July 25, 2006
Works
Tradition has it that James, whose feast is kept today, was the first of the twelve to be martyred. The New Testament letter attributed to him, considering its plethora of hortatory imperatives, mostly takes the form of a preachment. In fact, it’s a style that continues to pay the rent for some, if the eminently successful and carefully coifed TV evangelists mean anything at all.
With Peter and John, James was apparently on an inside track with Jesus, being chosen to witness both the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. Of course, that he slept through most of the best parts of both doesn’t commend him all that well.
He and Paul took conflicting spins on faith. For Paul, faith is the believer’s loyalty to the Christ, a way of life. For James, it’s mere assent to theological statements, pointless without works. Such perspectives remain very much alive today in all the self-styled wrangle separating the sheep from the goats.
Martin Luther’s disdain for James’s reflections preferred a Bible without him, casting his work off as an “epistle of straw.” On the other hand, maybe he’d have consented its being kept in the canon if only James had just replaced “faith without works is dead” with “don’t let the grace grow under your feet.”