James5chapter 5

James 5:1-3

The register is the prophets' own: go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl, addressed past the churches to the oppressors themselves, as Amos and Isaiah spoke over Israel's heads to her exploiters. The indictment reads their vaults as evidence, riches corrupted, garments motheaten, gold and silver cankered, the three ancient forms of wealth all perishing, and the rust shall be a witness against you and eat your flesh, hoarded metal turned prosecutor and executioner. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days is the bitter irony: they stockpiled for a future that is the judgment.

James 5:4-6

The specific crime is wage theft: the hire of the labourers who reaped your fields, kept back by fraud, crieth, the withheld coin itself given a voice as Abel's blood had one, and Deuteronomy 24:14-15 stands behind the charge. The cries have entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth, the LORD of hosts, the armies' God retained in Hebrew as if no Greek word carried the threat. Living in pleasure, they have nourished their hearts as in a day of slaughter, cattle feeding on the morning of the knife, and ye have condemned and killed the just, and he doth not resist you, the unresisting righteous man whom many old readers heard as a portrait of the Just One himself.

James 5:7-9

The brethren's word is patience, makrothumia, unto the coming of the Lord, and the figure is the farmer waiting for the precious fruit through the early and latter rain, Israel's October sowing rains and the March rains that filled the ear, both needed and neither hurried. Stablish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh, the church's constant posture of nearness. Grudge not, groan not against one another, for the judge standeth before the door, the same nearness turned inward on the grumblers.

James 5:10-11

Two exhibits carry the exhortation: the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord and suffered for it, and Job, whose patience was not serenity but endurance that held while it argued. Ye have seen the end of the Lord, the telos, the outcome God wrought in Job 42, and the moral drawn is about God rather than Job, that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy, polusplagchnos, full of bowels of compassion. Endurance is blessed because of who waits at the end of it.

James 5:12-13

swear not: Above all things, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, is the Lord's own Matthew 5:34-37 in his brother's words, aimed at the casuistry that graded oaths by their formula; let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay, truthfulness that needs no scaffolding. The traditions divide on the civil oath, some reading all oaths forbidden and most reading profane and evasive swearing, and both readings stand with their holders. Verse 13 opens the letter's closing liturgy of response: afflicted, pray; merry, sing psalms, every weather answered upward.

James 5:14-15

The sick believer's provision is stated as standing church practice, present tense: call for the elders of the church, let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up, the healing the Lord's own act through his elders' prayer, the pattern taught here as the church's living possession. The oil's readings are named with their holders, the medicine of the ancient world, the sign of the Spirit's anointing as the disciples used it at Mark 6:13, or both at once; the power is in the name of the Lord and the prayer of faith, not the oil. The later development of this text into a last anointing for the dying belongs to reception history, and the text's own aim is the opposite direction, recovery, that the Lord shall raise him up, with sins forgiven joined to the healing as the Lord joined them in the gospels.

James 5:16-18

The healing provision widens into congregational life: confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed, mutual confession among brethren, not a tribunal, and the healing bound to the praying community. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much translates one working word, energoumene, prayer that is at work. The exhibit is Elias, a man subject to like passions as we are, whose praying shut and opened heaven for three years and six months, the Lord's own Luke 4:25 reckoning; the encouragement is exactly his likeness to us, the same nature praying to the same God.

James 5:19-20

The letter ends mid-rescue, without benediction or farewell: if any err from the truth, and one convert him, turn him back, the word of shepherds recovering strays. He which converteth the sinner shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins, and the readings divide the clauses, the erring brother's soul saved and his sins covered by the mercy that receives him, with some referring the covering to the rescuer's own reward; Proverbs 10:12, love covereth all sins, stands behind the phrase. The abrupt ending is the letter's last lesson, the book of doing closing on the doing of rescue.