Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-september-5-2023
James 2:1-11
Favoritism Forbidden
1My brothers [and sisters], as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. 2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. 3 If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” 4 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
5 Listen, my dear brothers [and sisters]: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? 6 But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? 7 Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong?
8 If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. 9 But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers.10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 11 For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.
Back in 1988, Melissa and I joined a congregation after years of estrangement following four years at a very conservative Christian college. We really just wanted to have our first son baptized, but a friend and mentor in ministry said baptizing a child was a waste of time unless the parents were actually engaged in Christian discipleship themselves. So we found a church that worked for us, joined the congregation and had our son baptized.
A month or two after we joined the congregation, the session of the church called a meeting to vote on whether or not to fire the pastor. (“Dissolve the pastoral relationship” is the official expression.) It was a complicated situation. The church had over 500 members, and the previous pastor had been a charismatic celebrity-type guy. Being the next pastor after one of those folks is always hard, and the young guy they brought in had never led a church before. He probably never had a chance.
In any case, there was one moment from that congregational meeting that I never forgot: One of the pastor’s defenders rose to say that under his leadership, the congregation was attracting new people to the church. But then a longtime member stood up and shouted, “Yes, but they’re the wrong kind of people!”
I remember that occasion every time I read this passage, because I think the apostle James was talking about this kind of situation in the early church. It seems that some members were making judgments about ‘the kind of people’ they wanted in the body, and they were treating the prosperous members with greater respect than the poor ones. In this passage, James was pointing out that this kind of discrimination represents a failure of love for the poor. And that makes it a sin in God’s eyes. James wants to make the point that anyone who is willing to give their heart to Jesus is by definition ‘the right kind of person.’
Some people might say that this issue isn’t a problem for the church anymore. But anyone who has served in church leadership – and especially in a church that’s struggling financially – knows that it’s a real temptation for the leadership to knock itself out to avoid offending “the good givers.” And that can go so far as letting the rich “call the shots” in the life of the church. (The humorist Garrison Keillor once wrote that if the church had spent half as much energy on greed as it has on lust, this would be a much better world to live in. The well-to-do are fine with sermons on lust, but they can get touchy about preaching on greed.)
James is understood to have been the biological brother of Jesus and the leader of the church in Jerusalem after Jesus ascended to heaven, and he wanted to make the case that the rich and the poor deserve equal honor in the church. Giving a good seat to the rich and telling the poor to sit in the back (or in the balcony, as has often happened in the case of African-Americans) is not what God has in mind for the family of faith. And when it comes to speaking powerfully into the life of the church, God is at least as likely to speak through the poor as through the rich.
This leads James to a second, related idea, which is that breaking any part of God’s law amounts to breaking it all. We have a tendency to tell ourselves that our sins aren’t as serious as the sins of the ‘really bad people.’ But James says that even a tendency like showing favoritism among followers of Jesus is a sin in God’s eyes, just as murder and adultery are sins.
It would be missing the point to say, well, taking a pen from the counter at the bank isn’t as serious as mass murder. Of course, that’s correct. But the larger point is that we followers of Jesus are called to recognize that placing greater value on one person than another violates God’s law of love, and so represents a sin against them and against the God in whose image they were made.
There are no doubt many people of comfortable means who are deeply committed followers of Jesus. But a consistent thread of the New Testament is that wealth is not so much evil as dangerous. That’s true of individuals who come to love it too much, and also of churches that allow it to distort their theology and the relationships within the body. James wants us to see that sometimes the poor, who are unencumbered by the need to hold onto material wealth, can see God’s will with a purity of vision that we who are comfortable might miss.
That’s why it’s so important for all followers of Jesus to guard our hearts and minds against any trace of favoritism, whether it might be racial, economic, gender-based or other.
Let’s pray. Lord, guard us against the mistake of thinking that the wealthy and the well-to-do are especially favored in your eyes, and of shaping the ministries of the church in ways that are appealing to them. Remind us that you have always shown a great love for those who are in need, and that in Jesus, you have called on your people to give generously to help them. And let us never forget that many of the wisest voices in the church have come from among the poor. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
(The other readings for today are Psalms 132 and 133; I Kings 8:65-9:9; and Mark 14:66-72. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.com, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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