"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 needs, what is the good of that? So faith, if it has no words, is dead." [James 2:14-17]
I'm done with fighting with these words from James like he is my opponent in debate. In fact, I have found an amazing freedom in the discovery that James isn't trying to pick a fight with the gospel of grace here, even though that's pretty close to how I had heard these verses for a lot of my life. If you're willing to join the conversation here, too, I would offer that same freedom for you as well. Or rather, to be clearer about it, I hope we can both hear, you and I, that James has been offering us freedom all along.
So, truth-in-advertising here for a moment. I'm an almost lifelong Lutheran, and the cornerstone of our five-hundred-year-long tradition is the assertion that God has put us into right relationships as a gift of grace through Christ Jesus, and that our part of the relationship is to trust (faith) God's free gift. There is no earning, no achievement to be accomplished, no prerequisite acts of religiosity, and no amount of gold stars, piety points, or heavenly merit to be racked up. It's all a gift, and it always has been. In fact, Luther himself would say, even the ability to receive the gift and the capacity to trust the promise are themselves gifts of God's grace. For all the other things Lutheran Christians can argue about (and there are a lot of them), that's still the beating heart of the Gospel. And it's still a truth I would stake my life on.
That said, we can sometimes get so focused on fighting that particular battle (with slogans like "Grace alone!" "Faith alone!" and "Christ alone!") that we come down with theology paranoia. We can assume every conversation everywhere is really about affirming or denying "The-Doctrine-of-Justification-By-Grace-Through-Faith-Alone", and we start spoiling for a fight where there was no real conflict. Even our older brother in the faith Martin Luther himself couldn't shake the assumption that James was trying to refute the power of God's grace with this passage, and it almost led Luther to propose cutting this letter out of the New Testament. Luther was ready to fight with a biblical author like James because he couldn't hear James' words as anything other than a direct assault on the claim that our salvation is a gift of grace. And so he was prepared just to ignore James altogether and pick sides with Saint Paul.
And again, I get it--on the face of it, it certainly can look like James is arguing against the very thing on which Luther centered the Reformation movement. So it surely would be easy to hear this passage as a shot across the bow for someone committed to the idea that God loves and saves us apart from what we do. But let's step back for a moment and not assume there is an argument where there might not be one. As they say, to the one with a hammer, everything looks like a nail--but maybe this situation doesn't require any pounding or smashing. Maybe James is trying to call us into genuine love, and to free us from playing tedious religious games.
So before anybody starts nailing theses to doors or pounding on tables back and forth in competitive displays of increasing outrage, let's start with this. Picture someone who loves you. A child or grandchild, a spouse, a partner, a soul friend, a parent, or what-have-you. Got someone in mind? Good. Now let me ask: where is that love located? Or to put it differently, how do you know that this person loves you? My guess is that they may tell you in words, but if all you had was empty talk and actions that didn't line up with those words, you would doubt that the words were true. If somebody told you they loved you but were never willing to let themselves be inconvenienced for your sake, or never went out of their way to show you that you were important to them, or if they abused or manipulated you while professing their undying love, you would say that their words are a lie. Their actions don't earn your love in return, but rather they reveal if their professed love for you is real, or just an act. Like the hair band Extreme taught us all in the year 1990, "More than words is all you have to do to make it real/ Then you wouldn't have to say that you love me, 'cause I'd already know."
Or to slightly modify our thought experiment, imagine your little child has climbed up into a tree and is now afraid to get down on his own. You call up, "Jump, and I'll catch you," and your child refuses, because he says he's too afraid. So now you ask, "Do you trust me? I promise I'll catch you!" But as much as your child insists he trusts you, he won't jump to let himself be caught in your arms at ground level. Do the words "I trust you" get him safely to the ground? No--at some point you'll know whether this child's trust in you is real because he'll jump and you'll catch him. In any case, it's your arms that do the saving, but let's not pretend that just saying the words "I trust you" actually mean there is trust. Trust is the leap into your arms.
James is really just saying the same thing. Actually trusting God means letting God direct what we do, because we dare to commit our lives into God's good hands. Caring for our neighbors is one way of actually trusting God, because God has called us to love the people around us. Giving of our resources to help someone in need is a way of trusting God, because it requires that we rely on God to provide for our own needs as well. Refusing to return evil for evil is a way of trusting God, too, because God has dared us to answer evil with good even if that sounds naive and ridiculous to the watching world.
Saying we believe in Jesus but then refusing to take him seriously when he calls us to welcome the stranger, love our enemies, and care for the prisoner or the sick reveals that we don't really trust what he says. And as Dallas Willard put it so directly, "Saying Jesus is Lord can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying Jesus is smart." If we don't think Jesus is trustworthy in how he calls us to live and to follow him, I don't know what it can mean to say we trust him. Faith in Jesus can't be reduced to memorizing a list of facts about him--it is a call to trust the way that Jesus points us in, which always takes the form of embodied action: the act of kindness, the choice for generosity, and the daily practices of mercy, truth-telling, and integrity.
Maybe then James isn't really attacking "faith" so much as he is revealing that trusting God cannot be reduced to merely mouthing words. He is simply pointing out that if we say, "I trust you, Jesus" but are still stuck up in the precariously cracking tree branch rather than leaping into his arms to catch us, we don't really trust. And if we say we believe in Jesus but can't bring ourselves to trust that Jesus knows what he's talking about, we don't really have faith in him, either.
And on that point, even old Martin Luther himself really turned out to be in agreement. As Luther himself wrote, "Faith is a living, daring confidence, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times." It's letting go of the tree branch and trusting we will be caught because God has promised to catch us. Letting ourselves be caught doesn't "earn" us any points--that's now this works. Letting ourselves be caught is what it looks like to trust.
Today, let's get beyond memorized creeds as our evidence of faith, and simply leap where Jesus has promised to catch us, and to go where Jesus leads us.
Lord Jesus, we live in a time of empty talk. Don't let us settle for it--help us to trust you enough to live that faith out in our actions, our choices, and our habits.
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