Thursday of the 32nd Week

James 4:7-5:9

Brethren, submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbour? Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. 

Mark 11:27-33

At that time, Jesus came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him, and they said to him, “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?” Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me.” And they discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven’, he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But shall we say, ‘From man’?”—they were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet. So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

The priests and scribes asks Christ with which authority He had cast the money changers out of the Temple, wishing to trick Him. For had He pointed to His own authority, they could accuse Him before the authorities as a rebel. As King Solomon says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes” (Prov. 26:5). Christ therefore answers their question with a question, asking them about the baptism of John. Either they had to reject John, and therefore God whom the people knew had sent him, or accept John together with Jesus whom He preached. Instead of repenting of their pernicious accusations, they simply said We do not know. Christ does not reply “Nor do I know what to tell you,” but I will not tell you, not wishing to entertain their wicked intentions, this time showing us the meaning of Solomon’s other exhortation, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself” (Prov. 26:4). That is, we should not engage with evil on its own terms. Resist the devil, says St. James, and he will flee from you, just as the priests and scribes did.

This story from the Gospel is not just an example of the Lord shaming His opponents with a clever answer, but an occasion for us to ask ourselves by whose authority we live our lives? Even for us who consider ourselves Christians, the answer to that question is all too often “ourselves,” even if it is subconscious. While Christ acted as God because He was God, we act as if we are God on account of our prideful delusion. We judge our brothers, although there is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. We speak about our future plans as if we had authority over life and death, and yet we could not exist for a single second but for the will of God. St. James therefore tells us to preface any talk of the future with the phrase If the Lord wills. If you travel to the Middle East even today, you’re unlikely to hear anyone even say something as simple as “I finish work at 5 tomorrow” without adding “God willing”, a habit we would do well to imitate. Likewise, we store up riches for ourselves, forgetting that we are powerless to prevent the decay, corrosion and death that inevitably follows; as if we will never hear the words, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Lk. 12:20).

Submit yourselves therefore to God. We should submit to God, simply because to do anything else is to lie to ourselves. However, we submit, not to a tyrant, but to a loving Father who draws near to us when we draw near to Him. We are told to be wretched and mourn and weep and that our laughter should be turned to mourning and our joy to gloom. While this can sound very harsh to our ears, these things are a necessary part of the process of repentance. When we realise that we have wronged someone we deeply love, we cannot help but feel disappointment, sadness, and bitter regret. Likewise, when we draw near to God and see our own sinfulness, we cannot help but mourn. The Fathers tell us that these tears of repentance are like a second baptism, which washes away our sins: Cleanse your hands…and purify your hearts. We then read, Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. Although humbling ourselves can be a painful process, we will be exalted – not falsely, as the proud person exalts himself – but truly, in God. It is the false laughter, the false joy we feel when we take pleasure in the things of the world that we are called to put aside. But when we draw close to God through humility, we will find a joy that is infinitely greater.

Whatever we do in life, we must ask ourselves By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them? and never let the answer be anything but Christ.

This is the last reading from the Epistle of St. James, and there is so much more that could be said about it. Just a few minutes ago, I was sent a link to what appears to be a very good commentary on the Epistle, verse by verse with numerous references to the Holy Fathers, which is well worth a read for those who wish to have a more thorough understanding of it:

The Epistle of St. James: A Patristic Commentary