Thursdays with Iwand
Hans Iwand, a sermon on James 2:14-26
Is there anyone among us who doesn’t want to get up in protest and answer this text with a simple, ‘No!’? The last sentence alone does us in: ‘So faith apart from work is dead.’ If it has no works! Or have we become so dull and apathetic that we simply accept these things just because they are in the Bible? ‘Faith apart from works…’ But isn’t that just the opposite of what paul preaches: that we are justified by faith alone, apart from work of the Law? In other words, not faith and works, but by faith alone. Not both/and, but rather either/or. Either a person is made righteous before God on the basis of his effort – or his righteousness before God is grace, complete and absolute grace.
Do we all of a sudden have to throw overboard everything we believe including why we call ourselves evangelical Christians and heirs of the Reformation? ‘Faith if it has works…’ – that lies there like a big rock in our path. We cannot get around it. We take offense at it.
Yet there may be others among us who are glad this finally is being said; at last this message is getting out. Now we’re really getting down to some practical Christianity. Now it’s finally a matter of our behavior toward the poor, the weak, the sick and the have-nots of this world. Now faith is going to be measured by another standard and not by the usual norm. Now it is the Christianity of deed that is the standard of faith.
Perhaps these friends among us would even say that the church would be better off if such words would be preached and taken to heart more often. And perhaps that was the consideration of the ‘Innere Mission’ (roughly translated, ‘Lutheran Social Services’) in choosing this text of this day of anniversary – so that the witness to faith might be led and characterized by the helping and saving deed. In a way we are like Goethe’s Faust who opens the Bible in the prologue of Goethes work, and is taken back by the very first sentence: ‘In the beginning was the word’ – ‘No,’ he says, ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ ‘What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works?!’
Perhaps it is the case that when it comes to this text we have to divide up into those who say ‘Yes’ to James and those who say ‘No.’ Those who go with james and those who go with Paul; those who are with Rome and those who are with Luther.
But let us hold off for a little while with our ‘Yes’ or our ‘No’ so that we can listen and hear once more before we take a hard and fast position; so that we do not simply follow inclinations or dis-inclincations, or our deep seated opinions for or against; instead, let us first of all allow ourselves to be very still before God’s Word and listen because it doesn’t say that everything depends on our works.
There is not here a commending, rather it is first and last a matter of faith. It is all about faith – the kind of faith which justifies us before God; totally and alone it is about faith. However, it is also the case that it is a matter of two different kinds: one a dead, and one a living faith. And the situation which is being addressed here in this text is that of a dead faith! This is the most terrible situation which the apostle James faces:” there is faith present, yes; there are Christian congregations, it is true, but this faith they have is like a skeleton of a dead man – it is a deceased dead faith. What a terrible combination of words: two words which are as foreign as heaven and hell or as God and the devil, such are these two words, faith and death.
Or shall we say it even clearer: it is not just that death has succeeded in conquering the body of a person; death has also succeeded in bringing under his spell that new life born of God. It’s as though death as won a second time; not just conquering the flesh, but now the spirit as well.
This is what the apostle sees; it is what he already saw back then right in the midst of the first springtime of Christianity. There in their midst was the death smell of the age-old enemy-like worm that eats itself into the blossoms and kills the fruit, a worm that doesn’t even let it become fruit. For, if faith really is faith, then it most certainly has to be, as Luther says, ‘a living, active, busy thing.’ Faith can do nothing other than to be constantly working and doing, because he who gives faith its life, namely God, is himself always working and doing. But then what in the world is it that happens when faith suddenly stops being active? What happens that it stands there like something dead, like a formula or an empty phrase? Yes, this is the greatest danger there is: the danger that the new life, the life born of Christ, could fall under the law of death. And because he sees this danger, the apostle breaks into a loud fanfare, a blast that echoes within and throughout a Christianity threatened with death, into the security of the Lutherans and those claiming Paul: the works will decide, love shown with deeds, not with words alone! and that is why this fellow speaks so suddenly and in such a way so that our first inclination is to say he is speaking like a Jew or a Roman Catholic. But he speaks like he does because in the midst of this Christian ‘Christianness’ (christliche Christlichkeit), into this evangelical attitude of faith has crept the enemy itself, the enemy who threatens to destroy the entire new structure of God. Were there no such thing as this dead faith, then the cry of James would not be necessary. Were there no such deforming of Christianity then this strange speech of James would not be needed. But that is why we do need to hear his message. And we should ask ourselves whether or not our faith, too, is in danger of becoming such a skeleton, and whether there aren’t even today congregations and fellowships of Christians that are like a field of dead bones, where faith now only flits around like a ghost in empty phrases and vacant all-too-familiar formulas but without really allowing faith to take charge and to rule life and deeds. This is the situation.