The Letter of James

The letter of James is the book of faith that acts. Written by the one called the brother of the Lord, head of the Church of Jerusalem, it has accents of very concrete wisdom, close to the Proverbs and to the words of Jesus. It develops no long doctrines: it presses believers to live what they confess. To those who would be content to believe without changing their conduct, it addresses a warning that has remained famous, and gives to the whole Christian life a simple rule: faith is proven by acts.

Faith and works

The heart of the letter is this cutting affirmation: “faith, if it has no works, is dead in itself.” James 2:17 James does not mean that man saves himself by his own strength, nor that works replace the grace of God; he says that a true faith necessarily produces fruit, as a living tree bears fruit. A faith that would leave the heart cold, that would see a brother lacking what he needs without lifting a finger, would be but an empty word. The faith that saves is the one that acts through charity. Far from opposing Paul’s teaching on grace, James completes it: Paul removes the pride of the one who would claim to merit salvation; James removes the laziness of the one who would call himself a believer without loving. To believe and to love are one. To prove it, he goes back to Abraham, the father of believers: his faith, he says, did not remain a mere assent, it acted when he offered his son Isaac, and thus it was brought to its perfection. The same Scripture that Paul cites to show that Abraham was justified by faith, James rereads to show that this faith was living and active. The two apostles do not contradict each other: they look at the same Abraham, whose faith and obedience were one. True faith, that of the father of believers, is always a faith that sets itself in motion.

Putting the Word into practice

Hence the exhortation that sets the tone of the whole letter: “put the word into practice; do not merely listen to it, deceiving yourselves.” James 1:22 To listen to the word of God without living it is to deceive oneself, like a man who looks at himself in a mirror and goes off at once forgetting his face. James even gives a definition of true piety that surprises by its simplicity: religion pure before God, he says, is to visit orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by evil. True faith is measured not by fine words, but by the care of the weakest. God, in this letter, is recognized in the service of the neighbor.

The poison of the tongue

James devotes a remarkable page to a small organ capable of great havoc: the tongue. It is tiny, but it steers the whole man as the rudder steers the ship, and a single spark is enough to set a forest ablaze. “The tongue no one can tame: a restless evil, it is full of deadly venom.” James 3:8 From the same mouth come the blessing of God and the cursing of the neighbor, and this contradiction ought not to be. Slander, lies, the word that wounds or divides: James shows that sin often begins with words, and that to master one’s tongue is the sign of a complete man. This wholly practical wisdom meets the Gospel, where Christ teaches that one will give account for every word. In this James is the direct heir of the sages of Israel: the Proverbs and Sirach had already long meditated on the power of the tongue, capable of life and death, and on the man who knows how to hold his mouth. His whole letter has this savor of practical wisdom, made of short striking sayings, so close to the book of Proverbs that it has sometimes been called the Proverbs of the New Testament. But this ancient wisdom, James rereads in the light of Christ, who made the true and good word the sign of a pure heart.

The anointing of the sick

The letter ends on prayer, and notably on a gesture the Church will recognize as one of its sacraments. To the sick man, James gives a precise instruction: “Let him call the elders of the Church, and let them pray over him, after anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” James 5:14 Prayer and anointing with oil: this is the sacrament of the sick, by which the Church, still today, sustains those whom suffering tries, for the raising up of the body and above all of the soul. James adds a word on forgiveness, inviting believers to confess their sins to one another and to pray for one another, where the Church has always recognized the spirit of the sacrament of reconciliation. Thus the most practical letter of the New Testament ends on the very gestures by which the grace of Christ reaches the body and the heart of the believer.