Brothers

I’m going to ask you to send your minds back in time just a little bit, back to the heady days of 2006, which , my goodness, was more than a decade ago.  Don’t time just fly?  But back in those days, we had a little something called the DaVinci code that came out, that seemed poised to blow the lid off of the entire Christian tradition.  And what was the shocking revelation that the DaVinci code, er, revealed?  Simply that Jesus had married a lovely lady, had fathered children, and that those children continued on to be royalty in France, and are still alive today.  Oh, and mickey mouse watches, those too.

I’m bringing this up because of the bizarre fetishization of the bloodline of Jesus leads people to some strange conclusions.  That is, people would happily look for a surviving member of the bloodline of Christ, of his family in the world today, for….. some reason? I don’t really know.  Even if Jesus, the Christ, were to have reproduced, which he did not, what would that child tell you? What would they reveal to you that you would want to know over and above what Christ has already revealed.  Or, I suppose a better question to ask is if you desperately want to listen to a member of the family of our Lord, would you listen to what they said?

This is a great question because our Lord’s relative has spoken.  And perhaps predictably, you will find that people loathe the message that our Lord’s brother brings forth.  You may think that Jesus is a bit of a cuddly kitten, and you’d be wrong, but you may think it.  But there is no way that you can hold that to James.  James the Just, James, the lion of the early church, the figure who looms so large that even Luther himself struggled with his words.  All sorts of people love the words of Jesus, but few love the words of James, who pushes, who pulls, who desires to see the people of God live lives worthy of the calling, the mantle to which they have been called.  And this is a big job, it’s an enormous job, and it’s a job which weighs heavily on even the most relaxed Christian.  The words of James cause you to tremble.  They do this because they expect a lot of you as an individual Christian, probably more than you’re interested in providing. 

As children we tend to think of ourselves as being relatively easy not even to forgive, but to condone, and those are two different things. That is, if you are looking to your activities to be justified instead of forgiven, well, that’s just the way most of us would want things. Most of us want and crave the Lord our God to condone what we do, and to look kindly upon us with a smile, saying to us ‘you are the chosen people, because you’re you.’  Well, that’s really not how it works. 

When James calls us brothers and sisters, he’s being very serious, and because it’s him saying these words, they mean more than they would coming from any other apostle, any other disciple.  It’s not as though Peter calling you a brother or a sister would mean quite this much, and James means it more than just a term of endearment – rather, James is being literal.  You are literally in the family of Jesus Christ.  You are literally one of his siblings.  You have been adopted into God’s family.  The New Testament is laced through with that kind of conversation, the language of us being in the family of God. We are supposed to call him Father according to Jesus, who refers to him as our father not just in the famous prayer, but also talks about him as our father numerous other times.  And the language of the scriptures becomes a language of family, extended family.  Not just the family that you were born into, but the family that you have been adopted into.  

But there’s a problem with this, and the problem will help you to understand what’s up with the book of James.  Ready?  Have you ever heard this refrain from children: “why can’t you be more like Bobby’s mom? She serves us ice cream for dinner and lets us stay up as late as we want!” Sure, that old chestnut.  And that old chestnut comes to grips with the problem we have with love, especially serious love.  Why was it that your parents didn’t let you do that? Why was it that they served you fish, liver and fish livers all the time instead of kraft dinner and hot dogs? Surely if they loved you, they’d serve you tasty treats all the time.  They don’t though; instead they serve you junk like cauliflower, broccoli, and fish liver.  Now, when you leave the nest, and get out to your own place, you realize that you can’t actually get away with eating nothing but kraft dinner long term.  You can’t genuinely get a hold of those kinds of groceries and keep a go of it.  And so the perception of your parents as people who were just out there to kill you buzz, well, you tend to reassess when you realize that they were doing what they were doing not because they wanted to be mean, but instead because they actually love you . And a parent, a family that love you aren’t just going to give into every single whim that you have.  That’s not what real love looks like.

This gets reinforced not only through the book of James, but numerous other points in the scripture as well.  That is, if you read through the New Testament, Jesus reframes the relationship that we have with God as one in which we’re not talking about Abraham as our father, we’re talking about God as our Father.  Oh, sure, Abraham is the father of the faith, and that’s fine, but God is our literal, adoptive father.  He’s the one that takes us into his family, and adopts us as children, and heirs.  And if we’re going to be in his family, you have to understand that he’s going to care how we turn out.  People have the opposite idea about God and our relationship with him, which is too bad because he frames it distinctly in a parent / child motif.  He tells you straight up that his relationship with you is equivalent in every way to that of a Father to a child.  And the thing about your parents is that the more they love you, the less they’re going to let you get away with

If there are children that aren’t yours, whether they’re well behaved or skunks, it doesn’t really matter that much, mainly because you’re not going to see them again, and they aren’t your responsibility.  It doesn’t really matter too much if other people’s children are bad news, as long as they don’t hurt your kids and essentially stay out of the way, then they’re sort of fine, and you’re not worried too much.   But if it’s your children, all of a sudden you care desperately if they’re doing their math homework or not, if they’re riding a two wheeler, if they can read, who their friends are, and how much newly legalized plant matter they’re consuming.  This is a huge issue, and it makes perfect sense as long as you consider it in exactly this way – that when James calls us brothers, we are literal adopted brothers of Jesus Christ. We share the same father, and he cares a lot.

The story of the entire Bible is a story that tells us that proximity to the divine isn’t an easy thing, to be close to God, close to Jesus, imbued with the Holy Spirit, that’s a daunting issue.  It isn’t a sort of ‘Jesus and I are best buds’ kind of thing, it’s close, intimate contact with the divine, with the whirlwind and thunder and the creative force behind the universe.  It’s close contact with the one who requires perfection just as he is perfect, and that’s a big deal.  This is essentially what makes books like the book of James, the book that the brother of our Lord put together so difficult for us to deal with and read, which is that this book in particular has standards, James tells you a lot of things that you’re supposed to care about.  James will tell you all about how hearing the word and doing what it says are different, sometimes miles apart.  He will tell you all about impartiality, all about how faith without works is dead.  He tells you to tame your tongue, and warns against worldliness, and in all these things and all these issues, the standards are incredibly high, as befits a perfect family. 

And here’s where things get absolutely interesting.  Think about your own family for a moment, and how you joined it.  Did you get to join once you were good enough, once you had earned their trust? Did you get to join your family once you had kept to their standards for long enough, or once you had toed their line often enough? Or, more likely, were you born or adopted into your family, and then the expectations were leveled.  That doesn’t mean that if you do get the family standards wrong that you’ll be kicked out, far from it.  Instead, the story of James doesn’t tell you how you join the family, rather it tells you how you are expected to behave now that you are in the family. The reason the book of James is so taxing is because it talks about the standards that the family of God has, and those standards are desperately, impossibly high. 

And this is where you need to think about your own family again.  The closer you are to your own family, to your own children, the higher your standards are going to be.  You’re going to expect much from them, much more than you’re going to expect from the neighbor kids. But you’ll also forgive more from your children than you would from the neighbor kids too.  If they’re your children, you will put up with a lot, because it’s your family, and you care what happens, even if they’re not keeping up with your standards at the moment. This is super important, given that this unlocks the lock of the book of James.  By the time James is writing, you’re already being addressed as brothers, you’re already in the family. There is much that is expected of you, but as members of the family, there is much that will be forgiven, too.  And this letter doesn’t tell you how you get into the family, but it does let you know how you stay.  You are able to stay because someone fulfilled all these incredibly high standards for you.