James

What This Book Is

The New Testament's book of practical wisdom: short, blunt, and concerned with speech, money, favouritism, and doing rather than only hearing.

Overview

James reads more like Proverbs than like Paul. It moves quickly between topics, gives instruction rather than argument, and is full of images: a wave tossed by wind, a mirror, a bit in a horse's mouth, a rudder, a spark, a mist.

Its concerns are consistently practical. Trials produce endurance. Ask for wisdom and it is given. Do not merely hear the word; do it, or you are like someone who glances in a mirror and immediately forgets what they look like.

He is sharp about favouritism. If a rich man in fine clothes and a poor man in filthy clothes come into your assembly and you seat them differently, you have become judges with evil thoughts. He is sharper still about wealth held while workers go unpaid, and about telling a hungry person to go in peace and be warmed while giving them nothing.

Chapter 3 is the New Testament's most concentrated passage on speech. The tongue is small and sets a forest on fire; with it we bless God and curse people made in his image, and these things ought not to be so.

The passage most argued over is in chapter 2, where he says faith without works is dead and that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Read alongside Paul, this has troubled readers since the Reformation. The usual resolution is that the two are answering different questions: Paul is addressing how a person is accepted by God, James how you can tell whether a professed faith is real. Both use Abraham as their example.

He closes with prayer, patience, and restoring those who wander.

Structure

• Chapter 1: Trials and doingEndurance, wisdom for the asking, and hearers who forget.
• Chapter 2: Favouritism and faithRich and poor seated differently, and faith without works.
• Chapter 3: The tongueSmall, powerful, and difficult to govern.
• Chapter 4: ConflictWhere quarrels come from, and planning without presumption.
• Chapter 5: Patience and prayerWarnings to the wealthy, patience in suffering, and prayer for the sick.

Themes

Why It Matters

James is the corrective for any version of Christianity that has become entirely internal. Its insistence that religion which God accepts includes visiting orphans and widows in their distress keeps faith tied to visible care. It is also, verse for verse, the New Testament book that most resembles the teaching of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount.

How to Read It

• Read it in one sitting, then again slowly, one paragraph at a time.
• Read 2:14-26 alongside Ephesians 2:8-10 and notice the different questions being answered.
• Read chapter 3 before your next difficult conversation.
• Read 1:27 and 2:1-7 together and ask what your own gatherings communicate.

Key Verse

Did You Know?

• James contains more direct echoes of Jesus' teaching than any other New Testament letter.
• Luther famously called it an epistle of straw, though he continued to include and preach from it.
• The letter has more imperatives per verse than any other New Testament book.

Where to Start Reading