James

Daniel M. Doriani

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781596384590
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

With 59 commands in 108 verses, James expresses his zeal for law. The hasty reader may think there is not much gospel in James, but this insightful commentary shows otherwise.

1

INTRODUCTION TO JAMES

James 1:1

James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings. (James 1:1)

For many believers, James is a beloved book. Eminently practical, it is full of vivid exhortations to godly living. In short compass it offers concrete counsel on an array of issues that confront Christians every day: trials, poverty and riches, favoritism, social justice, the tongue, worldliness, boasting, planning, prayer, illness, and more.

Yet James’s candor and clarity are a two-edged sword. “Its call to realize professed ideals in appropriate action has spoken with prophetic urgency to generations of readers who have found James’ directives difficult to perform rather than to understand.”¹

ASSESSING FAILURE AND FAITH

James, like the Sermon on the Mount, is sublime and penetrating—almost too penetrating. Its piercing assessment of our failures proves we cannot achieve holiness by our striving. James stirs us to action, but as it reveals our sins, we doubt our ability to do what the writer commands. Yet James often declares that obedience is a hallmark of living faith: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (1:22).

James demands an obedience that honest readers know they cannot render. Therefore, while the individual sentences and paragraphs of James are clear, we struggle to resolve the tension between the stringency of James’s demands and our inability to attain them. If this were Paul, he would turn our attention to redemption and justification. But James never mentions the cross or the atonement, the death or the resurrection of Christ. He never uses the gospel vocabulary of justification by faith, redemption, or reconciliation. Indeed, the absence of these elements prompts observers to wonder where Jesus and redemption are found in this letter. James does use Jesus’ name twice, in 1:1 and 2:1, but on both occasions it is a passing reference rather than an exposition of his life and redemption. Similarly, while the term “faith” appears fourteen times in James, eleven of them occur in 2:14–26, a discussion that stresses that faith without deeds is dead (2:17, 26). If we want to hear the gospel of James, we must consider who James was.

THE LIFE OF JAMES

James simply calls himself “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” but several lines of evidence indicate that he is the half-brother of Jesus, the natural son of both Mary and Joseph.² When the author calls himself James without further identification, it implies that his audience knows him and his credentials well enough.

There are three men named James in the New Testament: two apostles and the brother of Jesus. Of the apostles, James of the trio Peter, James, and John suffered martyrdom at the beginning of the Christian era. The second apostolic James is the son of Alphaeus. He is nearly a cipher in the Gospels, and we know nothing of him after the resurrection. So we doubt that he is our James.

The process of elimination leads us to think that the author is the brother of Jesus. But there is more. First, both the book of Acts and early Christian historians say Jesus’ brother became a leader of the Jerusalem church. He is prominent at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). His speech there and the subsequent letter, both in Acts 15, contain a number of distinctive phrases that also appear in James’s epistle.³ James the church leader and James the epistle writer also share a passion for the law of Moses (Acts 15:21; James 2:8–11) and for peacemaking (Acts 15:28–29; James 3:17–18).

It is doubtful that James believed in or even respected Jesus in the early phases of his ministry. If, in Genesis 37, Joseph’s brothers struggled with his sense that he was destined for greatness, imagine the difficulty of being Jesus’ younger brother.⁴ The Gospels hint at familial tension. For example, the first time John’s gospel mentions Jesus’ siblings, they mock him. The Feast of Tabernacles was approaching, and his brothers said: “You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” John adds, “For even his own brothers did not believe in him” (John 7:3–5). On another occasion, Jesus’ family became alarmed when his ministry began to attract unruly crowds and to rouse opposition from the Pharisees. When they heard about it, Mark says, “They went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’ ” (Mark 3:20–22). Later, Jesus’ family showed scant respect for his work when they arrived during a teaching session and acted as if they had the right to interrupt him (Matt. 12:46–50). Finally, when the gospels name those who stayed with Jesus at the cross, they list Mary his mother, but not his brothers (Mark 15:40; John 19:25).

It is impossible to determine when James came to faith. But Jesus, after his resurrection, graciously appeared to James, either to instill or to seal his faith (1 Cor. 15:3–8). After that, James rapidly became a pillar of the Jerusalem church. In Acts 15, when the church convened its first great council in Jerusalem, Peter and Paul described the terms and the progress of the gospel among the Gentiles. Both apostles preached that salvation came to Gentiles by faith alone, apart from works, apart from the laws about food and circumcision that established Jewish identity (Acts 10:34–11:18). Although some initially disagreed, the council established that Jew and Gentile are both saved “through the grace of our Lord Jesus” (15:11). At the council, James gave the concluding speech:

Brothers, listen to me. Simon has described to us how God at first showed his concern by taking from the Gentiles a people for himself. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

“After this I will return

and rebuild David’s fallen tent.

Its ruins I will rebuild,

and I will restore it,

that the remnant of men may seek the Lord,

and all the Gentiles who bear my name,

says the Lord, who does these things.” (Acts 15:13–17)

In the early church, James acquired the title “James the Just” because of his personal righteousness and his passion to promote righteousness in others. We see the same passion in James’s epistle. He calls the law “the perfect law that gives freedom” (James 1:25) and “the royal law” (2:8). But the letter never asks readers to keep the laws regarding food, circumcision, and Sabbath that marked the Jews as an ethnic group. At the Jerusalem Council, James did urge adherence to some aspects of distinctively Jewish law (Acts 21:19–21), but it seems that his goal was peaceful relations in early church life as Jew and Gentile learned to live together as the family of God. At any rate, his letter never requires obedience to laws about circumcision or food. Thus James subordinated his passion for the law to his greater passion for the gospel. He had a zeal for legal righteousness, but greater zeal for the grace of God.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JAMES

With 59 commands in 108 verses, the epistle of James has an obvious zeal for law. In his imperatives, James directly communicates the royal law, the law of King Jesus (2:8). But the hasty reader will not see much of the gospel in James. If James is merely a series of commands, its moral clarity is a burden, and its limpid commands only condemn. While James does lack familiar formulations of the gospel, his insistence on obedience is unmistakable. He says good deeds mark true religion:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (1:27)

Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. (2:10)

Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins. (4:17)

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. (1:22)

Similarly, James expects teachers to do what they know and say: “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (3:1).

This call to obey or to face judgment is all the more stringent since James insists that everyone fails to do what the law requires. James says we must control the tongue (1:26), yet he says no man can tame the tongue (3:8). He says we must avoid the pollution of the world (1:27), yet he says our envy and our quarrels prove we are worldly (4:1–4).

These paradoxes lead to the gospel of James. He says that all are liable to judgment, but “mercy triumphs over judgment” (2:13), for “the Lord is full of com...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Preface
• 1. Introduction to James (1:1)
• 2. The Trials of Life (1:2–12)
• 3. Blessed Endurance (1:12–18)
• 4. Hearing to Obey (1:19–25)
• 5. The Tests of True Religion (1:26–2:7)
• 6. All or Nothing (2:8–13)
• 7. Faith That Works (2:14–19)
• 8. Justified By a Faith That Works (2:20–26)
• 9. Who Can Tame the Tongue? (3:1–12)
• 10. Two Kinds of Wisdom (3:13–18)
• 11. The Gospel According to James (4:1–6)
• 12. Grace for the Humble (4:5–10)
• 13. Pride and Humility (4:11–17)
• 14. Woe to the Rich (5:1–6)
• 15. Patient Endurance (5:7–11)
• 16. Note On James 5:12
• 17. The Quest for Healing (5:13–20)
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects and Names