James 2:1-9

The Royal Law

Jam 2:1-9

We do not know what is meant by a man having on "a gold ring." The translators have Englished this matter down to simplicity. The persons referred to had not on "a" gold ring, they had as many rings on each finger as the finger would carry. That is a very different statement; that, however, is the historical fact; the hands were all jewelled, hardly any portion of the hand could be seen. We do not know what is meant by a man having "long hair" in this country, or in Western civilisation; when it is rebuked in the New Testament it is a very different thing from anything we have ever seen, unless we have travelled in Eastern countries. It is precisely the same with this matter of the gold ring, which in its singularity is perfectly justifiable, and may be very beautiful. We are to understand, however, by the gold ring of the text, foolish, extravagant, ostentatious luxuriousness. We do not know what is meant by "goodly apparel"; the word is better rendered lower down, "gay clothing." The reference is to people who were very fond of high colours, and who covered themselves with great glaring, staring, dazzling, blinding garments; no matter how the colours lay in relation to one another, provided there was plenty of colour, a man was satisfied. Now, says James, if a mountebank like that came into the church, the church would not be good enough for him. Some think the reference here is to great pagan authorities, coming to pay an occasional visit to the Christian synagogue, which, by the way, is the literal translation of the word "assembly" in the second verse, the only instance in which the term synagogue is associated with the Christian function in the New Testament, Some have thought that now and again a great Roman might look in, some huge and pompous local celebrity might deign to look in, to see how the Christians conducted themselves in worship; and James gave warning that the presence of such a person in the church may very likely excite undue attention, and elicit a deference which was neither rational nor pious. This, however, may not be the case; the reference may be to Christian classes, the one rich and the other poor, but all the classes being included within Christian or ecclesiastical lines: if so, the warning was all the more poignant and the danger all the more acute. Do not compare one man with another. It is not a question of stature against stature, and jewellery against jewellery: remember, says James, whose servants you are; you are the servants of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory; if you lose sight of your Master, you will be making all kinds of mistakes about one another. He whose eye is filled with Christ never sees what kind of coat a man has on: it is the poor fool who has forgotten Christ that begins to look at the people with whom he has to associate. If we could see all the heaven that this poor little capacity can take in, we should see no pomp in palaces or in thrones. Caesar would attract none of our attention because we have been with the King of kings, with the Lord of lords; and this is precisely the Apostle's argument: you are the servants of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, the centre of all law, the focus of all magnificence and splendour: what have you to do with the coat of the self-idolator, with the jewellery of a man who clothes himself in shining stones of earth? or why should you be intimidated by any little majesty of a local and transient kind? or why should you be turned away as if through revulsion from the poorest human creature that sleeps without a pillow? No, James would rather say, If ye had in you the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, ye would say that this poor man more closely resembles the Son of God in his earthly relations than any other man. That would be Christian reasoning.

How difficult it is to keep the world in its right place! The great man would not allow the poor black negro to sit in his pew. He was argued with on the ground of philanthropy, but philanthropy had no effect upon his nature; he was argued with on the ground of advancing civilisation, things were now much larger and nobler than they used to be; he was argued with on the ground of the personal piety of the negro, he was represented as reverent, as really Christian in feeling and spiritual in aspiration; but all this was lost on the self-idolator: when, however, the self-idolator was told that the negro was worth a million dollars, he said, Introduce me, if you please. How difficult it is to keep the devil in his right place, and to keep the world within its right limits, and to keep ourselves really honest men. We shall get over all this little tawdry devotion by-and-by; our hope is in education, our hope is also partially in familiarity, so that people, becoming accustomed to these little lights or superficial glories, will in due time learn to value them at their right price, or to despise them all. What does it matter how much luggage a man carries through to the grave? Yet we admire the man who has a great deal of baggage. It is a kind of hotel standard: the landlord seeing the luggage carried upstairs is quite sure that his bill will be paid, or that luggage will never leave the roof until it is discharged. We are luggage-worshippers. All these fields of yours are but so much luggage; the rows of houses are but so much baggage; they but amount to such and such a quantity of impedimenta , that is all; they do not make you any better or any richer in heart, any wider in mind, any kinder or more Christian in soul. The question is, What are you, yourself? When you have lost your luggage, how stand ye? men, or not men? calm, noble, richer than ever, or perturbed, disquieted, humiliated, thrown down, and altogether disorganised? You are in reality what you are in your soul.

James begins to reason with the people, as he may well reason with all the generations following "Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him." God does not take the view of the case which you adopt. God looks at men, not at circumstances; God looks at the soul, not at the body; God sees the jewels of the mind, the gleaming of intelligence, the uplifting of aspiration, the outstruggling of the soul towards liberty and light and rest. A man is not necessarily a bad man because he has a great income: a man is not necessarily a good man because he has no income at all, and because he is so crippled that he can never earn his own daily bread, but has to be a pauper all the days of his life. Incapacity and piety are not interchangeable terms. The real moral and spiritual argument you find below all these incidental aspects and transitory relationships. If a man is trusting in his riches he is a pauper; if a man is living honestly, he never can be other than really rich. Unless we have a clear understanding of these terms, we shall never get at the meaning at all. We must not look upon "rich" as equal to money, "poverty" equal to piety; nothing of the kind: the whole question of character still remains to be looked into and to be determined.

What is the charge of James against the people to whom he is writing? He states it frankly in Jam 2:6 But ye have despised the poor despised them, not because they were ignorant, perverse, foolish, worldly, or stupid, but ye have despised the poor because they are poor: if these very same men had been the recipients of ten thousand a year, then you would have quoted their names, and you would have said that your gardens adjoined one another, and that you were on hobnobbing terms with my Lord Ten-thousand-a-year. There would have been no change in the men, they have not been to school, they have not learned several more languages, they have not purified themselves of low desires; they have simply laid a great income upon their ignorance, and you look at the revenue and not at the superstition. Are ye not partial, and do ye not indulge evil thoughts? and is not your whole intellectual and social system thrown out of gear by these seductive temptations? Nor let the poor man imagine that he is despised when he is not. The poor man is apt to be sensitive; and sensitiveness is often stupidity, it is most offensive to everybody who has to do with the poor man, or with the rich man either, when any man claims to be too sensitive. I do not understand that a man is necessarily of a very high quality of character simply because his pockets are empty; I can quite understand men believing themselves despised when no feeling of contempt whatever exists in relation to them. Poverty may be honest, and honesty is always independent. Honesty can always walk in the middle of the road; it may not be able to ride in a chariot, but honesty knows the way home and takes it straightly, and is thankful that it can at all events fall back upon an unaccusing conscience. He is wealthy who wants little; he is a rich man whose necessities are few; and he is a poor man who, being a millionaire at the bank, wants the next field. Greed is never contented, cupidity is never satisfied, avariciousness lays down its head upon a pillow of thorns.

"Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats?" That was the case in the time of James, and has probably been the case in all generations. It is simply impossible for any poor man to get justice in England. He will get justice if he gets before the judges, but how to get there is the question. He is not strangled by the judges: the judges of England are to be spoken of in terms of veneration and religious gratitude; they do not care whether it is prince or peasant that stands before them, they will deal out justice according to the evidence that is submitted; we ought to be proud of the English bench; but the poor man cannot get to the bench, he cannot get through the bar; there are many gentlemen who take care that the poor man shall have a hard time of it, if he wants to lay his case before the court. Why not go and seek justice? you say to the poor man. He says, I cannot pay for it: I want it, I am dying because I cannot have my case clearly stated, but I have not the costs. Why not seek to be released from this burden? Because I cannot pay for the release. The judges will do you justice. Certainly, if I could see them they would, but I cannot get at them. Justice is too dear in this country. Justice is an article of commerce, and it is sold for gold in the sense in which I have just defined. Thank God, not in the higher sense. England has outlived that period of venality, and now the bench is spotless in its administration of justice. The rich man challenges the poor man to go to law, knowing very well that the poor man cannot follow in that pursuit. The great newspaper with its million pounds behind it, says, To the law! The poor man says, I would go to the law, but it would mean utter ruin to me before I could have my case fully laid before the proper tribunal. The Apostle's argument is this, that life uncontrolled by moral and spiritual considerations is oppressive, overbearing, dictatorial. Wealth, spelling itself with an infinite W, demands to have its own way, to sit where it pleases, and to order the rest of the world about as menial servants: that is vulgar wealth; that is the new riches; not the real wealth, accompanied by learning, self-control, piety, Christian reverence, love of Christ. Blessed be God, it is possible for a man to be very rich, and yet to be very good. It is a great danger; he lives on a volcano, he would seem to invite the enemy; yet history and our own observation concur in testifying that it is possible to be wealthy and to be modest; possible to be socially great, and socially kind; possible to have much of this world, and to counterbalance it by infinitely more of heaven: blessed are they who can thus exemplify such a possibility.

"Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by which ye are called?" Here the Apostle is evidently speaking of pagan rich people. To blaspheme means to hurt with the tongue, to prick, puncture, injure, poison with the tongue; to utter foul words, unjust words, hellish words. Do not these people hurt the Son of God with their unruly tongues? Are they not irreverent, are they not impious, are they not profane? Hear their language, it expresses a boastful spirit; if they were poor they would be close-mouthed, if they had nothing to eat you would never see their real character: wealth develops personality. A man who never suspected himself of being overbearing or tyrannical, will suddenly develop into an oppressor when he receives his wealth without a corresponding addition of moral quality, spiritual energy, and sense of dependence upon the living God.

"If ye fulfil the royal law according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well." A man is your neighbour, whatever his circumstances may be. If he be too rich to acknowledge you as a neighbour, you can do without him; if he be so poor that he will thank you for neighbourly offices, you need not make him feel his poverty by an injudicious bestowal of such offices. Neighbourliness is full of subtle quality, full of spiritual unction, and may be turned into a real blessing. A man is not your neighbour simply because he lives next door to you; he may live next door to you locally, and yet live many miles from you sympathetically: he is your neighbour who understands you, who trusts you, who comes to you in his hour of need, and who quietly and hopefully tells you that he would be thankful for a hand stronger than his own put out to assist him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. You will be imposed upon. I do not really care much for people who have never been imposed upon. They impose upon themselves. They seek to impose upon God, and they succeed. They eat bread to which they are not entitled; they drink water which they have practically stolen. Deceived! why, Jesus was once imposed upon by nine men all at once. There were ten men who came to him and told him what they wanted, and he granted their request; and no sooner did they get what they wanted, than off went nine, and they have never been heard of since. One man came back, and had the good sense to fall down and worship the Son of God. What, have the nine never been heard of since? how mistaken the suggestion, how absurd the proposition! Why, they are here, they are everywhere, we cannot get rid of them. We know them to be of the nine, although they never confess it. There lives no man in gospel lands who is not a debtor to Christ; there lives no man under the sun that is not a debtor to the Cross of Calvary.

How then, is all this difficulty to be handled? By not handling it at all. We get wrong when we become economists, managers, machine-minders. Whenever we turn Christianity into a machine or an organisation, we do it injury. Christianity is a spirit, it is a quality of the heart: if we have in us the obedient spirit, carrying out the law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," there need be no handling in an economic sense, there need be no showy patronage of the poor, as who should say, Look at me: here is a man with the poorest clothing on, and I will walk with him, as it were arm-in-arm, down the whole length of the church: behold me. That man is not kind to the poor; he does not understand the poor; he is not an ornament in the sanctuary, he is an ostentatious idiot. He only does Christ's will who so does it that he is not seen of men in the doing of it. How is the spirit? how is it with our hearts? Do we really love the Saviour? are we crucified with Christ? are we partakers of the miracle which he alone, as the priest of the universe, works out? If so, we shall do all things almost unconsciously. The garden never says, I am giving you great wafts of fragrance to-day, am I not kind? The garden never says a word about the odours which it throws upon the winds. If we be in Christ Jesus, rooted and grounded in him, sharers of his grace, guests at his table of sacrifice and priesthood, our life will emit its frankincense, our hands will distribute the myrrh of the gospel, and our whole action will be modest, beautiful, simple, beneficent. This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working.

Prayer

How shall we thank thee, thou God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for all thy loving kindness and thy tender mercy, when they are without measure or bound? Our poor song is strained, our praise is without effect, our thanksgiving fails for the infinite occasion: who shall praise thee adequately, or set forth thy glory in words that are enough? Behold, there is none who hath harp, or instrument of music, or voice, to praise the Lord with sufficiency of praise. Yet thou wilt accept our song, feeble though it be; thou knowest what our hearts would do if they could: sometimes we feel as if life were too small for us, as if it needed enlargement, because of our slumbering faculty, which, if awakened by the breath of the Lord, would need all space for the utterance of its song. Thou art verily good unto us. Every man has his own blessing, every home its own light, every life its own song. Thou hast left none unblessed; on every flower there is one trembling drop of dew. We accept all thy gifts as pledges of still greater bestowment: what shall we see when we receive our sight? what shall strike the vision of the soul when delivered from the limitations of the flesh? These are mysteries we may not penetrate, but they are so hallowed and tender and condescending that they lure us on an onward, heavenward course, and we are filled with delight because of the assurance that every cloud shall be transfigured into glory, and all things now difficult and bewildering shall be made part of the great harmony of thy movement. What we need is patience, the power to wait, the energy that can stand still, the resoluteness which can express itself in repose. But this is the gift of Christ; the world has no such treasure to bestow. Bless us with thy peace, thou Son of God, and we shall be quiet under all circumstances; yea, though the earth be removed and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, we shall linger with religious leisure by the stream which maketh glad the city of God. Amen.