July 25, 2007
Santiago
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, maybe one reason for his early demise. In fact, it’s a style that for some continues to pay the rent, epecially 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 and hardly a work in itself. Such perspectives remain very much alive today in all the self-styled wrangle separating the sheep from the goats.
Martin Luther disdained James’s reflections and preferred a Bible without him, casting his work off as an “epistle of straw.” On the other hand, maybe he’d have consented to its being kept in the canon if he had only realized that if James had been a bit more hip, what he really meant by “faith without works is dead” was “don’t let the grace grow under your feet” (Jas 2.17).
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