If we want to belong fully to the Lord Jesus and his holy Church, we must first believe the Gospel is true and also live in the freedom of the children of God which comes from abiding in that saving truth, because only together do believing and behaving lead to belonging. And that is a central them of the Letter of Saint James.
Last week was the first of five Sundays on which the second lesson will be taken from the Letter of James, and during this month I encourage you to read, study, and pray with the whole text of James which runs to about three pages in most Bibles. The first thing to note is that there is no modern scholarly consensus about which man named James wrote this letter, in part because in the New Testament there are at least four and maybe five different men with the same name.
The English name James comes from the Hebrew Jacob or Ya’akov, which was the name of the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham. The name Ya’akov passed from Hebrew into Greek as Iakovos, next into Latin as Iacobus, and then it spread into other languages as James, Jacob, Jacques, Jaime, Giacomo, as well as into less obvious forms like Jay, Iago, and Seamus.
For millennia the name Ya’akov in all its forms has been among the most popular names for Jewish and Christian men alike. In the time of Christ the name Ya’akov or James was very common and surnames were not yet in use, so it is difficult to keep track of each man in the New Testament who is named James.
To begin the confusion, two of the Twelve Apostles were named James. First was James the son of Zebedee and brother of John, and second was James the son of Alphaeus, who is also called James the Less to distinguish him from John’s brother, called James the Greater. Think of them as big James and little James.
Then there was also a James who was called the brother of the Lord. That James led the Church in Jerusalem until his martyrdom around the year 62, and he has long been regarded as the author of this letter. There also were two other men named James among the disciples of Jesus, and they were the father and brother of the Apostle Jude.
Many ancient authorities held that the Apostle James the Less, who was the son of Alphaeus, and James called the brother of the Lord were actually the same man, and that belief is reflected in the Catholic liturgical tradition. If this ancient consensus be true, and I believe that it is, then James called the brother of the Lord, was not the son of either Joseph or Mary, and he was also James the Less, one of the Twelve, making him the most likely the author of the Letter of James.
But no matter how many men of this name are in the New Testament and no matter which of them wrote the Letter of James, this text is certainly among the canonical and divinely inspired books of the Bible, and so it is properly and fully a part of the written Word of God.
But although this text is called a letter or an epistle, it does not have that literary form. Instead, James is closer to the wisdom literature of the Old Testament such as Proverbs and Sirach. So along with the Letter to the Hebrews, the Letter of James clearly shows the essential and permanent Jewish foundations of Christianity.
At the heart of the Letter of James is an understanding of human nature that we can call Christian anthropology, because it is an account of the human person shaped by both right reason and divine revelation. And in the Letter of James, three distinct dimensions of Christian anthropology can be teased out, ideas which when taken together ignited a revolution of love in human affairs to bring the light of the Gospel to a darksome world.
The first dimension of Christian anthropology in James is that every human person has intrinsic and equal dignity which must be respected by all others. So, the homeless woman and the star athlete are equal in dignity. The brilliant professor and the child with Down syndrome are equal in dignity. The wealthy entrepreneur and the immigrant laborer are equal in dignity.
This is because our human dignity comes from the fact that we exist rather than from any personal quality or ability we may possess, including age, sex, race, health, ethnicity, nationality, religion, beauty, wealth, fame, and intellectual, athletic or artistic gifts. No matter what each person can or cannot do, all people have intrinsic dignity because they exist, and for any society to be just, that fact must be respected by all others.
The second dimension of Christian anthropology in James is that we cannot trust our own hearts until they have been purified by God’s grace in Christ Jesus. The world believes that personal authenticity requires us to follow our hearts without reference to any norm beyond our own desires, but the Gospel reveals that because of the Fall from grace we cannot trust our own hearts until we have been changed from the inside out by God’s grace.
Our hearts and minds must be formed by the Word of God and then our desires themselves must be transformed by grace, else we will always go astray and be trapped by our own disordered self-love. And the alienation from God, from others, and from our own true selves caused by disordered self-love is the foundation of our deepest loneliness and sadness.
The third dimension of Christian anthropology in James is that only by living a virtuous life of righteousness can we find our true selves in Christ. The virtues we must acquire to live such a life are themselves the fruit of our cooperation with God’s grace, and then together our obedience of faith in the Word of God and the interior renovation flowing from grace through faith make it possible for us to set aside whatever inside of us is contrary to the Gospel.
Only in that interior liberty do we find the strength to respect the human dignity of other persons and to live an upright life in keeping with our own personal dignity. And that is why the Letter of James insists that faith without works is dead.
Last week we read the exhortation of James to be doers of the Word and not hearers only, lest we delude ourselves with false religion. Today we have five verses of James which warn us against the sin of partiality that flows from the tendency of fallen human nature to give greater respect to the rich than to the poor.
And in the next three weeks we will read further admonitions from James about living in the truth, about treating all persons with genuine respect, and about finding peace and wisdom in works of charity which come from saving faith in Christ. According to James, such works of love are not a substitute for faith in the Word of God; instead, they are the manifestation of our justification by Jesus Christ, who alone redeems us from the grave but does so only with our consent and cooperation which are themselves a gift received by grace through faith.
The Letter of James insists on the necessity of expressing our faith by deeds of love because we are not solitary individuals who can seek happiness either here or hereafter without the company of others. We are, instead, social beings who live always as a part of a human community, both here and in the eternal Kingdom.
For this reason, the covenants of God are always with groups of people in an ever-expanding communion of persons: first a married couple, then a family of parents and children, followed by a tribe, a people, a nation, and finally the entire human race. Every human person who will ever live is called to communion with the living God in his Church, the heavenly Jerusalem, and the new and everlasting covenant is offered to all human persons because we are all of us created in the image and likeness of God, who desires that none should be lost and all should be saved.
This does not mean, of course, that we will be friends with everyone. There will always be some people to whom we are drawn close by the bonds of mutual affection, common cause, compatible personalities, and similar interests, and this was true even of the Lord Jesus.
And there will also be others whom we find annoying, tedious, inscrutable, and even repulsive. But while we may not be personal friends with all people, if we want to bear witness to the whole counsel of God, then we must love and respect all persons and treat them in keeping with their human dignity even when they choose to live in undignified ways, as all of us do from time to time.
Friends, put most simply, if we want to belong to the Lord Jesus and to his Church, then we must believe the Gospel and behave accordingly, because only together do believing and behaving lead to belonging. Any attempt to construct our religion otherwise is a vain delusion, because our freedom and holiness are found only in being faithful disciples and true friends of the divine Messiah, the one alone who is the eternal Word by whom all things were made and who alone can save us from sin and death and then share with us his own eternal glory: the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 8 September 2024, the 23rd Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman