Studies in the Epistle of James :: XII Perseverance and Prayer

XII Perseverance and Prayer

The purpose of James in writing his epistle comes out clearly in 5:7-20. He wishes to hearten the Jewish Christians in the midst of their trials as well as to make a protest against the oppressions to which they were subjected. “The storm of indignation is past, and from this point to the end of the Epistle St. James writes in tones of tenderness and affection” (Plummer). He has denounced the persecutors and now turns to the brethren who are under the heel of the money devil.

Patience till the Parousia (5:7 f.)

“Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.” Moffatt has it “till the arrival of the Lord.” The example of the righteous man, whether Christ or the typical righteous poor man, argues strongly for long-suffering (“long-tempered” like our “sweet-tempered,” “quick-tempered,” and the opposite of “short-tempered,” according to Mayor). In the Christian race one cannot afford to be short of wind. He has a long run and must hold out until the goal is reached (cf. Heb. 12:1-3).

One is reminded of the opening note of the Epistle of James (1:2-4), where he urged joy in the midst of varied trials. The wicked rich deserve all the fierce denunciation that James has just bestowed and all the penalty that God will inflict, but the suffering Christians must not engage in mere recrimination. James does not discourage protest against wrong or the effort to remove evil. But there is a residuum of suffering and pain in the cup of all of us. When all else is done, in the end of the day we must drink that cup. Let us do it with the spirit of soldiers who fall in the trenches at the post of duty. It is better to do it without flinching and without making a wry face. God is full of long-suffering toward us (Rom. 2:4; 1 Peter 3:20), and men have shown the same spirit (James 5:10; 2 Cor. 6:6). The patience in James 1:3 f. is just “remaining under,” but here the point is to do it and make no fuss about it, not to call attention to what one is suffering, to be a martyr without insisting on being recognized as one.

The early Christians were so eager for the second coming of the Lord Jesus that they were impatient for his return and some of them completely upset about it, although Jesus had emphasized the utter uncertainty of the time and had urged watchfulness and readiness. By a skilful turn (Plummer) James “makes the unconscious impatience of primitive Christianity a basis for his exhortation to conscious patience.”

Some of them no longer had a taste for the slow work of plowing, sowing, and reaping, forgetting what Jesus had said of the gradual growth of the kingdom of God from seed to harvest. So James, probably with the words of Jesus in mind, says, “Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth.” The farmer, tiller of the soil, has much to discourage him in the making and selling of his crops. The soil has to be kept up to its level of fertility and must be properly prepared. The seed must be of good quality and has to be sown at the proper season. The weeds will come, and the harvest is dependent on the sun and the rain. He cannot hasten the process. When he has done the most scientific farming, he can only wait in expectancy. Often, perhaps daily, the farmer watches the growth of the grain, “being patient over it,” bending over it as a fond father. He knows that he cannot hasten the season. The early rain made possible the sowing of the seed. The latter rain will make possible a harvest. Meanwhile, he can do nothing but wait “until it receive” the final touch from God’s hand. By force of circumstances the farmer has to exercise long-suffering toward his crop of wheat.

“Be ye also patient.” James applies his illustration with directness and power. “Ye also,” as well as the husbandman. He does it, for nature has taught him her secrets. “Ye” should do so, for Jesus has shown you the way. “Establish your hearts.” Peter is charged with just this task when he has turned (Luke 22:32). God strengthens us (1 Peter 5:10; 1 Thess. 3:13), but we must do our share. “For the coming of the Lord is at hand.”

The phrase “is at hand” is the one that John the Baptist used of the nearness of the kingdom of heaven which had come right upon them (Matt. 3:2). So Peter (1 Peter 4:7) says, “The end of all things is at hand.” Paul (Phil. 4:5) says, “The Lord is at hand.” There is no doubt that the early Christians hoped that Jesus would come back quickly and thus relieve them from the ills of an impossible social system (Rom. 13:11; 1 Thess. 4:15; 1 John 2:18). But they did not at all feel sure that Jesus was coming right away (1 Thess. 5:2; 2 Thess. 3:1 ff.; 2 Cor. 5:1-10; Phil. 1:21-23).

When 2 Peter was written, scoffers were already asking, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). The answer is given that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Back to their tasks they must go, back to the building up of the kingdom of God in the midst of a world of woe and sin, on with the conflict till Jesus comes, on with the long siege against human greed and inhumanity to man. Patience is the word—patience and prayer, pluck and praise, power and peace in the end.

Folly of Recrimination (5:9)

If things do not go to suit us, the natural way is to blame somebody else for what has befallen us. We generally exculpate ourselves from all responsibility. A naÏve illustration of this propensity is found in John 12:19: “Behold how ye prevail nothing; lo, the world is gone after him.” At the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem the Pharisees, thinking that their cause against Jesus was lost, turned and blamed each other for the outcome. So then “murmur not, brethren, one against another.” Literally it is, “groan not, brothers, against one another.” See Romans 8:23: “We ourselves groan within ourselves.” It is the inward and unexpressed feeling rather than the outward expression of dissatisfaction (cf. James 4:11).

The secret grudge is taken out in groans and murmurs. In Mark 7:34 Jesus is said to have groaned as he looked up to heaven and prayed, perhaps out of sheer weariness at the burden of sin and sorrow that was upon him. It is hard to be content and to smother resentment at known or suspected wrong. The suppressed volcano may easily break out into a violent eruption. “Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied” (Psalm 59:15, AV). The murmur of a mob is often senseless, and in all events we must bear in mind that we bring down condemnation on our own heads.

“That ye be not judged,” says James. He recurs to this point in 5:12. Probably the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:1 are recalled by James. “Behold, the judge standeth before the door.” He will hear all complaints and set everything right. The picture appears to be that in the Mishnah Ab. iv. 16: “This world is as if it were a vestibule to the future world; prepare thyself in the vestibule, that thou mayest enter the reception room.” Jesus is the Judge who stands at the door through which all must pass. The conception is eschatological and apocalyptic. See Matthew 24:33: “Know ye that he is nigh, even at the doors.” In Revelation 3:20 Jesus is represented as saying: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Let him in now, that you and he may sup together. Let him in now, else you may stand before him hereafter as culprit and helpless and hopeless. “Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way” (Psalm 2:12). Treat kindly one another so that you will not need the Son to act as Judge between you.

Examples of Patience (5:10 f.)

James, like a practical preacher, loves to illustrate his points. He has a fitting one at hand in “the prophets who spake in the name of the Lord.” They spoke in the name, with the authority and with the power of the Lord. The idiom is common enough in the Septuagint and, indeed, in the papyri.[93] They spoke as the representatives of Jehovah. Mayor seems a bit perplexed over the failure of James to mention Jesus as the supreme example of suffering, as is done by Peter (1 Peter 2:21), who spoke of Christ’s leaving us an example, by Paul (Phil. 2:5-11), and by the author of Hebrews (12:1-5).

Perhaps James may have thought it was particularly pertinent for these Jewish Christians to be reminded of the prophets as an “example of suffering and of patience.” Certainly they endured evil in abundance and had great need of long-suffering. It was common enough to appeal to them for this purpose. Jesus did it with keenest irony at the mock heroic monuments built later to the memory of the martyred prophets (Matt. 5:12; 23:34, 37). Stephen did it with so sharp a tongue that the Sanhedrin stoned him to death for his courage and proved the truth of his words by their own acts (Acts 7:52). Elijah says to Jehovah, “The children of Israel have ... slain thy prophets with the sword” (1 Kings 19:10, 14). Jeremiah says also, “Your own sword hath devoured your prophets, like a destroying lion” (2:30). As patterns of patience take Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. These illustrate in various ways the patience of which the readers of the Epistle of James stand in sore need.

“Behold, we call them blessed that endured.” He had already done that in James 1:12. Jesus had promised salvation to the one who endured to the end (Matt. 24:13). Men usually felicitate the survivors of a catastrophe. Often they become popular heroes.

In particular, “ye have heard of the patience of Job.” Job was the most frequently quoted instance in Old Testament times and is a perfectly obvious one for James. And yet Job did have passionate outbursts of indignation at the gibes and superfluous advice of his tormenting friends, and even of his wife, when God seemed to have deserted him. But it must be remembered that Job did not curse God and die. He waited for God to speak and make it all plain. Job hardly exhibited long-suffering, but he clearly did show patience. He was not exactly meek, but he revealed the endurance of a sensitive man. Although Job is the most famous instance of patience in the Old Testament, yet he is nowhere else cited as such in the New Testament. We need not discuss the question whether Job is parable or fact, as the point is here precisely the same.

Ye “have seen the end of the Lord, how that the Lord is full of pity, and merciful.” The outcome in the case of Job proves the point. It turned out all right with Job. So he illustrates the pity and mercy of the Lord; “the end of the Lord” is seen in the conclusion, like a novel that turns out happily at last. In the midst of the stress and storm of Job’s life and his violent outbursts of emotion and exalted feeling God is sympathetic and compassionate. God has understood Job and watched his endurance all the while. The story is so well known that James does not have to tell it but can depend upon his readers to see the point of the illustration.

Profanity (5:12)

This little paragraph seems to come in rather abruptly, with no connection with what precedes. As a result, Oesterley regards it as “a fragment of a larger piece” which James here tears from its context, perhaps a saying from Jesus. But Plummer is more likely correct in thinking of it as an appendix after rounding out the epistle, coming back to the blessedness of trial, with which topic the epistle opens.

The exhortations need not have a close connection with each other. As a matter of fact, James has spoken more against the sins of speech than any other single sin. Plummer well says, “He has spoken against talkativeness, unrestrained speaking, love of correcting others, railing, cursing, boasting, murmuring” (see 1:19, 26; 3:1-12; 4:11, 13; 5:9). He now recurs to the sins of speech to say a few words against one of the commonest evils of which he has not spoken specifically. He evidently is thinking of the words of Jesus as we have them in Matthew 5:34-37, though it is not an exact quotation.[94] He may, indeed, as Resch holds, give another version of the same logion (cf. 2 Cor. 1:17). But there was ample ground for this prohibition, as the Jews had learned how to split hairs on the subject of profanity.

The Third Commandment was plain enough on the subject, and it was supported by the Pharisees and the Essenes. The Essenes, indeed, opposed all oaths, even before courts, and were said to have been excused by Herod from taking the oath of allegiance (Jos., Ant. xv. 10.4). And yet, as Mayor notes, this is not consistent with the oath of initiation which the Essenes took (Jos., War ii. 8.7). The Jewish view is well represented by Sirach 23:7-11 and by Philo (M. 2, p. 184).

The early Christians found trouble with this verse of James, as with the words of Jesus on the same point. See the list of quotations from the early writers in Mayor. Augustine sees no harm in oaths before courts if it were not for the danger of committing perjury. And yet it may be seriously questioned if Jesus or James is thinking of oaths in courts of justice, since Jesus himself did not refuse to answer when put on oath by the high priest before the Sanhedrin (Matt. 26: 63 f.). Besides, solemn asseveration is allowed in the Old Testament (Deut. 6:13; 10:20; Isa. 65:16). It is far more likely the flippant use of oaths (profanity) that is here condemned. There were, and are still, all sorts of devices by which more or less pious people feel justified in calling on the name of the Lord in ordinary speech. It is today one of the saddest things in life to note how common profanity is in the ordinary speech of men and of boys, mannish boys who imitate the men about them. It is positively disheartening to hear it on the streets, in the streetcars, in the trains.

If one is puzzled, as was Augustine, over the words “above all things,” on the ground that profanity is not worse than adultery and murder, we may take it either as a kind of hyperbole (as did Augustine) or as a sort of elative superlative (not literally before all but only very important), as limited to the forms of impatience in the preceding context, like 1 Peter 4:8, where the same idiom occurs (Mayor). But if the strict interpretation be insisted on, one has only to consider what the sin of profanity really is. It is a blasphemous use of the name of the Most High God. The fact that it is usually done without thinking mitigates the offense, but sometimes the full bitterness of profanity is meant. Few things are worse than sulfurous speech like the very fumes of hell. For my part, I should not press the words “above all things” too far in this context.

“Swear not, neither by the heaven, nor by the earth, nor by any other oath.”[95] Certainly this is plain enough to be understood. It is conclusive and inclusive and leaves no room for the milder forms of profanity for which Christians sometimes excuse themselves. “But let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay;” “let your ‘yes’ be a plain ‘yes,’ your ‘no’ a plain ‘no’” (Moffatt)—this, and nothing more. But there is the trouble. The need for emphasis and the love of strong assertion lead a person so easily to go beyond the bounds of good taste and decency. Edersheim (i. p. 583) has a Midrash quotation: “The good man’s yea is yea, and his nay nay.”

In calmer moments one knows that the value of his statement rests essentially on his own character for veracity. His mere word is enough and, in truth, all that one can offer. Violent expletives throw discredit on a person’s ordinary statements and suspicion on the one that he seeks to bolster up with artificial means. Profanity is one of the worst and most useless of sins. It brings good to none and harm to all, in particular to the one who uses it. “That ye fall not under judgment.” The Judge is at the door (James 5:9), and there is no escape.

Worship and Excitement (5:13)

Plummer has a very keen and pertinent heading for his chapter on this verse, and it is noteworthy that he devotes an entire chapter to this one verse, a verse that is little understood by most interpreters. His heading is this: “Worship the Best Outlet and Remedy for Excitement. The Connection between Worship and Conduct.” Certainly oaths are not the way to express one’s emotions, whether one be angry or merely excited, least of all when one has the miserable habit of profanity and is unaware of his foul speech. And yet it is not wrong to express one’s feelings. There is no merit in the self-repression of the cynic or the stoic. “Let the expression of strongly excited feelings be an act of worship” (Plummer). This is an intensely practical point.

“Is any among you suffering?” And what church or community does not have one or more of these occasional or chronic sufferers? The word has a wider meaning than mere bodily sickness. Paul uses it for suffering hardship as a good soldier (2 Tim. 2:3, 9; 4:5). It includes any kind of ill of body or mind. It means, literally, having hard experiences, and it refers to natural depression as a result of such misfortunes. The remedy is not in despondency or in suicide. The remedy lies in prayer. “Let him pray,” let him pray as a habit (present tense of durative action). Prayer is a blessing to the heart and to the mental life. It is good to talk with God. The worry disappears in God’s presence and often the very ill itself disappears. But if it does not go, he gives grace sufficient to bear the burden. So then prayer is the proper outlet for the depressed Christian.

Here lies one of the great blessings of public worship in the house of God. The tired soul finds rest in prayer in the house of prayer. There is comfort in secret prayer and in family worship, but the man makes a tremendous psychological blunder who cuts himself off from the spiritual tonic of the public worship of God. Those in charge of that worship should never fail to have in mind such persons who come to church seeking comfort and strength.

But some hearts are overjoyed and feel like giving expression to their joy in unusual ways, almost in ecstasy. “Is any cheerful?” There are many in happy mood, in good spirits or “good cheer” (cf. Acts 27:22, 25). These are in good health of soul and perhaps also of body. “Let him sing praise.” The word originally meant to play on a stringed instrument (Sir. 9:4), but it comes to be used also for singing with the voice and the heart (Eph. 5:19; 1 Cor. 14:15), making melody with the heart to the Lord.

There is a wondrous exaltation of soul in the public praise of God. The combination of instruments and of voice enables the soul of man to pour itself out toward God in richness of praise. This is far better than the reckless, unrestrained ecstasy of overwrought emotionalism. Plummer notes properly that there is no merit or demerit per se in excitement. The wild dervish commands only astonishment, not sympathy. Religious excitement may become the occasion of bringing discredit upon Christianity, even when it represents real fervor and an element of worship. The spirit of man cannot always be restrained. Under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield the audiences were sometimes carried to excesses of emotion. But far better this than the deadness and coldness of mere formalism. Revivals occasionally have been marked by such excesses, like the “Jerks” in Kentucky one hundred and fifty years ago when, however, real change of life took place.

There is wisdom in the words of James here. Let the religious emotions find expression in prayer and praise. The effect is not only good for the moment but is good for conduct and life as a whole. If we could only manage somehow to turn some of the energy that goes into our activities into religious worship, certainly the effect would be more wholesome all around. People cannot help a measure of excitement. Some of it is good for them. There is tonic in communion with God, tonic for soul and body.

God and Medicine (5:14-18)

Few subjects have excited more interest in recent years than the subject here presented. So many subsidiary issues are raised that it is difficult to treat the question adequately in a few pages.

Many varieties of “faith cures” have been before the world. The so-called Christian Science movement is now the most prominent of them all, combining an idealistic philosophy and pantheistic religion. This combination takes up various aspects of Buddhism, Gnosticism, and a dash of Christian verbiage with the vital elements of Christianity gone, and uses some of the well-known ideas of modern psychology as to the influence of the mind on the body. As a whole, it is a hopeless jumble of absurdities and inconsistencies and is hostile to the worship of Jesus. It leads astray a certain type of mind without clear reasoning processes and fattens on the fees for mental healing, a portion of which goes to the mother church in Boston. There is only the most superficial parallel between what James here describes and what the Christian Science “healer” practices.

There is in James an absence of all mercenary ideas. There is no “commercialized use of prayer,” to use the legal phrase of one of the New York courts. There is also the use of olive oil, the best medicine known to the ancient world and still one of the best remedial agencies, whether used internally or externally. The disciples of Jesus on their tour of Galilee had the double ministry of preaching and healing (Matt. 10:7 f.), and they anointed the sick with oil (Mark 6:13). In Isaiah 1:6 the prophet says that the bruises were “neither bound up, neither mollified with oil.” So the good Samaritan bound up the wounds of the poor victim of the robbers and poured oil and wine upon him (Luke 10:34).

A number of questions come bristling for discussion as we proceed with this passage in James. The use of the word “church” rather than synagogue, as in 2:2, is to be observed. The local church undoubtedly had a close kinship to the Jewish synagogue in origin and worship. The very phrase “elders of the church” occurs also in Acts 20:17 and in the plural, like bishops at Philippi (Phil. 1:1). There was a council of elders in the synagogue (Luke 7:3), and the word appears in an official sense in the Egyptian papyri.[96]

But a more vital question for our subject is whether these elders come in an official capacity to perform an ecclesiastical “anointing” with oil or whether they come to pray as brothers in Christ and rub with the olive oil (cf. Isa. 1:6) as medicine. Mayor quotes Philo (Sonm, M. i. 666), Pliny (N. H. xxiii. 34-50), and Galen (Med. Temp., book ii) in praise of oil as a medicine. In Herod’s last illness a bath of oil was recommended to him (Jos., War i. 33, 5).

There is, therefore, no doubt as to the ancient opinion about, and use of, oil as a medicine. It is probable that each one will decide this question according to his predilections. For my own part, I incline to the view that we have here not a sacramental or priestly function on the part of these elders but the double duty of ministry of the word and of medicine (with prayer). The nearest parallel in modern life is the medical missionary, who goes with the word of life and the healing balm of modern science. He heals the sick with the physician’s skill and the prayer of faith. Paul helped the sick (Acts 20:35) at Ephesus and often healed the sick, and yet he worked side by side with Luke, the beloved physician, as in the island of Melita (Acts 28:8 f.).

There is certainly no indication that what is called “extreme unction” was practiced or urged by James and the apostolic Christians. That was a later development in Greek and Roman Catholic churches that is foreign to the tone of this epistle. There is here no such superstition as sending for a minister when death is at hand to perform a magical ritual ceremony to stave off death. Mayor has a full statement of the chief facts about the sacrament of unction in later centuries. He suggests that the cases of the failure of the simple use of oil as a medicine probably led finally to the special consecration of the oil or the use of relics. But in James we seem to have not a ceremony or ecclesiastical function but rather the simple use of oil as a medicine and prayer “in the name of the Lord.”

Today we have a more advanced medical science which is, however, by no means final and infallible. We separate the functions of the minister and the physician. We prefer the doctor to the oil, but we still need God with the doctor. It is a great error for one to think that God is not to be called upon because we have a skilled physician. The minister still has a place, and a very important place, in the problem of therapeutics, particularly in those many cases of a more or less nervous type when the influence of the mind on the body is very pronounced. Often in the most severe illness the deciding factor is not medicine but hope, as any doctor will say. The minister should make friends with the physician and be at his service and co-operate with him. The minister needs to be careful to be a help and not a hindrance in cases of sickness. He should be a sedative and an inspiration to the patient, not an irritant or an excitant. It is a just ground of complaint that physicians have against those preachers who lend themselves to the schemes of quack doctors with patent medicines for all sorts of ills.

But coming back to the use of prayer, James says, “And the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” The credit is here given to prayer and the power of God. One is not to infer that James gives no credit to medicine. The oil was good; God works through medicine and without medicine. The best that we still know on this subject is this: prayer and medicine, or God and the doctor. The promise of James may be compared with those of Jesus in Mark 11:24 and John 14:14. But the very essence of prayer is acquiescence with us. By “save” here James means “cure,” as it often does in the Gospels (Mark 5:23; 6:56; 8:35).

The prayer of faith is the only kind that is real prayer, and it is trust in God with full acknowledgment of God’s power and love. Some men have always had the idea of a God so aloof from the world that he cares nothing about it or is powerless to help. There is nothing in modern scientific knowledge inconsistent with an immanent, yet transcendent, God who holds the key of life in himself. The wondrous laws of nature are all of God, and there are many more that we do not yet understand. Science has vastly increased our sense of wonder about God and his world. We have only skirted the fringes of knowledge. It is idle to say that God, if he really sent his Son to redeem men from sin and all earthly woe, does not care if we suffer in body and mind. The Father’s hand rests upon us all. He can be reached. He is not far from any of us, and he loves us.

“And if he have committed sins, it shall be forgiven him,” not by being healed in body nor because he is healed of his sickness. The two things do not correspond, nor does one follow because of the other. What James means, undoubtedly, is that the cured man, convicted of his sins and out of gratitude to God for his goodness, repents of his sins and is forgiven.

This is what should always happen in such cases, but often it occurs that men who profess repentance on a bed of sickness forget it when they get up. This is sheer ingratitude and a horrible outcome. But certainly if the sick man is a sinner, he should be prayed for. It is the time of opportunity to get him to listen to the voice of God. No undue advantage need be taken of one’s situation, and yet it is wise to speak plainly then. Sickness is a great leveler and brings us all down. Beyond any doubt, Roman Catholics have made good use of their asylums and hospitals. Other denominations are beginning to take a real interest in this aspect of Christian activity. In the hour of sickness it is a great mercy to fall into the hands of those who love God and where the love of Jesus is mingled with the highest medical science.

During sickness is a good time to confess our sins to one another as well as to God. “Confess therefore your sins one to another.” Clearly if the sick man, conscious now of his own weakness, is not willing to confess his sins against others, God will not forgive him.

As Mayor points out, James expands the words of Jesus about forgiving those who have trespassed against us (Matt. 5:23 f.; 6:14), so as to bring out both sides of the subject. Let the sick man ask forgiveness of those whom he has wronged. Then let them forgive him and pray for him. “Pray one for another.” The Roman Catholics—Bellarmine, for instance—sometimes appeal to this passage as a justification for auricular confession to the priest; but Luther has a pointed answer: “A strange confessor. His name is ‘One Another.’” Cajetan “speaks the language of common sense” (Mayor) and admits that James has no such custom in mind. What James urges is public confession, in particular to those wronged, not private and secret confession to a priest.

The Roman Catholic confessional is one of the most dangerous of ecclesiastical institutions. It puts untold power for harm into the hands of the priest. It is difficult to conceive how a husband or father could be willing for wife or daughter to make secret confession to a priest. The abuses of the confessional make a horrible chapter in human history. Not merely are things wrung out that should not be told, but evil is suggested that would never be thought of. The original form of absolution was “precatory rather than declaratory” (Plummer).

But it is a great good to the soul to open the heart and make a frank confession to the church or to the persons who have been injured. Great sorrow would be avoided if men would only have the manhood to do this thing. Tertullian (On Penance viii) well says, “Confession of sins lightens as much as concealment aggravates them.” Confession of sin was one of the cardinal tenets in the preaching of John the Baptist. The Romanists demanded penance for sins publicly confessed, and private enmity (Plummer) took advantage of it for purposes of revenge.

Then it is a good time to pray “that ye may be healed.” Then the power of God is with men to heal both soul and body. Many a revival has started in a church because those who have been estranged have buried the hatchet and seen eye to eye again. There is power in prayer when the soul is open to God, as can be true only when hate disappears from the heart. “The supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working,” “the prayers of the righteous have a powerful effect” (Moffatt).

This short sentence is clearer in the Greek than in any of the English renderings. Plummer suggests, “Great is the strength of a righteous man’s supplication, in its earnestness.” The word for “supplication” is more specific than the usual term and suggests a sense of need. But the crucial word is the participle, which may be either middle or passive.[97] Our word “energetic” is derived from the verbal adjective. The notion of energy is present, at any rate. The great word in modern science is this very word “energy,” which is made luminous by electricity and radium. The only prayer worthwhile is one with energy in it, whether inwrought (taking the participle as passive) by the Spirit of God or at work (middle voice) through the spiritual passion of the man’s own soul. Such a prayer has much force in it and is not a mere ceremony or rattle of meaningless words.

The emphasis on “a righteous man” here does not mean that God will not hear the cry of a sinner for mercy but probably that a righteous man is more likely to put the proper energy into his prayer. We may reflect sadly that our prayers often have no power with God because they have no energy when said. There is no power in the dynamo; the engine has gone dead; the steam is not high enough to move the driving wheel. Oesterley quotes aptly the words of Rabbi Ben Zakkai in Berachoth, 34b, when prayers for a sick child are desired: “Although I am greater in learning than Chaninah, he is more efficacious in prayer; I am indeed the Prince, but he is the Steward who has constant access to the King.” They have it because they live close to God. With a great price they have won this high prerogative. Ofttimes they are the humblest of men in earthly station and store. Very mechanical, surely, is the idea of Rabbi Isaac (Jebamoth, 64a), who says: “The prayer of the righteous is comparable to a pitchfork; as the pitchfork changes the position of the wheat so the prayer changes the disposition of God from wrath to mercy.”

James has a typical case to illustrate his point. “Elijah was a man of like passions with us,” “with a nature just like our own” (Moffatt). James emphasizes the human frailties of Elijah to show that he does not refer to ceremonial or sacramental rites when he urges prayer for the sick. Such prayer is the privilege not merely of the elders of the church but of any good man who has the ear of God. That power is not a function of ecclesiastical position but the reward of holy living and trust in God. Elijah had his weaknesses as we all have, but God heard him. The point for us is that if God heard Elijah, he will hear any of us who puts the same amount of spiritual energy into his prayer. “He prayed fervently.” There is no use to pray in any other way. Elijah prayed seven times before the rain came. Halfhearted prayer defeats itself (cf. doubting prayer in 1:6 ff.).

Many modern men have no faith in prayer of any kind save as a wholesome reaction on the mind of the one who prays. They scout the idea that the God of the universe would condescend to listen to the feeble chatter of such worms in the dust as men. They conceive it as impossible that God would alter his will in any particular because of such insignificant requests. Least of all do they admit the possibility that God would change the weather in response to the prayer of one or many individuals. They argue that the laws of the weather are fixed by the laws of nature and that God does not alter his own laws. A very pretty network of impossibilities is fixed up, but all the same, the experience of Christians breaks right through these entanglements.

A real God is greater than his own laws, and his own will is the chief law of his nature. God is not an absentee God; he is our Father and loves for us to tell him our troubles. Certainly God knows how to work his own laws. We do not have to think that Elijah had the matter of drought and rain in his own hands at his beck and call. Far from it. Elijah won by strenuous prayer and perseverance, not by lightly informing God of his wishes. Besides, when rain came in response to the prayer of Elijah, it came out of clouds, as rain always does. God made the clouds gather from the west (the Mediterranean) till the rain came. As the hot winds from the east and the south brought the drought, so the west winds brought rain. Many times in my own experience I have known people to pray for rain, and the rain came. The rain may not have come in response to the prayer; that I do not know. But it came the very night in which prayer was made for it at the prayer meeting. The difficulty in the matter of rain is no greater than in cases of sickness. The root of the trouble is the lack of trust in God, the broken relation with God, the loss of power with him.

Rescue Work or Restoring the Erring (5:19 f.)

James makes a last appeal to his readers, and it has a touch of tenderness—“My brethren.” In verse 5 he spoke of the case of a sick man who is brought to confess his sins and is led to God. Here he seems to refer specifically to the case of a brother who has fallen into error. There are such sad instances that puzzle many a pastor by their indifference, hardness, and even scorn of Christ. “If any among you err from the truth, and one convert him.”

The condition (third class) is put delicately only as a supposed case, not assumed as true and yet probable, alas. “Err” is from the Latin errare (to wander, to go astray). The Greek word here suggests the picture of one who is lost in the mountains, who has missed his path,[98] without passing on the question of his own part in the process. That is now neither here nor there, for he is lost. Our “planet” is this word, from the notion that these luminaries were wandering stars, not fixed like the rest. We now know that none of the stars are fixed, but they all move with great speed.

Whatever the cause, it is not impossible for brethren to go astray “from the truth.” One way to treat them is to kick them out of the way, down the hill. Another way is to go after them with hammer and tongs to beat them back into the path. Another course is to give them up in disgust and to wash our hands of all responsibility. It must be confessed that often it is very hard to do anything else, since brethren act with so much independence and resent any effort to show them a better way. When they start away, often they go the whole way. But there is a more excellent way—the way of love. See 1 Corinthians 13 and Galatians 6:1 ff.

We are our brothers’ keepers in spite of all they say and all that we may feel. You that are spiritual have a call to mind the broken lives all about you. There is no nobler work than this rescue work, to turn a sinner “from the error of his way.” It is so hard to get a man back on the right track. He, like all lost men, wanders round and round in his old tracks of sin and error. He is the victim of his own logical fallacies and sinful delusions. Though a giant, he is bound by the cords of the Lilliputians, the bonds of habit which he does not break.

It is enough to discourage any social worker in the slums or in the tenement districts of our cities to see the hopeless conditions in which the victims live. Drugs have fastened some with clamps of steel; drink has fired the blood of others; cigarettes have deadened the will of others; and immorality has hurled still others into the pit. They stumble into the rescue halls, “cities of refuge” in our cities. Happy are those who know how to save souls like these who have known better days and who have gone down into the valley of sin and sorrow. But it is worthwhile to save souls like these for whom Jesus died. Let the rescue worker know (by personal experience, in truth) that he “shall save a soul from death,” from a living death in which such a soul already finds itself and from eternal death as well. That is the reward of the winner of souls.

But it is not alone those who go down into the depths of gross sin, the “pick-me-ups” of life, that are to be won back. There are many who live in accord with the outward ethical standards of life who turn away from the knowledge of Jesus, who go after the strange gods of gold, of so-called knowledge, of materialistic monism, of “new thought,” of Christian Science, of Russellism, of any new fad in science or philosophy or religion, of any new form of old wives’ fables that lead men astray. These are, in reality, more difficult to win back to the truth as it is in Jesus, for they have the pride of knowledge and look with compassionate condescension on those who still worship Jesus as God and Saviour from sin.

The worker for souls has one more joy. He learns to see the good side of human nature. The bad side is there beyond a shadow of doubt. No man knows that better than the worker for the redemption of human souls. But this fact does not make him a pessimist or a cynic. He sees the angel in the stone. He learns the love that “shall cover a multitude of sins,” “hides a host of sins” (Moffatt), that covers with a veil the sins of the poor soul who wandered away and is now brought back. See 1 Peter 4:8 for the same idea.

This is not the Jewish doctrine of merit in good works balancing evil ones, as Oesterley holds. Mayor also thinks that the man who rescues another saves his own soul. But this interpretation seems out of harmony with the teaching of Jesus and the whole trend of the gospel message. We do not need to go back to these “blind guides” of Pharisaism to find the key to this verse and that in 1 Peter 4:8, where we read that “love covers a multitude of sins.” It is the love that no longer sees the sins of the saved sinner. We see the true idea in Proverbs 10:12: “Hatred stirreth up strifes, but love covereth all transgressions.” See also Psalm 85:2: “Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people; thou hast covered all their sin.” In Luke 7:47 Jesus speaks of the love of the converted woman as proof that she has been forgiven much.

James presents the joy of the winner of souls who throws the mantle of love over the sins of the repentant sinner, the joy of the Shepherd who has found the lost sheep out on the mountain and is returning with him in his arms, the joy of the Father who welcomes the prodigal boy home with the best robe and the fatted calf, the joy in the presence of the angels that one sinner has repented and turned unto God. That is heaven on earth. The preacher who has missed this joy of winning souls has missed the greatest reward in his ministry. If he has this, he can do without much else. He can stand many rebuffs, small salary, lack of help, if only there is this meat to eat that satisfied the soul of Jesus when he led one poor abandoned woman into the light and life of God.

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