Living in the Spirit
September 7, 2018
Scripture Reading: James 2:1-17
You do well if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgement will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgement.
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not ply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. –James 2:8-17
Christians tend to cherry pick the scriptures we favor and ignore the ones we do not. My guess is that is true also of other faiths. We identify as the worst sins those things we would probably never do in the first place but afford us the opportunity to judge others whose behavior we do not understand. I think much scriptural interpretation is derived from human nature rather than God’ nature. I guess that makes me a cynic. James speaks of murder and adultery representing sins without differing magnitudes. Human nature says adultery is not as serious as murder. I have been surprised that many people who claim to be pro-life support capital punishment that seems a contradiction to me. Did you know that the death certificates of executed prisoners indicate the cause of death as homicide? Federal law restricts the use of federal funds from being used for elective abortions, but our tax dollars pay for executions.
James is calling us to account for our hypocrisy when according to Jesus the primary law we are to follow if we love God, is loving our neighbors as we love ourselves that precludes the necessity of judging anyone but calls us to journey with others as they search for relationship with God.
Prayer: Lord, do a new thing in us helping us to love one another as Jesus modeled for us. Amen.