“I’ll Show You My Faith” (James 2:18): Inspiring Models for Exilic Life

Life in the Diaspora

If, to a significant degree, our identity is shaped by the narratives we tell, then it behooves us to reflect initially on the narrative James has given us. ³ James’s letter identifies four milestones, or identity-shaping markers, along the path:

Creation → Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ → Present, Exilic Life → New Creation

Our author refers to creation in roundabout but important ways—ways aimed at fashioning his audience’s patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving. He speaks of “the Father of lights” (1:17, my translation), a phrase that the Common English Bible helpfully translates as “the creator of heavenly lights”:

Don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father, the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. He chose to give us birth by his true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created. (1:16–18)

It is possible to read the entirety of this section, 1:13–18, as James’s theological ruminations on Genesis 1–3 as he works to capture something of God’s gracious character. God does not tempt. God’s gifts are good. God does not vacillate between giving good things or bad. God is not capricious. Rather, the creation accounts bear witness to God’s magnanimity. God provides “every good gift, every perfect gift” (1:17) “without a second thought, without keeping score” (1:5). James’s interest in creation extends to his reflections on humanity, too. For example, in his speech ethics, he reports, sadly, that we use our tongues to “bless the Lord and Father and curse human beings made in God’s likeness” (3:9). Using the rare word homoiōsis (“likeness”), James’s criticism reminds us of Gen 1:26–27: God made humanity “according to our image and likeness (homoiōsis)” (LXX, my translation). He thus grounds the privileged status of human beings in their Godlikeness; accordingly, to defame the one is to defame the other. Finally, in a text to which we will return shortly, James ties Elijah and his audience together through a reference to their common humanity: “a human being equal in nature” (anthrōpos . . . homoiopathēs hēmin). ⁴ Creation orients ethical comportment and spiritual practice.

If creation is the first identity marker, new creation is the last, and its counterpart. Like cosmology, eschatology shapes how we conceptualize this world and live in it. Two of the most direct references to the end parallel each other:

Those who stand firm during testing are blessed. They are tried and true. They will receive the life God has promised to those who love him as their reward. (1:12)

Hasn’t God chosen those who are poor by worldly standards to be rich in terms of faith? Hasn’t God chosen the poor as heirs of the kingdom he has promised to those who love him? (2:5)

James’s eschatological vision is furthered in a later reference to divine judgment:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, you must be patient as you wait for the coming of the Lord …. You also must wait patiently, strengthening your resolve, because the coming of the Lord is near. Don’t complain about each other, brothers and sisters, so that you won’t be judged. Look! The judge is standing at the door! (5:7–9)

The Lord’s “coming” (parousia) signals divine judgment (cf. 4:12). These references to the end time do not serve anyone’s curiosity about an eschatological timetable. Instead, they should set aside any inclination towards violence, whether in word or deed, or human efforts to balance the scales of justice. The God known for gracious openhandedness is also the God who will set things right, whether now or in the eschaton. Forgetting this, humans too easily set themselves up as gods who harass or punish others or parade among others as if they were the solution to the world’s concerns. James thus frames his narrative with this two-pronged affirmation about humanity: we are like God, but we are not God.

The centerpiece of James’s narrative turns on the third identity-shaping marker, namely, Jesus’s mission and message. As has long been recognized, the cloth of James’s letter is interwoven with Jesus’s instruction, ⁵ which he uses to write the lives of his audience into Jesus’s way of life: Jesus’s grasp of God’s purpose and the conceptual and behavioral patterns authorized by Jesus. Moreover, albeit implicitly, James identifies Jesus’s significance in his claim that “[God] chose to give us birth by his true word” (1:18) and the injunction to “welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you” (1:21). This is as close as we find in this letter to a reference to God’s good gift of new birth, by which humans are set on a new course, on which they put cravings aside and find themselves able to do God’s word and, then, qualify for an eschatological reward. “The very word that is able to save you”—is this not the good news of Jesus Christ?

More explicit are those two texts that refer to Jesus. Both identify him as Lord and Christ (1:1; 2:1), the second filling this description out with reference to his “faithfulness” and his having “been resurrected in glory.” The Common English Bible translation presumes that the Lord’s “glory” is a consequence of God’s exaltation of Jesus by raising him from the dead, on the basis of which Jesus shares in God’s glory. Even the more prosaic reading represented by Today’s New International Version or the New Revised Standard Version (“our glorious Lord Jesus Christ”) pairs Jesus’s glory and impartiality, so that the glory he shares with God is centered in his embrace of those whom God esteems—not those of high status, wealth, and acclaim, but the needy and humble. In short, James’s appeals to faithful ethical comportment find their exemplar and engine in his christological affirmations.

We come, finally, to what is truly central to the life-narrative James relates: present, exilic life. It is not too much to say that his theological reflections on creation and the eschaton, together with his use of the Jesus-tradition, are concerned above all to serve his agenda of pressing his audience toward faithful life in the context of their present situation. He interprets this setting-in-life by borrowing a metaphor from Israel’s own story. They may represent the liberated, restored people of God, but they are exiles awaiting restoration: “From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion: Greetings!” (1:1, my translation). Note how his letter characterizes present existence: “various tests” (1:2), “the testing of your faith” (1:3), “poor” (1:9), “testing” (1:12), “difficulties” (1:27), worldly contamination (1:27), “conflicts” and “disputes” (4:1), victims of deceitful behavior (5:4), condemnation and murder (5:6), a life of wandering (5:19). These descriptors may remind us of the rhetoric of exile and forced migration, past and present. James recognizes these threatening experiences, these occasions for violence, while at the same time interpreting them—painting them, as it were, into a grand mural that extends from creation to new creation, and that features prominently the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he paints into the mural the figures of Abraham, Rahab, Elijah, and Job. Like these people of Israel’s past, James’s audience find themselves as a journeying, not-at-home people, confronted with the unremitting threat of assimilation and defection—and so, loss of identity (cf. 5:19-20: “if any of you wander from the truth”). They must not only hear but also do the word, recognizing, on the one hand, that their patterns of life run counter to the world in which they live and, on the other hand, that these patterns mark the way of faithfulness marked out for them by Jesus and modeled for them by their forebears—sensibilities and practices that outfit them for eschatological reward.

Abraham, God’s Friend, and Rahab the Prostitute (2:21–25)

The first major section of James’s letter, 1:2–27, orients his audience to the sensibilities and practices comprising faithful, diasporic life. James then pulls back the curtain on evil-minded, law-breaking sensibilities and practices that parade as favoritism to the elite of this world. He contrasts this favoritism with faithful patterns of life inspired by Jesus’s own example, that tack toward God’s choice of the poor, and that embody Scripture’s “royal law”: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2:1–13, citing Lev 19:18). James follows his critique of favoritism toward the elite with four exhibits. The first is the comical, but dreadful example of alleged Jesus-followers who pronounce well-being, shalom, over a brother or sister whom they send away hungry and naked (2:14–17). This first case ends with the proverbial claim, “Faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity” (2:17). The second is a scathing contrast between demons, whose confession of the Shema (“God is one”) leads to their trembling with fear, and those alleged Jesus-followers whose confession of the Shema leads nowhere (2:18–20). This second case ends with a proverbial claim phrased as a question: “Do you need to be shown that faith without actions has no value at all?” (2:20). Yes, apparently, James’s audience does need proof of this axiom—and this is precisely what James sets out to provide with his third and fourth cases: Abraham and Rahab. The consequence of James’s argument is that he pushes his audience to identify at a visceral level with Abraham and Rahab. This is because of the way his examples have already begun to recruit negative and positive associations (or feelings) that encourage (or bias one toward) one form of response over another. ⁶ If the alternative to the way of Abraham and Rahab is the dreadful disconnect between word and deed on display among those sanctimonious Jesus-followers in 2:14–17, what choice is there, really? If we must pick between Rahab and Abraham, on the one hand, or keeping company with the diabolic (2:18–20), on the other, what choice do we have, really?

James pairs Abraham and Rahab through his introduction of the adverb homoiōs (“in the same way,” 2:25). Rahab and Abraham demonstrate, both in the same way, “that a person is shown to be righteous through faithful actions and not through faith alone” (2:24). Of these two cases, the relevance to this letter of James’s reference to Rahab may be the easier to understand. Within her world, Rahab’s social rank would have been at best ambivalent (cf. Josh 2:1; 6:17, 25; Matt 21:31; Luke 15:30; Heb 11:31), this in spite of the likelihood that she was forced into a life of trading sexual pleasures for money as one of the few options available to her as a single woman challenged with economic calamity. According to Joshua, Rahab’s house occupied space on the outer wall of the city (Josh 2:15)—her physical location, then, a metaphor of her place on the fringe of her world. In short, as a prostitute, her life situation would have been strongly correlated with poverty and oppression. ⁷ In terms of status, then, Rahab is not so far removed from the poor to whom James addresses his letter, from those whose identity as Jesus-followers would have shoved them to the periphery of honorable society. Significantly, then, Rahab demonstrates precisely the behavior to which James has just called his audience: receiving God’s people as if they were one’s own family, even provisioning them when they depart. Is this not the very extension of openhanded hospitality James has just counseled? Though socio-religiously an outsider—a woman in a man’s world, a prostitute, oppressed, impoverished—she exemplifies “the royal law” found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2:8; italics original); she speaks and acts as someone who shows mercy (2:12–13). James thus reflects wider emphases found in early Jewish and Christian interpretations of Rahab, namely, that she “represents the least, last, and lost among us all, whose newly found devotion bears witness to the hospitable God who seeks and finds the outsider to save.” ⁸

We have reflected on Rahab first in part because her example illuminates James’s comments on Abraham. James has written that Rahab’s faithfulness is like Abraham’s, but the opposite can be said, too. Abraham is like Rahab. At one level, of course, this is nonsense. Abraham, we might say, is Rahab’s opposite: a male, wealthy, a person of the highest acclaim. Their stories intersect tellingly on two points, however: they were both shown to be righteous (or reckoned as righteous) by their actions, and they were both celebrated in Jewish tradition on account of their hospitality. ⁹ Although James does not overtly refer to Abraham’s hospitable practices, he does invite reflection on them. First, he refers to Abraham as God’s friend, this in a sociocultural context in which friendship would be correlated with economic sharing and hospitality—that is, just the sort of behavior James has outlined in this second chapter. If friendship with God is constituted through faithfulness to God, faithfulness to God here entails acts of mercy to those in need. ¹⁰ This emphasis is furthered, secondly, by James’s odd reference to Abraham’s “actions” (or “works,” erga, 2:21–22)—odd because James has mentioned only one such action, the binding of Isaac. The binding of Isaac may be the summation of Abraham’s faithfulness, but it is not the whole of it; in Jewish tradition Abraham’s reputation is expanded with reference to his hospitality. ¹¹ Third, James couples his reflections on Abraham with Rahab’s exemplary hospitality.

Just as hospitable practice is implicit in the case of Abraham, so in the case of Rahab faith is implicit. James speaks plainly only of her behaviors, but her faith is a necessary implicature of his argument. That is, her hospitable practices signify embodied faith. Elsewhere, James writes, “Can a fig tree produce olives? Can a grapevine produce figs?” (3:11). His metaphor field is organic, not mechanical, and this helps make sense of the case he wants to make concerning faith and practice. In a mechanical metaphor, we might picture “practice” as an add-on to “faith.” Bolt it on here. Screw it down there. Weld it here. Grapes are not an add-on to grapevines, as though the work of the viticulturist is to affix grapes to the vine. Grapevines simply generate grapes and fig trees figs. Even those who cannot pick a grape leaf out of a lineup or tell a gnarly olive tree from a mesquite know what they are by their fruit. Organic metaphors conjure no images of hierarchical systems or divisible parts but invoke images of integration, interrelation, and interdependence. Practices do not occupy a space outside the system but are themselves part and parcel of the system. Analogously, faithful practices reveal faith and faith is known through its faithful practices. James inseparably binds “is” and “does” together, calling the “is” into question only when it wants to exclude the “does.” “As the lifeless body is dead, so faith without actions is dead,” James concludes (2:26).

It is easy enough to see James’s coupling of Abraham and Rahab as an example of his interest in pairing male and female; earlier, he referred to “a brother or sister” (adelphos ē adelphē, 2:15), thus displaying a systemic rejection of characterizing God’s family in terms of Roman masculinity. Similarly, Abraham and Rahab exemplify the top and bottom rungs of the ladder of prestige, so that their corresponding roles as exemplars of faithfulness undermine discriminatory attitudes and practices that accord privilege to those with gold rings and posh apparel at the expense of the needy who show up in filthy rags (2:2). James may well have been interested in other connections, too. Is not James concerned with how these brothers and sisters respond to the tests of exilic life (1:2–4)? It would be difficult to imagine a more demanding test than the one Abraham faced: “Take your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him up as an entirely burned offering there on one of the mountains that I will show you” (Gen 22:2). In his exposition of James’s letter, Bede the Venerable emphasized the severity of Abraham’s test: “For what greater temptation, except for those which concern injuries to one’s own body, can happen than that someone, an old man, should be compelled to slay his only and most beloved son?” ¹² Accordingly, would Abraham not provide Exhibit One of the nature of faithful response to tests of which James writes in the opening of his letter: “My brothers and sisters, think of the various tests you encounter as occasions for joy. After all, you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let this endurance complete its work so that you may be fully mature, complete, and lacking in nothing” (1:2–4)? Moreover, Genesis identifies Abraham as the consummate exile. Addressing the Hittites, he observes, “I am an immigrant and a temporary resident with you” (paroikos kai parepidēmos, Gen 23:4; see Gen 15:13; Acts 7:6). In other words, although Abraham’s elite status and reputation might seem to put him out of reach as an model of faithfulness to James’s audience, it turns out that Abraham is a stranger, a refugee, like them; and he is tested, like them. As such, his faith-in-action, his allegiance, can serve as a surprisingly down-to-earth exemplar of diasporic faithfulness to these pilgrims.

The Endurance of Job (5:11)

The Authorized Version of James’s reference to Job has done us no favors, exegetically or pastorally. With its steady translation of James’s variegated vocabulary with the English term patience, ¹³ the Authorized Version apparently attributes to Job what the book of Job does not, patience (!). Regrettably, this has led to counsel that those mired in troubling, traumatic circumstances should respond passively, accepting their dire circumstances with quiet acquiescence.

As a whole, the canonical book of Job does not present Job as a model of virtuous calm in the midst of suffering, and this has led some to find a background for James’s portrayal not so much in the canonical text as in the Testament of Job. In this later book, Job gathers his children at the end of his life in order to reflect on his life, counsel his heirs, and settle his affairs. Along the way, he recounts a conversation between himself and “a very bright light,” God’s messenger who reveals to Job that his battle against idolatry will attract Satan’s ire: “He will bring you many plagues, he will take away for himself your goods, he will carry off your children. But if you are patient, I will make your name renowned in all generations of the earth till the consummation of the age” (T. Job 4:5–6). He later counsels his children, “You also must be patient in everything that happens to you. For patience is better than anything” (27:7). ¹⁴ The storyteller of the Testament of Job sounds like the model of patience to whom James refers. And it is possible that James was aware of the tradition represented by the Testament of Job. In fact, however, James’s presentation of Job makes good sense of canonical Job—once we recognize that James’s term hypomonē is closer to our English endurance (or even persistence) than to the passive, silent waiting connoted by the modern use of patience. ¹⁵ Luke uses different terminology, but we are well advised to find in his account of the widow seeking justice, repeatedly taking her case to the judge (Luke 18:1–8), an example of faithfulness that tracks well with the response of persistence or endurance to which James refers.

James names Job at the end of the textual unit that began in 5:7. The wealthy have just been castigated on account of their failure to align their lives with God’s agenda and their treatment of the poor (4:13–5:6). Our author now turns from the wealthy to address his audience (“brothers and sisters”)—that is, those on the receiving end of systematic oppression. How should they respond when they are trampled underfoot by the wealthy? James counsels patience (5:7a), uses an agrarian image to fill out the meaning of patience (5:7b), reiterates the directive to respond with patience (5:8a), includes mounting courage or resolve in his definition of patience (5:8b), ¹⁶ and points to the future coming of the Lord as the chief motivation for present patience (5:8c). Patience apparently includes continuing work in preparation for the harvest as well as deep-seated protest in the face of abuse, even while waiting for God to bring change and vindication. The opposite of patience, he seems to say, is complaining against other Jesus-followers, since this is tantamount to replacing God-as-Judge with oneself-as-judge (5:9; cf. 4:11–12). Finally, James provides two models of what he regards as the appropriate response to suffering: prophets, who exemplify “patient resolve and steadfastness” (5:10), and Job (5:11).

The nature of the response James advises is grounded in affirmations concerning God, God’s justice, and the grand mural of God’s purposeful activity. Note the conceptual parallels:

We might summarize by referring to the teleology James has set up: suffering → endurance/persistence → restoration/vindication. The patience of which James speaks, then, is future oriented and grounded in particular affirmations about the Lord: the Lord will come. The Lord’s justice is imminent. The Lord is compassionate and merciful. So let the Lord be the Lord, rather than (through directing vicious words against each other) usurping the Lord’s role as the one who rights wrongs. Like the prophets, continue to serve the Lord. Like Job, reject wicked speech and the words and ways of accusers, and cry out to God (cf. Job 27).

To borrow a concept from literary theory, James here engages in backshadowing. ¹⁷ That is, as a means of sculpting the patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving James promotes, God’s future casts its shadow back on the present. Images of God’s future thus provide a glimpse of God’s aims, disclose in the present what is of ultimate consequence, and lay claims on present life. In this sense, God’s good ends point the way forward and draw us into them, shaping the character of faithful response in the present. In the background, we may hear Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Plain: “Happy are you when people hate you, reject you, insult you, and condemn your name as evil because of the Human One. Rejoice when that happens! Leap for joy because you have a great reward in heaven. Their ancestors did the same things to the prophets” (Luke 6:22–23). Or, closer to home, we may hear James’s opening directive: “My brothers and sisters, think of the various tests you encounter as occasions for joy. After all, you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let this endurance complete its work so that you may be fully mature, complete, and lacking in nothing” (Jas 1:2–4).

As it turns out, then, the canonical story of Job—reflection on which James triggers by referring to Job’s endurance and “what the Lord has accomplished”—reverberates with words from the Jesus-tradition about suffering and joy, and models the response to exilic trials that James urges. Job, we might say, serves as a role model. Even more, we can see how Job’s story might prompt empathy and attraction, even identification with Job among the Jesus-followers to whom James addresses his letter. This is both because his struggles are like theirs and because the compassionate, merciful Lord was obviously at work in Job’s circumstances, bringing about a good end.

Elijah, a Person Just Like Us (5:17)

Elijah appears near the closing of James’s letter, in a section concerned with faithful speaking (5:12–20): speaking plainly (5:12), praying with conviction (5:13–18), and recovering those who wander (5:19–20). Elijah is introduced as a model person of prayer, a “righteous person” whose prayers are “powerful” in their effect. “When he earnestly prayed that it wouldn’t rain, no rain fell for three and a half years. He prayed again, God sent rain, and the earth produced its fruit” (5:17–18).

According to 1 Kings, Elijah was clearly remembered as someone who prayed with conviction and whose prayers were effective. This is evident in the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath (1 Kgs 17:8–24), in which he prays for Yahweh to restore the widow’s son to life and “the Lord listened to Elijah’s voice and gave the boy his life back” (17:20–22); and in the story of the contest with Baal’s prophets (ch. 18), in which he prays for God to reveal “that you, Lord, are the real God” (18:37), after which “the Lord’s fire fell” and “all the people saw this and fell on their faces,” exclaiming, “The Lord is the real God!” (18:36–39). Given these powerful occasions of prayer it is all the more fascinating that 1 Kings has it that Yahweh chose to allow rainfall in the third year of the drought quite apart from any mention of Elijah’s prayerful request that Yahweh might send rain (18:1). This detail underscores the reality that the withholding and sending of rain is Yahweh’s doing (cf. Amos 4:7) and is not the outworking of some sort of extraordinary power on Elijah’s part. This accent on praying for God to act also recalls James’s earlier claim that God responds to prayer with openhandedness; God’s “very nature is to give to everyone without a second thought, without keeping score” (1:5).

Of the stories that might be told of Elijah, why this interest in drought and rainfall? The immediate context concerns prayer for the sick (5:12–16), but this follows immediately on James’s advice that those who suffer ought to pray (5:11). And only a few sentences earlier, James imagines farmers who wait patiently for rainfall as an analogue to the patience of those who suffer in anticipation of the Lord’s coming to bring justice. That is, among the choices from the biblical tradition from which James might draw, he selects this one about prayer for God to bring drought (judgment) and rain (life), thus adding to the bridge he is constructing from his audience’s experiences to Elijah’s.

Even so, the primary building blocks for this bridge come from James’s introduction of Elijah as “a person just like us.” Clearly, effectual prayer is not dependent on the prodigious nature of the one doing the praying. Concerns with human status are irrelevant. If Elijah can pray earnestly, so can everyone else. God is not moved by games of favoritism. Indeed, our author bypasses those stories and traditions that depict Elijah’s extraordinary deeds, drawing attention instead to the Elijah possessed of life-struggles common to all human beings: “subject to suffering as we are because of the frailty of both mind and body,” Bede observes. “For he showed that he was frail in body by asking for food from the widow of Zarapheth; he made it clear that he was also subject to suffering in mind when, after he had restored water to the earth and killed the prophets and priests of idols, he fled to the desert.” ¹⁸ He is a mere mortal, “just like us.”

Of course, the opposite case could be made, too. If Elijah is “just like us,” then it follows that we are like him. From this vantage point, emphasis might fall less on Elijah’s frailties and more on his capacities as God’s servant—and, therefore, on the capacities we share with him. Either way, though, the emphasis falls on God’s (not human) performance, and concerns with status and belonging (up, down, in, out) are rendered immaterial. Recalling the creation story, the human family is privileged as bearers of God’s image, with no one more privileged than the next.

James deploys Elijah as a means of encouragement to his audience, to be sure, but also encourages imitation of Elijah. This is not easy, given the biblical traditions of Elijah’s exploits and his elevated status. Empathy, attraction, and identification in this case must be manufactured, and this is exactly what James accomplishes in his introductory character reference: “Elijah was a person just like us.”

Conclusion

James’s letter imagines an audience scattered among the nations. They live in a time of exile, and this is the setting within which they must carve out faithful patterns of faith and practice. Joining them in James’s mural of God and God’s people are Abraham, Rahab, Job, and Ezekiel. They appear as heroes of faithfulness, to be sure, but James goes to great length to mollify their hero status by writing them into the lives of his readers and auditors. This is because James wants to present these four figures as people with whom his audience might identify, whom they might regard with empathy. These four people exemplify hospitality, earnest prayer, and faith in the midst of trial. Male and female, rich and poor, they are bound together by a common humanity that draws its inspiration from a portrait of the beneficent God who sets things right.