Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

The Epistle General of James is my favorite epistle. Yes, granted, I love the whole brilliant Johannine corpus, including the letters; yes, the letter to the Romans is peerless, to me, when it comes to a theological outworking of the majestic love of God in Christ to welcome all into the kingdom; and yes, the letter to the Philippians is hands down amazing, filled with glorious hymns and liturgical allusions…but the pastoral concern of the letter of James, and James’ own pastoral voice, are things I deeply treasure about this letter on which we’re embarking in our lectionary today.

There are many things we could talk about given the reading from James appointed for today: the sorts of things for which James thinks we ought to pray; how we approach hardship; what are the fruits of endurance; what temptation means and how it’s overcome…. And then there’s that seemingly evocative passage right in the middle: “Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low.” I feel there’s some real spiritual nourishment in this passage, Friend, and there are two things I’d like to point out about it.

The first is that the one who raises up and the one who brings low is not any human agent: the humble believer and the rich person are not exalted or abased by their own power, though there’s certainly a suggestion that the humility of the believer and the wealth of the rich person are both the fruits of devotional pursuits. In fact, it's often the case (particularly throughout the New Testament), that “rich person” is code for “a prideful person who trusts in themselves and their possessions and not in God; a person who believes that being ‘self-made’ is actually possible, somehow good, and not the mark of a damnable solipsism; a person who, on account of their devotion to this world, is a vain and empty shadow of the person they’re called to be, and who will inevitably fade away with the light and the dawning of the Age-to-Come.” The one who pursues humility, the one who empties herself, the one who puts self aside to seek the good of the other, the one who relies on God—that person will discover a Power at work in their lives that fills them with virtue, goodness, blessedness, and lifts them up to joy…and they’ll rejoice in that Power. But the one who seeks riches, who seeks self, power, gain, will find that the only path to joy available to them is in surrendering to the Power that will strip them of their riches, of their own might, even of themselves, and rejoicing in an Other who will bring them low in the hopes of genuinely raising them up to real blessedness and bliss.

This Power is Love. And the second thing about this passage I want to point out to you, Beloved, is that the outworking of Love in the world is Justice. The lifting up of the lowly and the casting down of the proud is Justice. And it is the good and necessary work of Love. It’s not the easy work of love, particularly if and when we realize that we may indeed be the ones who need to be abased by Love for Love’s sake. But our joy only becomes possible with such a realization, and it’s then that we can welcome and rejoice in the work of justice in our lives and in the world around us.

Friend, I pray that we may welcome the just work of Love in our lives, whether to raise us up or to cast us down. Therein is our joy, our fullness…by it are we transformed from shadow into substance…in it, we discover the fierce and fiery life of Love alive and living in and through us.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+