Love With Its Sleeves Rolled Up

For years, James did not believe his big brother was anyone special. They grew up in the same house in Nazareth, and when Jesus started preaching, his family worried he had lost his mind. James did not believe in him either. Then Jesus died on a cross, and on the third day he was alive, and one of the people he came to see was James.

After that, James became a leader of the church in Jerusalem. Jesus' followers had been scattered far from home, and many were poor. So James wrote them a letter. (His letter sounds like a coach calling from the side of the field.)

"What good is it," he wrote, "if someone says he has faith but never does anything about it?"

Picture it, he said. A brother or sister turns up shivering, with no warm clothes and nothing to eat. Somebody pats them on the shoulder and says, "Go in peace! Keep warm! Eat well!"

And sends them home with nothing.

(That is about as useful as handing a hungry man a drawing of a sandwich.)

"Faith is like that," James wrote. "If it never does anything, it is dead."

Someone might argue, "Well, I have faith, and you have good deeds. We can each have our own."

"Show me your faith without anything you do," James answered, "and I will show you my faith by what I do."

He was not finished. "You believe there is one God? Good! The demons believe that too, and they shudder." Knowing God is real is not the same as being on his side.

So James pointed to two people from long ago.

First, Abraham. God told him to take his son Isaac up a mountain and offer him to God on an altar. Abraham trusted God so much that he went, built the altar, and lifted the knife, until the angel of the LORD called out and stopped him. "Abraham believed God," the Scriptures say, and God called him his friend. His faith and his doing worked together, like two hands carrying one heavy bucket.

Then Rahab, a woman of Jericho who was not one of God's people. When two spies from Israel came to her city, she hid them on her roof under stalks of flax. When the king's men came knocking, she kept the secret and let the spies down the city wall on a rope. She believed in Israel's God, and she risked her life to prove it.

"A body without breath is dead," James wrote. "Faith without doing is just as dead."

Even so, James knew his readers would never get it all right. Some coats would stay on the hook. Some bowls would stay empty.

But James had grown up beside someone whose words and hands never came apart. Once a whole hillside filled up with hungry people, five thousand men and their families besides. His friends said, "Send them away to buy food." He fed every one of them instead. When a sick woman touched his clothes in a crowd, he healed her first, and only then did he say, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace."

He did not only say he loved the world. He gave his life for it. Now he is alive, and everywhere his people feed the hungry and warm the cold in his name. James's big brother, Jesus, never once told a cold person to keep warm and walked away.