And I Will Show You The Faith That Underlies My Works

If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

-James 1:26-27

Martin Luther called the Epistle of James an 'epistle of straw.' It happens to be one of my favorite epistles, because it strikes at the heart the Christian life as it is lived here and now. It is all well and good to talk of faith and saving grace, and to express the deep sentimental shift within, as if there was a tectonic drift in your heart. But what good is that, really, in the Christian life? Was Jesus primarily preoccupied with sentiments of grace? No, Jesus had not faith, but absolute certainty (he was God, after all), and from that point he led a life of both words and deeds. People came looking for him on account of the many wonders he worked, but when he spoke, they were all spellbound. But he was not concerned with idle talk or righteousness contests, and argued about theological matters only when they were an imposition on his works.

Now certainly none of us are Christ, and all fall short of his glory (Rom. 3:23). We will never have the certainty that he did, for as humans the greatest movement to make is one of faith, which presupposes objective uncertainty by definition. But if we as Christians are called to imitate Christ, what good is it to spend tremendous effort 'debunking' other theologies and proving why we are right, while putting little to no effort into helping the downtrodden and the suffering? Indeed, a few verses before the quoted passage from James, it says "A man who listens to God's word but does not put it into practice is like a man who looks into a mirror at the face he was born with: he looks at himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looks like" (1:23-24). How often do we look at our brothers and sisters, seeing in them the same Image of God in which we ourselves were made, and then go away and promptly forget that Image in them? How often do we neglect to take care of our neighbors in their distress? Are we so quick to forget that what we refuse to do for the least of us, we refuse to do for God himself?

Jesus spent his time healing and listening to those less fortunate than we. As Christianity is a call to imitation and thus to action, we have less need of vain talk than of action, here and now. The moment we believe we've got it right and are complacent in our pride and assurance, we lose sight of the mission, which must be from within ourselves, and from there move outward to others. We need to bridle our tongues from self-righteous speech, and act for those in need.