Martin Luther famously dismissed the letter of James as a right strawy epistle. Against the background of a corrupt church which in the late middle ages would allow you to buy your way out of purgatory Luther insisted that we are saved by faith and not by works, still less by indulgences. What will matter when we stand before God is not the catalogue of our good deeds, but whether we have put our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. James asserts, in this morning’s reading, by reference to Abraham, that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.’ Our reading concluded with the words: just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.’ James even goes so far as to pose the question: Can faith save you? It was the mother’s faith that triggered the healing of the little girl in our gospel reading. And Luther knew that faith had saved him, when years of disciplined monastic devotion had left him dissatisfied, indeed depressed. As a result of his own experience of a faith that saved him and years of good works that had no such effect on his life, Luther relegated James to the very end of his translation of the New Testament into German, after the book of Revelation.
Luther based his position on Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the emphasis is not so much on the good works that flow from faith, as on the primacy of faith itself. Good works were required under Jewish law. But if salvation depended on keeping the law, we were all doomed. Attempting to live by the law could lead only to failure and judgment, so the blessing promised to Abraham had to depend not on what he did, but rather on his faith in God’s promise to him. As he reflected on Paul’s teaching, Luther came to understand that salvation was not something to be attained by devotion and hard work; the faith which opened the door to salvation was the free gift of God. Luther had been struggling for years to live up to the high standards of behaviour and moral discipline which he regarded as his Christian duty. His failure drained him of all joy and left him deeply depressed.
I tried as hard as I could to keep the Rule. I used to be contrite, and make a list of
my sins. I confessed them again and again. I scrupulously carried out the penances
which were allotted to me. And yet my conscience kept nagging me: You fell short
there. You were not sorry enough. You left that sin off your list. He fewlt himself
tempted to believe that he was a castaway, that he could never be redeemed. God
loved everyone but him. (Chadwick, The Reformation, p 45)
Directed by the Vicar-general of his order to study St Paul, it dawned on him rather gradually, over several years, particularly as he studied Paul’s letter to the Romans, that what really mattered was not so much his performance as his faith in God’s redeeming love. At last he was relieved of his heavy burden of guilt and failure. A century later we see an echo of this in John Bunyan’s pilgrim as he feels his burden slipping from him at the foot of the cross. 200 years later it was Luther’s inspirational commentary on Romans that similarly transformed John Wesley’s life, when years of holy disciplines and unsuccessful missionary enterprise had left him utterly depressed by his own failure. If there is anyone here this morning who has been struggling for years to do what is right, only to be rewarded with a persistent sense of inadequacy and failure, then Luther’s message, which is also Paul’s message and Wesley’s message, is for you too. Relax, God is not frowning at your sins and failures, he is holding out his arms for you, he loves you, he has loved you enough to die for you, so put your hand in his, yield to his embrace, let his love flow into your heart and soul, and just be thankful.
Seen from that point of view, what James has to say about faith without works being dead hits us like a cold shower. It does sound as if James is contradicting what Paul says about the primacy of faith, trying to take us back into the cul-de-sac of joyless discipline from which Luther and so many others have had to be rescued. But in fact what James is saying is a complementary truth. Paul never says it doesn’t matter what we do of course it does. By faith we receive the Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit dwelling within us bears fruit in lives of joyful devoted service. Good works are the natural consequence of a lively faith. But it’s no good putting the cart of good works before the horse of faith. What James is saying to us is this: if our cart is stuck in the mud, there is something seriously wrong. Paul would not dissent, but he would start by looking to see what had happened to the horse of faith. Have we been so busy trying to haul the cart ourselves that we haven’t even thought about the horse? Or have we neglected the poor horse so badly that it has died on us? These are serious questions. We don’t need to be unduly introspective about it, but we do need to ask ourselves from time to time what we are doing with our lives, both individually and as a community. If the answer seems to be not much’, we should remember that the remedy probably doesn’t lie in trying harder, but in going back to the springs of our faith, and seeking refreshment and renewal there.
James reminds us that it’s not enough simply to accept, as an intellectual proposition, that God exists. Even the demons in hell know that. Our faith needs to go a step further than that. Our faith needs to be engaged in a relationship of absolute trust and commitment with Jesus our Lord. Abraham and Rahab did not have the advantage we have. They did not know Jesus they had to put their trust in a God whom neither they nor anyone else had seen but because they were able to do that, they had the courage to do what was right, even when – in Rahab’s case – it was dangerous, or in Abraham’s case downright incomprehensible. James wants to test the reality of our faith by asking what difference it has made to our lives. Fair enough we should ask ourselves the same searching questions. But Paul comes at it from the opposite direction, pointing instead to the source of any good that we may do in the faith which changes us, strengthens us, inspires us to do the will of the Lord whom we trust and serve.
There is just one more thing I want to say about the link between faith and action. Mark wants us to see that the healing power which flowed through Jesus was a clear sign that he was the Messiah, the one who would proclaim and usher in the age of gold to which the Jewish scriptures look forward. Our reading from Isaiah was one such passage. The rare Greek word which Mark uses to describe the deaf man’s impediment occurs only once in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures with which Mark would have been familiar. And that one occurrence is in precisely those Messianic verses that we read from Isaiah. There can be little doubt that Mark’s choice of the same rare word was absolutely deliberate. People might not recognise Jesus as Messiah, he himself discouraged any such speculation, but it was plain enough to those whose faith had opened their eyes. And it was the woman’s faith that unlocked the use of his power to heal and restore.
Mark, who calls us to the same faith as the Syro-Phoenician woman showed, wants us to see and believe that because the resurrected Jesus remains alive, we too can call by faith on the power of his Spirit, to heal and restore not only our own broken lives but the damaged lives of others, and even, before it’s too late, our damaged environment. Now that’s an enormous programme of work, and it won’t happen unless it is grounded in an active outward-looking faith. Can faith save you, James asks. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it can, if by faith we mean that trust in Jesus our Lord which allows his power to be released to heal and restore the world that He has made. So my final point is this. It’s not our good works we have to look for, nor do we need to despair of our own failures and inadequacies. Like the woman from Syro-Phoenicia, we put our trust in the gracious work of Jesus our Lord, for which, sometimes, we may turn out to be the channel.