The Punchy Epistle – James (i) Starters: Abraham and Rahab
This is not a scholarly look at the Epistle of James. It’s not an investigation into authorship, manuscripts, historicity, debates over canonicity, or a re-hash of Luther’s famous dislike of its contents.
What I have in mind is a four-course meal, or more accurately, a three-course meal, with two starters.
Whenever we read the NT or OT scriptures it’s worth bearing in mind the following verse from Hebrews:
‘…the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith…’ 4v2
The scholarly approach to scripture is vital. We need literary and linguistic experts to build upon our knowledge of the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic languages to enhance the accuracy of bible translations to give the correct meaning of the text. But none of that will ‘profit’ the scholar unless he or she has faith to believe the translated word.
James may have been one of Jesus’s brothers; we don’t know. What we may safely assume is that he was Jewish and was writing to Jewish believers. He refers to Abraham as ‘our father’ 2v21 and states that his intended audience was the ‘twelve tribes scattered abroad’ 1v1. We know from Acts that Jewish Christians were hounded and persecuted by Saul/Paul and others, and ‘scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria’ Acts 8v1 and that the persecution extended as far as Damascus and then pursued Paul and others around the Jewish diaspora from Jerusalem to Rome.
The author, evidently, was steeped in the scriptures - what we call the Old Testament.
Our 3-course meal comes from the OT. James refers to Abraham and Rahab - our two starters; Job as our main; Elijah as our dessert.
Starters: Abraham and Rahab
We seem to be past masters at consigning just about everything into separate categories.
From an early age, it is by learning the differences between objects and feelings, that we make sense of the world. The Sun and the Moon. An ant and a giraffe. And so on. Then it becomes more subtle: the yoke and the white of the egg, and the shell. Distinct yet not truly separate. What James is describing here is a deeper connection between two words, faith and works, and arguing against the false notion that they belong to different categories.
James is contradicting someone who has mentally separated ‘faith’ from ‘works’.
What is faith? James doesn’t offer us a dictionary definition; he illustrates his answer with Abraham, the patriarch, then Rahab, the prostitute.
God spoke to Abraham on two occasions about two different events. The first occasion was a call to leave his father’s house and go into a land that God would show him. Secondly, that he and Sarah would have a son, despite their respective ages; Abraham was 100 and Sarah, 90.
His faith in God’s word to leave his father’s house led him to get up and start walking. Then we have the birth of Isaac. The bible does not teach us that this was due to an ‘immaculate conception’. The implications are clear enough.
Rahab was a prostitute who took in Joshua’s spies. She believed two things. Firstly, that her salvation and the salvation of her family would not be secured by the wisdom of the city elders, who had decided to close the gates to the city and wait out the coming storm of the invading Israelis. She saw that her salvation lay with the ‘enemy’, with Israel. Her faith led her to hide Joshua’s two spies and then escape with Joshua’s help.
Again, her faith and her actions, or ‘works’, as James puts it, were inseparable, or as he concludes, ‘faith by itself if it does not have works, is dead’ and ‘as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also’.
The Punch
Final point. Everything I have written up to this point may satisfy us intellectually, but James doesn’t let us off the hook.
‘If a brother is naked or destitute of daily food and you say ‘depart in peace, be warmed, and filled’ but do not give them what they need, what good is that!’
This echoes John’s statement: ‘whoever has this world’s good but sees his brother in need and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word…but in deed and in truth’.
If we truly have faith, our lives will be a demonstration of that faith. Neither Abraham nor Rahab was perfect. Abraham tried to do God’s will and produce the promised son via Sarah’s maid, Hagar, and Ishmael was born. The bible is disarmingly honest. None of its heroes get it right all the time, with the exception of Jesus.
We don’t know the circumstances that led Rahab into prostitution, but what we do know is that God delivered her not only from Jericho but into a new life, free of prostitution, in Israel, and she became the great-great-grandmother of David.