4 What causes fights and
quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet
but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have
because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask
with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that
friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who
chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture
says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to
dwell in us? 6 But
he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God
opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.”
but shows favor to the humble.”
7 Submit yourselves, then,
to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you.
Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
9 Grieve, mourn and
wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before
the Lord, and he will lift you up.
There’s a funny story about our
oldest child playing with other kids in faculty housing at Westmont College.
Our son, Jeremie, was running through the neighborhood in a game of “cops and
robbers” with other kids when the game was paused and everyone was switching
roles (the once cops were now robbers, etc.). When Jeremie was told that he was
now supposed to be a robber, one of our friends heard him exclaim: “What about
the morally ambiguous person?” Well, James doesn’t seem interested in the
morally ambiguous peson and his concerns are hardly cute. No, they’re Rated R.
He says,
1. The bad guys are us!:
Zealousness the sequel, vss. 1-4
James
4:1-10 might be the most searing part of James’ letter.
The language and
accusations are direct. To make it more poignant, he switches from third person
pronouns to second person pronouns. He continues to hammer away at teachers and
a church whose hateful speech and pride, particularly when using the God’s
Word, foment hatred, division, discord, and now, death.
His
question is rhetorical in vs. 1 but not hypothetical. Bad things are happening,
he acknowledges. Right off the bat, a pressing question has to do with what
James means by “conflicts and disputes.” Now the most common meaning for NIV’s
translation “conflicts,” for example, is outright war or battle (Matt. 24:6;
Luke 14:31; 1 Cor. 14:8; Heb. 11:34; Rev. 9:7, 9). The desire that these people
have, James says, is to acquire their desires through zealous violence and
“wrong motives”: “so you commit murder.” Many commentators think it unthinkable
that Christians could murder. They choose, rather, to believe that such
language is metaphorical. History, however, reminds us otherwise – Crusades,
witch-hunts, brutal oppression and slavery, even lynchings – these happened
among Christians by Christians. Religious violence, anchored as it was in both
the Old Testament and ancient societies, was more common than most of us care
to admit. Take the Apostle Paul, as an example, who himself was willing to kill
for the sake of God: Acts 8:3; 9:1-2, 21; 22:4, 19; 26:10-11; Gal. 1:23. Other Christian
sources, written at the same time of James, attest to this as well, e.g. the Didache,
a Christian document also written in the first century, states in 3:2, “Do not
become angry for anger leads to murder” and “Do not be zealous or quarrelsome
or hot-tempered, for all these things breed murder.” This is why, while clunky,
it perhaps is a better translation to have vs. 1 read: “warring and swording”
or less clunky would be “attacks and violence.”
While
I believe that the teachings of Jesus are decidedly non-violent, it is
nonetheless true that Christians can be. For James, what is the cause? Vs. 2
says cravings/desires and zeloute - zealousness. That’s the
word we talked about last week. And as we saw last week, such zealousness is
often connected to obedience of God and the scriptures, which, when misdirected
by dispositions of hatred, refusal to listen or love our neighbor, can lead to
murderous attacks on others. As the next verses will show, these leaders were
praying. Yet, zeal, ambition, cravings, and selfish desires ruled their hearts
and prevented them from receiving the very things they needed: humility and
grace. An example of such graceless zeal is the image of Santiago Matamoros, Saint
James the Killer of Muslims, which found its way in shrines throughout Spain
after the Reconquista. It’s hard to imagine Jesus approving of this.
So
many Christians worry about the state of truth, God in public life, external
forces (whether real or imagined) that wish to hinder, hamper or harm the
gospel. James, however, has a different worry. He’s not worried about the
gospel, the Bible, or God. Why would God need defending anyway? No, what
worries James are Christians who aren’t aware or worried about their own violence,
their own zealousness and pride, their own warring both personally and
publicly.
He worries about Christians who refuse to be wise. He worries about
their “friendship with the world” in vs. 4. Now, here’s where it gets
interesting.
One
of the most oft-cited verses of my childhood was from vs. 4 “friendship with
the world means enmity with God” and, I was told, both explicitly and
implicitly, that fleeing such friendship with the world was a simple moral
calculus: “Don’t cuss, don’t drink, don’t chew. Don’t go around with girls that
do.” Forego Rated R movies, avoid the very appearance of sexual impropriety,
and hate secular things, like music, government, etc. But that’s not what James
is saying. Avoiding “friendship with the world” is not about hating the world
(that doesn’t make sense of the gospel at all, remember John 3:16). It’s about refusing
to buy into a system that the gospel seeks to overthrow – the belief that by my
own desires and designs, using violence, I can bring about what’s good or
right. When James warns the church against friendship with the world he’s
warning them not to believe that they can bring about what they want and what God
wants if they just have a bigger stick or harsher word, in service of the
truth.
2. Put your hands down (and out)
or How to receive a gift, vss. 5-6
Humans yearn with
jealousy/zealousness/pride/cravings
God gives (more) grace
God opposes the proud
But gives grace to the humble.
Why
does God oppose the proud and give grace to the humble? Have we been tricked?
Is grace only undeserved and free in the telemarketing sense of the word, where
“free” becomes a gimmick to get us to spend all that we have. A few points
deserve mention.
·
Grace
appears before the commands of vss. 7-10 and is “more than” our own human
frailty and jealous spirit.
·
We’ve
already heard James discuss that wisdom, grace and humility aren’t earned but gifts
that “come from above” to be received.
·
And
that requires that we surrender and submit to God, which he reminds once again
in vs. 7 of our passage. To surrender and submit is to open our arms and
unclench our fists.
·
So
when it says that God “opposes” the proud, I tend to read that theologically as
suggesting that pride and grace cannot occupy the same space. He’s not saying
that God hates the proud or refuses to love them. No, Jesus died for sinners,
including the prideful and God is always a willing gift-giver, particularly
with grace. But the craving to control our lives and the pride that we are
somehow in control means that our hands our often full with worry, anger,
bitterness and fear, making us incapable of receiving God’s free gift.
·
Perhaps
an analogy will help. We approach God like this (arms clutched around
ourselves) or
like this (dukes up). And God says, “I want to give you a gift”
but if I refuse to open my hands what can God do? I am incapable of receiving
what is free I must open my hands or put down my dukes and I must do that
again, and again, and again.
3. Don’t cry pretty, vss. 7-10
There
are 10 commands in the final three verses: submit, resist, draw near, cleanse,
purify, lament, mourn, weep, let laughter be turned, and humble. Four are sad
things: grieve, mourn, wail, change laughter to mourning. The largest grouping
of these imperatives have to do with lament. The antidote to pride, James says,
is a bit of sadness, to weep at the state of our world, but more importantly at
the state of our own soul.
Humility
is not so much a command, it seems to me, but the culmination of a life of
surrender and the ability to confess sadness. It is the ability to state
honestly where we’re at. It’s the ability to admit – we’re human. One of the
most painful experiences I’ve witnessed as a pastor was a funeral for a beloved
faculty member at Westmont. It was all triumphalism. The tears were
getting wiped away before anyone had a chance to weep. There was no chance to
engage with the fundamental reality that it’s a fallen world and people get
sick and die, hurt each other, refuse to love, engage in hate —and that it
hurts. The beginning
and ending imperative are the summation of what we’re after. Not to look good
but to submit to God. Not to work harder but become humble and we cry because
we can’t.
Upper
middle-class, white churches aren’t criers. I’m always
amazed, however, at the
underlying pain that fills this place, that simmers under the service, because
we refuse to weep at our sin, our frailty, our brokenness. Maybe you can’t cry.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you but simply tell you two things in
closing. First, if you can’t cry, you will not grow. You will not be capable of
receiving the grace that God is ready to give. Second, if you can’t cry. Don’t
fake it. Tend to the painful stories of others. Sit with the aching hurt of
others – pick one person to listen to and love on without trying to fix it.
Stop trying to make yourself look pretty. Stop trying to put on a brave face and
listen to this: On the night when he was betrayed . . .
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