NOTES for Jam 5:17
Recalling Elijah's prayer in connection with confessing sins to one another, James points to the simple but often forgotten fact that God not only hears a person, but also comes to meet him, in the case, of course, when the two wills, God's and the human person's, coincide. Outwardly this looks like a miracle, but in fact what must be spoken of here is divine-human co-creation, without which neither the world nor human life is conceivable.
The Bible, after all, is not accidentally unfamiliar with such a concept, so widespread everywhere in antiquity, as fate, doom, or destiny: God's will and fatalism are incompatible; where one exists, there is no place for the other. It would seem that there is a reality external to the person, often partly or completely beyond his power, yet in practice reality is not so simple. Indeed, today even scientists are increasingly inclined to think that any existing reality can exist only as observed reality.
Without an observer it ceases to exist. Such a view requires postulating an absolute Observer for the existence of the universe, and here before us is yet another version of the cosmological proof of God's existence. What matters, however, is that the human person is also an observer, creating his own reality, which is real to the extent that the being of the person creating it is spiritually full. Only God can create absolute reality; any other reality will by definition be relative. But what will happen if two wills, God's and the human person's, begin to create a single reality?
In such a reality everything possible to God will open to the person and include the person with his freedom insofar as such inclusion is possible for him. The person finds himself in a world of miracles, a world of higher reality that is created by God, but in whose creation his human will also participates, through, for example, the very same prayer. Within the framework and context of such a reality, called the Kingdom of God, Christ acts, and there also every one of His followers is called to act, if he is a Christian not only in name.