of the King of glory. There can be no distinctions of merit when we meet in the presence of the supreme holiness of God. In his presence, all earthly distinctions are less than the dust and all earthly righteousness is as filthy rags. In the presence of God, all are one.
In verse 4, there is a problem of translation. The word diekrithēte can have two meanings. (1) It can mean ‘You are wavering in your judgments if you act like that.’ That is to say, ‘If you pay special honour to the rich, you are torn between the standards of the world and the standards of God, and you can’t make up your mind which you are going to apply.’ (2) It may mean ‘You are guilty of making class distinctions which in the Christian fellowship should not exist.’ We prefer the second meaning, because James goes on to say: ‘If you do that, you are judges whose thoughts are evil.’ That is to say, ‘You are breaking the commandment of him who said, “Judge not that you be not judged”’ (Matthew 7:1).
THE RICHES OF POVERTY AND THE POVERTY OF RICHES
James 2:5–7
Listen, my dear brothers. Did God not choose those who are poor by the world’s valuation to be rich because of their faith and to be heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you dishonour the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you, and is it not they who drag you to the law courts? And is it not they who abuse the fair name by which you have been called?
‘GOD’, said the American president Abraham Lincoln, ‘must love the common people because he made so many of them.’ Christianity has always had a special message for the poor. In Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, his claim was: ‘He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor’ (Luke 4:18). His answer to John’s puzzled inquiries as to whether or not he was God’s chosen one culminated in the claim: ‘The poor have good news brought to them’ (Matthew 11:5). The first of the beatitudes was: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:3). And Luke is even more definite: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’ (Luke 6:20). During the ministry of Jesus, when he was banished from the synagogues and took to the open road and the hillside and the seaside, it was the crowds of ordinary men and women to whom his message came. In the days of the early Church, it was to the crowds that the street preachers preached. In fact, the message of Christianity was that those who mattered to no one else mattered intensely to God. ‘Consider your own call, brothers and sisters,’ wrote Paul to the Corinthians, ‘not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth’ (1 Corinthians 1:26).
It is not that Christ and the Church do not want the great and the rich and the wise and the mighty; we must beware of an inverted snobbery, as we have already seen. But it was the simple fact that the gospel offered so much to the poor, and demanded so much from the rich, that it was the poor who were swept into the Church. It was, in fact, the ordinary people who heard Jesus gladly and the rich young ruler who went sorrowfully away because he had great possessions. James is not shutting the door on the rich – far from it. He is saying that the gospel of Christ is especially dear to the poor and that in it there is a welcome for those who have no one to welcome them, and that through it there is a value set on those whom the world regards as valueless.
In the society that James inhabited, the rich oppressed the poor. They dragged them to the law courts. No doubt this was for debt. At the bottom end of the social scale, people were so poor that they could hardly live, and money-lenders were plentiful and well practised in extortion. In the ancient world, there was a custom of instant arrest. If a creditor met a debtor on the street, he could seize him by the neck of his robe, nearly throttling him, and literally drag him to the law courts. That is what the rich did to the poor. They had no sympathy; all they wanted was every last penny, every last cent. It is not riches that James is condemning; it is the management of riches without sympathy.
It is the rich who abuse the name by which the Christians are called. It may be the name Christian by which the followers of Christ were called first of all at Antioch and which was given initially as a jest. It may be the name of Christ, which was pronounced over a Christian at baptism. The word James uses for called (epikaleisthai) is the word used for a wife taking her husband’s name in marriage or for children being called after their father. Christians take the name of Christ; they are called after Christ. It is as if they were married to Christ, or born and christened into the family of Christ.
The rich and the masters would have many reasons for insulting the name Christian. Slaves who became Christians would have a new independence; they would no longer cringe at their master’s power, punishment would cease to terrorize them and they would meet their master with a new strength and confidence. They would have a new honesty. That would make them better slaves, but it would also mean they could no longer be their master’s instruments in sharp practice and petty dishonesty as once they might have been. They would have a new sense of worship, and on the Lord’s Day they would insist on putting work aside in order that they might worship with the people of God. There would be ample opportunity for a master to find reasons for insulting the name of Christian and cursing the name of Christ.
THE ROYAL LAW
James 2:8–11
If you perfectly keep the royal law, as the Scripture has it: ‘You must love your neighbour as yourself’, you do well. But if you treat people with respect of persons, such conduct is sin and you stand convicted by the law as transgressors. For, if a man keeps the whole law and yet fails to keep it in one point, he becomes guilty of transgressing the law as a whole. For he who said ‘Do not commit adultery’ also said ‘Do not kill’. If you do not commit adultery but kill, you become a transgressor of the law.
THE connection of thought with the previous passage is this. James has been condemning those who pay special attention to the rich man who enters the church. ‘But’, they might answer, ‘the law tells me to love my neighbour as myself. Therefore we are duty-bound to welcome this man when he comes to church.’ ‘Very well,’ answers James, ‘if you are really welcoming the man because you love him as you do yourself, and you wish to give him the welcome you yourself would wish to receive, that is fine. But, if you are giving him this special welcome because he is rich, that is favouritism and that is wrong – and, far from keeping the law, you are in fact breaking it. You don’t love your neighbour, or you would not neglect the poor man. What you love is wealth – and that is not what the law commands.’
James calls the great commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves the royal law. There can be various meanings of the phrase. It may mean the law which is of supreme excellence; it may mean the law which is given by the King of Kings; it may mean the supreme law; it may mean the law that gives the regal quality to people and is fit for royalty. To keep that greatest law is to become king of oneself and a king among others. It is a law fit for those who are royal, and able to make others royal.
James goes on to lay down a great principle about the law of God. To break any part of it is to become a transgressor. The Jews were very apt to regard the law as a series of detached commandments. To keep one was to gain credit; to break one was to incur debt. People could add up the ones they kept and subtract the ones they broke and so emerge with a credit or a debit balance. There was a Rabbinic saying: ‘Whoever fulfils only one law, good is appointed to him; his days are prolonged and he will inherit the land.’ Again, many of the Rabbis held that ‘the Sabbath weighs against all precepts’, and to keep it was to keep the law.
As James saw it, the whole law was the will of God; to break any part of it was to infringe that will and therefore to be guilty of sin. That is perfectly true. To break any part of the law is to become a transgressor in principle.
