NOTES for Jam 1:7

There are many Christians in the world who are more or less sincerely convinced that God acts only in the Church and addresses only them, Christians. It is hard to say when such a conviction appeared in the church environment. It has existed as long as Christianity itself.

The source of this confidence is connected with the perception of Christianity as a new religion given by God in order to renew the world through those who become its adherents. Then everything is logical: if God created a new, uniquely true religion, then all other religions are by definition untrue. God is not there and cannot be there. He is only in Christianity, though at this stage in our time people usually point not to Christianity but to some concrete Christian denomination to which the speaker belongs. All the rest are outside God, outside the Kingdom, and outside salvation.

Meanwhile Christianity was neither conceived nor created by its Founder as a new religion. It was founded as a new life, life in that Kingdom which the Savior brought into the world. And He Himself never said that His activity and the circle of His communion would be limited only to His followers, that He would never go beyond the boundaries of His Church.

Of course, those who have already entered the Church do not need to seek a meeting with Him by some other means. In His Church there is everything necessary and sufficient for full communion with Him. But there are other people in the world who have not yet entered the Church, and may never enter it, at least during their earthly life. There can be many reasons for this, and it is not for us to judge them. It is important for us only to remember that Christianity is precisely a new life. The life of the Kingdom. Life in fullness and without boundaries.

A life that objectively cannot be limited by any earthly framework. Nor by any heavenly framework either: from the beginning God wants no one to perish and wants every sinner to turn and be saved. The coming of Christ is not a religious event, and not even only a spiritual event in the human sense. It is an event of universal, cosmic scale. His coming, like the appearance of the Kingdom in the world, objectively and quite really changed everything and touched all and each.

The breath of the Kingdom blows in the world, touching everyone who sincerely seeks the truth. This means that God's hand can now reach absolutely everyone. Of course, this was possible for God before as well, in pre-Christian times. But now He has the opportunity to work with each person in an environment that spiritually corresponds completely to the character of His work. And everything good that a person has in his life comes from one source. There is no other: God is one, the Messiah is one, and the Kingdom also is one.

The word ‘patience’, so important in today's words of the apostle James, is one of the most important concepts in the apostolic Epistles as a whole. In the Epistle to the Romans alone—a key text for the apostle Paul's theology—it occurs no fewer than eight times in a relatively short work. This count includes both God's long-suffering and human patience. Let us recall these wonderful words: and not only this, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces patience, patience proven character, and proven character hope; and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom 5:4). The apostle James says today: let patience have its perfect work, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. In fact, the only reason we have to be patient is that we lack one perfection or another. We must bear with our own imperfection. This is what it is important to understand. And the Lord bears with our imperfection… And who knows whose patience is harder to exercise? Besides, we also bear with the imperfections of the people around us. And any modern psychologist will say that the only factor making a marriage stable is the ability of at least one of the two partners to be patient. Finally, even folk wisdom says: God bore with things and told us to do the same. This word is also of the utmost importance in ascetic literature.

But how can we be patient like that? They are saints; they were placed in exceptional historical circumstances; moreover, they were crowned with glory… Yes, but even in our everyday lives we must remember this patience of theirs, so as to understand how sinful our complaints about life are. Remember that our God is ‘the God of patience and consolation’ Rom 15:5).

In his epistle, James recalls one of the key concepts of the Yahwist and, later, Jewish tradition: wisdom. Its meaning and content changed over time, but one thing remained constant: among Semitic peoples in general and the Jews in particular, wisdom was never associated solely with theory, abstract thought, or abstract knowledge. Wisdom was always seen as something practical, more a skill or ability than theoretical knowledge. After the Babylonian exile, in the Second Temple period, what was meant above all was the skill of righteousness, the practice of spiritual life.

This may seem strange: how can we speak of a skill of righteousness if righteousness is not a human achievement at all, but God's gift? Yet the apostle clearly formulates one of the fundamental requirements of righteous living: a person's inner wholeness. The double-minded person is not firmly established on the path—“A person whose thoughts are divided is unsteady in all their ways”—this is James' central idea. Indeed, from the biblical authors' perspective, the soul is the stream of life given to us by God, which we direct and manage as we see fit. We dwell in it, and it dwells in us.

But we can live fully only when this stream flows in a single channel, without splitting into rivulets constantly threatening to run dry. What our life will be like depends on our spiritual condition, on how undivided our will is. It is in this context that James speaks of steadfastness (“patience”), acquired through trials (“temptations”). Faith is above all trust in God; it presupposes that our life is centered on God's presence, without which no communion with God is possible.

For communion with God to be truly uninterrupted, however, our will must be rooted in it, rather than being “tossed about” by every outside influence. This focusing of the will on the Presence develops as a practical skill through the trials a person undergoes, which distract them from what matters most. If, however, a person uses these trials to strengthen the skill of focusing their attention on God, the trials make them wise—in the sense of that practical wisdom which is the skill of communion with God, opening the path of righteousness to them.

James addresses the twelve tribes in the dispersion. This designation has from ancient times referred to the Jewish people, but should we understand that James is addressing only Christians from among the Jews? Since the content of the letter concerns all Christians, by the twelve tribes we are entitled to understand the brothers who make up the Church, the people of God of the New Covenant.

The call to rejoice in temptations initially makes a strange impression. One can, of course, find a reason for joy in the fact that if the powers of darkness attack you, this means that you do not belong to them. But such awareness can lead to self-satisfaction, then to self-deception and proud self-exaltation, and that is itself a satanic trap.

So it is not temptations themselves that we should rejoice in, but the fact that the Lord gives us strength to cope with them, to stand firm against enticements. We should not fear them and lose our heads out of fear, but we should recognize them in time and be ready to receive help from above.

Today’s reading from the Epistle of the Apostle James is devoted almost entirely to what our proper attitude toward temptation should be. Of course, there is nothing good in such experiences; moreover, a person often emerges from situations of temptation drained, battered, and wounded, even if not defeated. Yet the Apostle considers it important to draw attention to the need to endure temptations with patience. The need to withstand powerful attacks of evil coming from different directions and disguised as good, and the steadfastness and firmness this demands, enable us to gain clarity of vision and mind—and consequently clarity of faith. It is precisely this clarity that makes it possible to overcome doubt when we greatly desire to yield to evil but understand clearly that nothing good will come of it. We usually excuse ourselves by saying that the temptation is too strong and we cannot resist it. In doing so, we forget that only the one who resisted to the very end can know the full force of evil’s attack: not the one who fell to the ground at the first gust of wind, but the one who remained standing through the storm. We are obliged to stand to the end, because the first One who stood firm died on the Cross for our life.