Kowtowing to the wealthy, to the privileged, to the powerful, and to those in the know happens in every society every day, and in many churches every weekend, and in most churches too often. Events, incidents, and accidents like this unmask social assumptions. Most of us are so intertwined in our social realities that we do not discern the inconsistencies of these incidents with our faith. James is here to help us because we need someone to walk into our assemblies and say, “Hey, friends, something’s not right!” We need to listen so we can do.
James sketches a scene. A wealthy man enters “your meeting.” The Greek term for “your meeting” is synagōgē, which can have three senses: a synagogue building, an assembly of people, or a gathering of messianic Jews who call their meetings what they had called them before they turned to the “Lord Jesus Christ.” Since he later uses the word “church” (5:14) and since he uses “your” with meeting and “among yourselves” in our passage, it is reasonable that James thinks of this as an assembly of messianic Jews in a designated space. He focuses on clothing. What one chooses to wear expresses a person’s self-perception. (We have too much trendy today, too much fashion show, too much “preachers-n-sneakers.”) The rich man dresses the part, and James frames a word and calls him a “gold-fingered” guy. He is given a special seat—perhaps in the front row, at least somewhere comfortable and conspicuous. Entering alongside, no doubt behind, the wealthy man is a poor man dressed in clothing expressing poverty. Instead of being ushered to a seat he is asked to stand somewhere or to sit on the floor. In our terms, the first man’s a celebrity. Celebrities are well-known persons who are celebrated as special by others. Think of it in reverse. When we celebrate a person for their fame (instead of their faith) we are treating them as celebrities. Only one person deserves celebration in a church, and that’s where James started to describe the scene: “the glorious Lord Jesus Christ.”
A pragmatic person sees this all go down and says, “That’s how life works,” or maybe, “We might get some donations out of this guy.” A wise person like James observes this happening and says, “This is not right.” Pragmatic people lack discernment. Pragmatic people see the surface; wise people see through the surface and discern the moral realities at work under that surface.
What do wise persons discern?
The wise person identifies the problem with clarity. No one in the New Testament talks more about the speech patterns than James, but no one else is as pointed as he is in naming some sins. He names this incident “favoritism,” and this translates a word that suggests lifting up a person’s face to see who it is and to see if they are worthy. A couple questions can illustrate the point. When you buy an article of clothing, do you look at the brand name? And, in doing so, are you thinking of impressing others? Or of quality? (Price, my wife often tells me, is not a good indicator.) When you buy a bottle of wine, do you assume the price indicates whether the wine is good or not? Is your palate actually fine enough even to know the difference? Or are you thinking a cheap wine is below your dignity?
Transfer these common instances of favoritism to how you (mis) treat others—African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans—and that’s what “favoritism” means. It means “they” versus “us.” It’s prejudice, it’s bias, it’s racism, it’s sexism, it’s political partisanship, it’s snobbery, it’s arrogance, and it’s wrong. Let us not forget, too, that habits of prejudice become systemic, and systemic prejudice must not only be named but admitted, unraveled, tossed away, and new habits and threads must be woven into a new system of goodness. Most importantly, prejudices both in practice and system are out of line with Jesus who was himself a poor man in poor clothing. Beth Moore speaks to all of us in our muteness: “To sit back and say nothing is to cast a vote of approval.”
One of the wisest moves to get people to discern what’s under the hood is to ask good questions. Our tone in reading James’ series of questions in 2:4–7 matters. One can read these in anger, or as a rough interrogation, or as questions probing ordinary folks. (You might try asking James’ questions aloud on your own from each angle and then ask which one best suits the passage.) It seems to me he’s irritated, and his wisdom turns a tad prophetic. Have you “discriminated” and “become judges with evil thoughts?” (Yes.) A little softer: Has God chosen the poor? (Yes.) Somewhere between the two previous questions: Are the rich exploiting you? (Yes.) A little stronger voice now: Are they hauling you into courts? (Yes.) Are they the ones slandering Jesus’ name? (Yes.) Tone aside, the answers matter and the rhetoric does its work: the believers become aware that their actions are prejudice. Celebrity-ism has no part in the church. Kowtowing to the rich is wrong. These questions led the believers to perceive the utter inconsistency between their own oppressed-at-the-hands-of-the-privileged-and-powerful situation and their favor-the-celebrity in their assembly. They knew their own realities: most were poor, the wealthy exploited them, the wealthy took them to court, and the wealthy slandered their own Lord. All by way of questions.
Good questions, when compared to straightforward statements, empower people to answer for themselves, and they permit inner probings. I have learned, too, that good questions often lead to answers I never imagined and open up into unexpected, growing conversations. Sometimes questions lead to responses that show that the question was not a good one but another one is better. Good questions leading to better questions promote wisdom.
Prejudice and love don’t hold hands, so wisdom takes us to the basic of all basics. Jews began the day and ended the day by reciting the Shema (“Hear O Israel … Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” Deuteronomy 6:4–5). Along came a theological expert asking Jesus which of the commands (mitzvot) was the greatest, and Jesus (in effect) encouraged the man to take a seat at his feet and listen up. Here’s what he told him: “Love God,” which repeats the Shema, and “Love your neighbor the way you love yourself,” which comes from Leviticus 19. Jesus said that reducing the commands to one is a mistake because there are two: love God, love others. These two commands in the law of Moses become the moral foundation for discipleship to Jesus. Do you love God? Do you love others? Not one without the other, as 1 John says over and over. John wasn’t the only one who got into love as the heart of it all. So did Paul, Peter and, James. In 1:12, James mentioned loving God, and now he mentions the other half of Jesus’ teaching, which I call the Jesus Creed. Like his older brother, he cites Leviticus 19.
Get this: to love another person as yourself means a rugged, affective commitment to be with that person, to be for that person, and to grow together to be like Christ. Great idea until the person you are called to love happens to be someone you don’t like! Or from the other political party. Or doesn’t appreciate your privilege and has told you so. To love like Jesus takes our all.
James uses the Jesus Creed to probe the believers even more. If you love your neighbor as yourself, excellent! Tov! Beautiful! But, if you show prejudice against the poor and favor to the celebrity—and here James uses the law as he has learned it—“you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers” (2:9). He probes deeper now. If you break one law you are a lawbreaker and that means you are as good as guilty of breaking all 613 of them! The one law James cares about here is the law Jesus made foundational: loving your neighbor as yourself. You can’t love your neighbor and degrade the status of a person because he’s poor or upgrade the status of a person because he’s rich and wears $1,500 sneakers on the church platform, can you? So James in his wisdom takes us back to the basic of all basics: love God, love others.
Once again we need to think of the basics: we will stand before God to be “judged by the law that gives freedom” (2:12). In James 1:25, James spoke of the “perfect law that gives freedom” and in 2:12 he only drops out “perfect.” Because of Jesus, James knows the law (of Moses) as liberating. The law is the measure, but the law as understood by Jesus is loving God and loving others. Which is liberating in that it sets a person free to focus on persons. But a sigh of relief fails the test here. I can hear someone say, “love is better than law,” but I answer back, “divine judgment of how well we loved God and loved others is no (as the Germans say it) Spaziergang, no lazy walk in the park.” In fact, for Jesus, law is the surface, and love is under the surface, and he wants us to dive deep into the depths of love.
James now faces his prejudice-practicing congregation and says, “What you did was wrong. You practiced judgment of fellow believers. Now turn from prejudice to mercy.” Mercy here means treating the poor man right and the rich man right, and right means as a sibling. Not as a celebrity, and not as a deplorable. No upgrades, and no downgrades.
You and I are brothers and sisters. Sit next to me.
Just as our glorious Lord Jesus Christ sat with the disciples.
