NOTES for Jam 3:1-18

The words of the catholic Epistle of the Apostle James, that the same spring cannot pour forth both salt water and fresh, are unfortunately very convicting. The apostle says that if, while claiming to know the truth, you harbor bitter envy and contentiousness in your heart, then you are a liar. “Do not boast and lie against the truth,” says the apostle. The boasting in question is precisely the claim to the name of Christian made by a contentious person.

The Apostle James explains in detail what characterizes a person who lives by true divine wisdom. He says that this wisdom is pure, which means it is not directed toward one’s own exaltation. Heavenly wisdom is peaceable: it seeks peace above all else. It is gentle and open to reason, because it values peace more than one’s own human sense of being right. Heavenly wisdom is full of mercy and good fruits, because it seeks to fulfil the will of Christ. It is free from divisions (“impartial” in the Synodal text) and without hypocrisy, because it acknowledges that the divine law is one and the same for everyone.

The apostle’s words in the concluding part of today’s passage, “Where do wars and quarrels among you come from?” can be applied equally to individual Christians and to the large “divisions” of the Christian people. We display the contentiousness of which the Apostle James speaks when we grumble at Christians standing beside us and arrogantly lecture them, even though we ourselves are no different from them. And when we reproach others for dioceses opened on our territory (ours, not God’s), although we ourselves have plenty of dioceses in foreign lands, that is the same contentiousness. Alas.

In calling us to tame the tongue, the apostle James speaks of the fundamental human tendency to replace action with talk about it. In the preceding chapter the apostle writes that faith which does not find expression in a person’s actions and deeds is dead. In today’s text he continues this thought, saying that we easily mistake the desire to teach other people how to live for faith. In the Church of the apostolic age, teachers were Christians who explained the essence of the faith and the foundations of moral life to those preparing for baptism and to all members of the Church. In saying, “...not many of you should become teachers,” the apostle calls us first of all to take responsibility for practical witness, which finds honor and approval with the invisible God rather than with human beings. Like the apostle Paul, the apostle James regards instruction here as a special form of ministry to which not all Christians are called. This is its fundamental difference from living according to Christ’s commandments.

The ministry of teacher in the earliest Christian Church was above all a ministry of the word. The teacher, or rabbi, in the church community took on the careful study of the Torah and the teaching of the Torah to others, primarily on the practical level. Of course, this practical teaching in the Church took place in the context of Christian interpretations of the Torah. And here the spiritual condition of the teacher himself became foundational. The ministry of a teacher-rabbi, like no other, easily and quickly exposed the gap between knowledge and even understanding of fundamental things connected with the Torah and with spiritual life in general, on the one hand, and awareness of those same things, on the other.

To learn and even understand what, for example, the inner Torah is, is much easier than becoming aware of its presence in one's own life and changing that life accordingly. Awareness presupposes inner changes in a person corresponding to what he knows theoretically. Then a person's whole life changes, not only his views and worldview.

The criterion of inner change is precisely speech. Here James is not original; he is merely reminding his readers of what should have been well known to them from the very popular collections of aphorisms of that time, included in the books we today call wisdom books. It is enough, for example, to open the Book of Proverbs to find there a whole series of aphorisms describing how a wise person guards his mouth and bridles his tongue, in contrast to a fool, who does not know how to do this. James merely reminds them of these obvious enough things. Indeed, for nothing of this sort to "slip out" from the tongue, a person must change seriously inwardly. The changes must touch his psyche so deeply that even the subconscious ceases to live a life of its own. Knowledge and understanding alone are not enough here; what is needed is that very awareness. And if it is absent, then it is better not to become a teacher, because the gap between knowledge and awareness is an extremely dangerous thing, spiritually destructive. And sometimes not only spiritually.

According to the apostle James, the tongue "grows" straight out of the heart. It "takes out" of the heart everything stored there, and by this either sanctifies or defiles everything around it. And this is so usual for us: to use one and the same mechanism of speech for prayer and cursing, for declaring love and for deceit. In this way we reveal to ourselves and to everyone around us our double-mindedness, our inner filth. James rebukes us: this ought not to be so. At the same time, he also says that none of us can tame his own tongue by himself. What, then, does he offer us? This: "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you" (James 4:10). We must humbly let Him into our hearts, and then our filth will be cleaned out from there, and only blessing will come from our mouths.

It seems that an intelligent person can be either evil or good—what connection is there between intelligence and moral and ethical categories? But the Apostle James distinguishes wisdom from above from demonic wisdom. And the first sign of demonic "wisdom" is envy and quarrelsomeness... Painful as it is to admit, these are the hardest things to free ourselves from. We have become far too accustomed to expressing all our grievances to everyone around us in the clearest possible terms—in short, to making scenes and grumbling at every opportunity. And it seems to us that this will help: if I just explain to this idiot that he is an idiot, the world will become a better place... But the wisdom that comes down from above, from God, teaches meekness. A truly wise person knows how to remain silent when necessary and, when possible, to correct the person who has gone astray with meekness and love.

The Letter of James contains many such deep sayings and aphorisms that need to be pondered. "The fruit... is sown": that is, it speaks about the very beginning of the action of righteousness, about the conditions in which righteousness can begin to act. "Righteousness" here also carries the senses of "justice," "truth," and "rightness." How natural it is for us, as human beings, to struggle, even to fight, in order to prove that we are right, to achieve what we consider justice. And here Scripture restrains us: righteousness acts only through those who keep peace.

Peace is not simply the absence of war, hatred, or fighting; peace is a very positive state of thoughts, feelings, and relationships that find harmony and balance by relying on the constant and unchanging love of God.

At the end of the third chapter of his General Epistle, the apostle James speaks about the difference between human and divine wisdom. In this case the issue is wisdom in the ancient sense of the word: following the way of life, the right choice of path. Several decades after the apostle James, the Didache, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, would formulate the general biblical idea of wisdom, accepted by Christians as well, in these words: "There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and the difference between the two is great." For the apostle James, wisdom first of all makes it possible to choose the way of life. The apostle says that such wisdom is given only by God; the rest he calls earthly, merely natural, and demonic wisdom, distinguishing, as the Didache does, only two ways.

Divine wisdom, given to people, according to the apostle's word, bears in a person's life good fruit, which he calls the fruit of righteousness. The apostle uses this term after the Lord Jesus Christ, who more than once spoke about the fruits borne in our life by the seed sown by God. This fruit of righteousness, "truth" in the Synodal translation, is in essence a synonym for eternal life, because it implies freedom from sin, unity with God, and therefore freedom from death.

The apostle James gives his addressees the most practical possible instructions about how the fruit of righteousness, the good fruit of life, is attained. He devotes a significant part of the whole Epistle to this, but his thought is expressed most briefly in these words: "And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." Here we encounter a certain feature of the Synodal translation. The Greek text of the Epistle literally says that "the fruit of righteousness is sown peacefully among those who make peace." The issue, therefore, is more than preserving peace in one's own heart. The apostle speaks of building peace within ourselves and, of course, around ourselves: the whole third chapter is devoted to this. Building peace, the ministry of reconciliation, is the chief thing that leads a person to life. All other ways the apostle calls demonic.