The Epistle of Saint James has been a nightmare for a number of theologians who have often tried to lax moral restrictions, or better, moral expectations that Christian adherents are meant to live by. He speaks about how conflicts and disputes given hedonistic and uncontrolled desires, can tear communities apart.
Saint James says that these uncontrolled passions can even drive us to murderous hatred. People can be driven by never-satisfied desires of greed, always wanting more and more. In fact, rampant crime and all sorts of violence are seemingly more present in affluent societies.
The apostle wrote, “…you covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts.”
‘War’ is what he literally meant by conflicts, where rather than continuing the interior battle of conversion, we engage in the physical violence of other people. Sadly, this is a repeated phenomenon which continues to plague our history in the making. We see so many conflicts all over the world, and most of it is due to people just not being happy with what they have and living peacefully as a nation, fearing God and worshipping him without fear, but rather coveting more and more so that their unnatural lusts for power and wealth may be satisfied. God sees. He knows all things. Those who deny him will have no excuse should they not call out to his mercy.
“You do not have because you do not ask.” Rather, James makes it clear, that what we should be seeking and craving, we do not ask for. In a word, the will of God. Jesus spoke about the cravings of human beings for natural food, but that his food… his “craving” if you please, was to fulfill the will of the Eternal Father.
When we do ask God for things, we ask wrongly most of the time. James points out that we ask, simply to satisfy our own personal satisfactions and the objects of our passions. What we ask has very little relevance to either our own real well-being or that of others, and much less as a desire to live out God’s will in our lives. How can we ever be pleasing to God, if this is the case?
For many of us our priorities are mixed up, and God does not occupy that top spot. He may be there in theory, or in word, or on a sheet of paper, but in reality, in terms of our conviction and our communication with him, we’re still distant, distracted, and at best struggling to transition from idealism to reality.
James is saying that the problem isn’t a god who doesn’t hear or answer prayers, but that he is approached imprudently and beseeched in obtaining things that will hurt, and not aid his precious child at the end of the day. In rather blunt language he ends up accusing the recipients of his epistle as being adulters. He is evoking the imagery of Hosea’s wife, who cast him aside for other men. This is similar to idolatry, when we cast the true and omnipotent God aside for all of our petty and transient little gods.
“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” ‘World’ here points to those elements whose behaviour is totally opposed to God’s way. A lot of us insist on warming up to the godless people around us no matter what their behaviour and conduct under the guise of not judging. We give in to a false sense of compassion, and by joining them, we become like them and soon lose sight of our own behaviour as it plummets to consistently lower standards.
James’ appeal is to those who through their lives, oppose all that God stands for. Rather, we must reject whatever is contrary to being a good Catholic, so as to be able to say we have totally given ourselves to him.
Yes, in biblical language, our God is a “jealous” God in the sense that he calls for the total dedication of ourselves to him. It has to be all or nothing:
“…none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” (Luke 14:33)
God is jealous for all of our love, not just some of it. And we know that when we do give our all, we also receive abundantly. We can hold on to the wealth of this world, and end up empty inside. Or, we can place everything at the service of Almighty God and find life. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” Matthew 16:25.
As pride is usually at the root of every sin we commit, James goes on to give us his list of nine admonitions so as to root out pride from our lives, and these are so vital for the serious Catholic:
- Submit yourselves therefore to God. Sometimes we’re like lions on the inside that need to be tamed. Our passions need to be kept at bay by the Holy Spirit so that we can become submissive to his divine will.
- Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. How often is our resistance so weak when it comes to temptation? Are we really trying to avoid the allurements of the devil? Idleness. Be careful of idleness. Keep yourself busy in good and productive things, and you won’t give room for the devil’s daily onslaughts. You will “crowd him out”, as Bishop Sheen used to put it. But then be careful, because he will intensify his attacks in more subtle ways, and he is allowed to do so by God so as to allow you to grow in humility and your dependence on his grace.
3. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. James is trying to tell us that God always desires to be close to us, but we are not always desiring to be close to him. We have so many plans, and desires, and longings, and future possibilities running through our mind, and how many of those involve God in a very real, premeditated way.
4. Cleanse your hands, you sinners…The Old Testament priests had to wash their hands and feet when they approached God in the tent of meeting as a symbol of spiritual cleansing; Ps 24:4 has the imagery of “clean hands and a pure heart.” We symbolically “clean our hands” in the confessional, where the Lord purifies our hearts and minds and our conscience.
5. …purify your hearts, you double-minded. How often do we allow our hearts to become divided. If you’re a married woman your love should be set on your husband alone and vice versa, yet how many times do we allow another individual to creep into our hearts and pull on those strings? And how often am I virtuous in one breath, and easily choose vices in another? I choose poverty on one hand, and crave going to a casino in the other. This is what James means when he is telling us to stay away from things that cause us to be divided in our hearts.
6. Lament and mourn and weep.. in this admonition, James is reminding us of the serious nature of sin. If we really knew how detrimental it was to us and to others, and how it offends God, and if we really knew who God is in a more complete way, we would surely lament over our sins.
7. Let your laughter be turned into mourning… in other words, it is better to weep over our sins now, then later. Sometimes we laugh at the wrong things. We laugh at evil, when instead we should be abhorring the evil we do, and not laughing at it.
8. …and your joy into dejection There is no joy in continually falling to the same sins because our love isn’t strong enough for our Lord. That’s a sad reality, not a joyful one. Rather, if we combat what is offensive to God in our actions, we will find more reason to be joyful.
9. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you Echoing our Lady’s Magnificat, we come to the crux of the matter. Pride is always lurking beneath any sin we commit. They are all somehow connected to pride.
In these ways we overcome pride and are able to live more closely to the Lord in a way which will please him and call down upon us, our ministries, our families, many blessings pride normally steals from us. Pride creates walls to divide us and humility builds bridges of communication.
James, being one of the twelve, was merely passing on what he himself had been taught by our Lord. This body of admonitions in his words which we examine today are only part of his beautiful epistle. We must remember that he was also on the receiving end of many admonitions by our Lord, and in today’s gospel we have a number of examples of this.
Jesus predicts his passion for the second of the three times that he does so. The apostles are unclear about what he means. This means that James too, like all the others, was thrown for a loop when face to face with the idea of a suffering Messiah. It wasn’t something expected by the vast majority, because the idea of that biblical Saviour was one more akin to a warrior who would devastate the enemy of the people of God. What they weren’t yet seeing was that the greatest enemy of all, was death. It alone could hold an immortal soul bound forever, and Jesus came to snap those chains, and to remove the sting of death by offering eternal life hereafter.
James, like the rest, had to be purified in the fire of humility—God’s humility. A humility that would allow for him to suffer, something our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters find to be an abhorrent idea—an impossibility. And so Jesus’ main emphasis in today’s gospel was on the true meaning of greatness as something to be acquired through loving and sacrificial service. “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” Mark 9:35.
Our Lord demonstrated this in humbly laying down his life in service to us throughout his entire life and ultimately as the Spotless Lamb nailed to the cross for our sins. Through overcoming our pride, we too need to realign our idea of greatness with that of God’s, and thereby allow him to work powerfully in our lives.
Add comment
Comments