith, his faithfulness? Is this talking about faith in Christ? Is this talking about…? So it’s a punt. But the idea is that: Do not attempt to be faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ with partiality, meaning those two things are incompatible. You cannot follow Christ and then be partial, or that has: be a hypocrite. And we’ll see what that means here.

And this is continuing off of what we just said. This is continuing this thing about “I’m pious. I’m one of the faithful. I’m one of the…” So it’s: if you think you’re pious but you’re doing this? Uh-uh. And now this is in parallel. So if you think you’re being faithful to Christ but you’re showing this partiality or you’re showing this hypocrisy: uh-uh. So what does he mean by this partiality or this hypocrisy?

Verse two: “For if there should come into your assembly”—and the word “assembly” there is the word “church”; actually, it’s “synagogue,” but someone comes into your gathering, your religious gathering—“a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, ‘You sit here in a good place,’ and say to the poor man, ‘You stand there,’ or ‘Sit here at my footstool,’ have you not shown partiality among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?”

So he’s saying— This is another way we know that he’s writing this out to a broader group, because he’s saying, “in your assembly,” your different assemblies, your different communities. You have these communities, and someone comes in who is very clearly rich, you’re like: “Oh! It’s so nice to see you today! Thank you for visiting! Thank you for joining our worship. Here, come sit here. Here’s a spot for you. You can meet the priest afterward. Hey, let’s get your number. We want to see you again.” And then someone comes in who’s disheveled looking, who’s filthy—looks homeless, in our modern language—and you go, “Oh… Go sit over there. Don’t be asking anybody for money.” Then what does St. James say? When you do that, you’re being a judge with evil thoughts.

Now, that doesn’t sound that bad to us—I mean, obviously it’s not a good thing, to be a judge with evil thoughts—but this is appealing to something in the Torah. This is the foremost command to the leaders in Israel, to the elders of Israel who are going to serve as judges. They were supposed to establish justice, make sure things happen well. God says he is the God who loves the orphan and the widow and shows no partiality and will not take bribes. And so what makes a wicked judge in the Torah, who is threatened with the worst kinds of condemnation, is someone who favors the wealthy over the poor, who favors the powerful over the powerless: who takes bribes.

So St. James is saying here— He’s playing off of this idea. He very clearly has in mind again this idea we saw in St. Paul and that we’re going to see again in St. Peter’s epistles that come up next, that not only is the Church Israel but that every member of the Christian community, because we have the Holy Spirit, is on the level of those judges of Israel. We are all in that leadership position, and therefore all of those commands to that leadership also apply to us. And therefore we have to be impartial and not accept bribes and not favor those who we think have something to offer us over those who we think don’t, because that person with the money, whom we want to court to get them to donate money to the church, is not more valuable to God than the homeless person who has nothing to offer and who needs our help. In fact, in some cases, it’s the opposite, depending on the state of the wealthy person’s heart. Remember the rich man and Lazarus.

God desires the salvation of both of those people, but what may help that rich man’s salvation—remember what we just read in chapter one—may be his humiliation. He may have to humble himself if he’s going to find salvation. And us fawning over him and telling him how wonderful he is, so that he’ll give us money, is not going to help him find salvation. And us disregarding this person who is equally precious to God but has nothing to offer to us and may smell bad and be filthy is not helping his salvation either. And so St. James is pointing to what the Church is all about: it’s about helping us all find salvation. Everybody who walks in the door, including us. And us being unjust judges is not helping our salvation either.

So what he’s putting forward here, which is a completely commonplace thing in churches to this very day, is for St. James a worst-case scenario. This is the worst thing that could be going on in your churches. We don’t think of it that way, because we’re so used to it. We think the worst thing that could be happening would be, I don’t know, probably sexual immorality, in our modern churches: somebody cheating on their spouse or somebody stealing from the church, stealing money from the church. Those are the things that we think would be the worst things that could be happening in the church, probably.

For St. James, this is the worst thing that could be happening in your church. Because somebody could be stealing money from the church and the people in the church could still find salvation. And not just could be—everybody in the Church is sinning all the time. I know; I hear the confessions. [Laughter] Everybody in the Church is sinning all the time, but even those people find salvation in the Church, but when this is going on, this isn’t helping anybody’s salvation, and that’s what the Church is about, not about the grass that dries up and withers and blows away, having the shiny new dome and the big new building that’s going to crumble. That’s not what the Church is about; this is what the Church is about: helping people find salvation.

Verse five: “Listen, my beloved brethren. Has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he promised to those who love him?” Obviously, this is a rhetorical question, that it’s yes. Because whom did Christ come and preach to?

Q2: The Jews.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, was he born the son of the Roman emperor and went to the Senate to proclaim the good news? [Laughter] No, he was born dirt-poor and preached to other Galilean peasants. And that’s whom he chose to be his apostles, a bunch of fishermen. And so he says these are the people whom God chose, so… whom are the people you choose to honor?

Verse six: “But you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts? Do they not blaspheme that noble name by which you are called?” So he’s saying—and this is just as true today—let’s look at the wealthy and powerful of the world. Are they the people who most love Christ? Are they supporting you and your church? Are these the people you should aspire to be like? Are these the people whose favor you should be courting? Again, rhetorical question. Obvious answer: no.

Verse eight: “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well.” Who said that was one of the most important commandments, one of the two? Christ, St. Matthew’s gospel. “...you do well, but if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.” So if you don’t love your neighbor, your neighbor here being everybody, as yourself, then you’ve sinned and you’re transgressors—

Verse ten: “For whoever shall keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all, for he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.” So what’s he saying? Remember, we’re talking about people who think they’re pious, people who think they’re faithful. That’s how he started this: “You think you’re faithful to Christ, but you show this partiality.” And he’s saying, “Hey, if you fail to love your neighbor as yourself, then you’ve broken the law. And it doesn’t matter if you keep most of the rest of it.”

A guy who commits murder can’t be like: “Yeah, but I never cheated on my wife! So I’m not all bad!” [Laughter] It’s like: No, you’re still a murderer. [Laughter] You’re still a murderer, you’re still a transgressor, you’re still a sinner. So he’s saying it doesn’t matter if you keep all this other stuff—it doesn’t matter if you’re faithful to your wife and attending the services and saying the prayers and you don’t like and you don’t— But if you mistreat your brother because he’s poor, and mistreat in the opposite way the rich man who comes into the church who needs salvation, if you’re not loving your neighbor as yourself, then it doesn’t matter if you keep all the other stuff.

Verse twelve: “So speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” Why does he keep saying “the law of liberty”? Why doesn’t he just say “the law”? The law of freedom, the law which sets you free. Well, remember, we’ve got to go back to St. Paul in Romans again. Remember, he talked about within the heading of law, of nomos, of Torah, he talked about the letter and the spirit. Those are subsections of that, because what does the Holy Spirit do? The Holy Spirit writes the law in our hearts. So for St. James, he uses this to connote that, the law of freedom, meaning the law is fulfilled in Christ, which is still the Torah; it’s not a different law. It’s not different commandments. “Love your neighbor as yourself” comes from Leviticus. [Laughter] So, same law—but as fulfilled in Christ, as we’re now set free by the Spirit to fulfill it, not in the old way.

This is the same kind of qualifier that St. Paul uses when St. Paul talks about the law. That nuance gets lost by people saying, “Oh, he just didn’t like the law.” It’s like: “No, no, no, no!” But he made a distinction between the law as fulfilled in Christ that we follow, and the way that his fellow Pharisees who hadn’t accepted Christ wanted to follow and impose the law, particular parts of it especially. That now we receive what is fulfilled in Christ. That’s the same thing St. James is doing here. And so we need to speak and to do—our works and our words—as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, that that last judgment is going to come. And we’ve received these commandments, we’ve received the word, we’ve received Christ: we’re going to be judged by what we did with it, which is what Christ says over and over and over again, that we’re judged according to our works. So we need to keep that in mind when we’re acting.

And he says, “For judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy,” which is the reverse of what Christ says in one of the beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” So if you show no mercy to the poor man, to this poor destitute one who needs your help, why would you expect God to show mercy to you? Remember also the parable of the evil [servant], the one who was forgiven the huge debt and then went out and attacked the one who owed him a couple of bucks, and then ended up being thrown in prison: he had his forgiveness revoked because he would not forgive. That’s a constant theme in St. Matthew’s gospel again, in Christ’s preaching, that “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” that those go in parallel. Same thing he’s saying here.

So if you want— You’re going to be judged one day by God. He’s saying right now, we’re in that judge position. Remember, that’s the analogy he used. You’re serving as a judge; God has entrusted you with this role in your community, in your church, this authority God has given you for the purpose of helping each other find salvation. That’s been entrusted to you. And if, when you’re tasked with this, with being a judge, you show partiality and you don’t show any mercy and you show favoritism, why would you then, when you stand before God, expect him to show mercy to you and not show favoritism to you?

Verse 14—Oh! Now we get into the controversial part! [Laughter] Oh! Oh! Cliffhanger. We’re going to pick up here next time! [Laughter]

Q1: You said we were going to hate this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because we’ve gone on a fair amount now, and we’re about to open the proverbial can of worms. We’re about to read the section that got a certain old Luther in Germany very upset at the epistle of St. James. So, yeah, we’ll stop here. We’ll stop here at the end of verse 13, and we’ll pick up in James 2:14 and get into all that, and whether this is really disagreeing with St. Paul, next time. Thank you, everybody.