James's version of the unforgiving debtor

Four meditations on James's law of liberty and his defense of the destitute

James says that if his brother Jesus’s assemblies favor the rich, then they become like courts that adjudicate based on the litigants’ relative wealth and power.

But at the same time, James points out, assembly people are being taken to court by their own rich creditors.

This irony is similar to that in Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving debtor: there, the same debtor forgiven by his creditor refuses to forgive his own debtor.¹

The text at the outset of James’s second chapter labels his brothers’ assemblies as unjust courts:

My brothers, hold to the faith of our Lord of glory, Jesus the Anointed, without any respecting of persons. For if a man were to enter your synagogue with gold on his fingers and in splendid attire, and a destitute man in begrimed attire were also to enter, and you were to look at the one wearing the splendid attire and say, “Here, be finely seated,” and were to say to the destitute man, “Stand over there” or “Seat yourself below my footstool,” have you not discriminated among yourselves, and become judges whose deliberations are wicked?²

James ends here by alluding to the same unjust courts that victimized the members of Jesus’s assemblies.

A few sentences later, James points out the irony of the assemblies’ position as unjust judges of the poor: “Do not the rich oppress you, and haul you into law courts as well?”³

James’s portrait of assembly members as both creditors and debtors—as both unjust judges and the victims of unjust judges—is not parabolic since these events in the assemblies and in the courts seemed to have actually happened. For the farm workers in the advanced agrarianism of New Testament times, Bruce W. Longenecker says, “the ‘courts of law’ could barely pretend to be anything other than ‘instruments of social control . . . [and] one way in which superior social status was displayed and maintained’ in the public arena.”⁴

Indeed, James’s remark about the oppression and lawsuits brought by the rich doesn’t appear to be describing targeted persecution of Jesus’s followers. It appears to be describing “instruments of social control” by the rich in the ancient Near East around the time of James’s writing. James, of course, has harsh things to say about the rich, speaking later in his letter in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets:

Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of armies.⁵

In James’s account, God threatens to become his own court, ready to do justice for the agrarian workers, including those among James’s readers.

James has more to say about God as a judge, and it bears on how the destitute should be treated in the Jesus assemblies. God’s court, where all of us will one day appear, dispenses neither injustice nor, strictly speaking, justice. Instead, it recompenses mercy for mercy. It extends judicial mercy for acts of charitable mercy—acts of honoring the poor and giving to the poor. In this way, mercy triumphs over the judgment due us for breaking God’s just laws.⁶

Mercy’s triumph is the “royal” standard, James says, the standard of the now-and-coming kingdom of God.⁷ Mercy’s triumph demands that we “speak and act like persons about to be judged by a Law of freedom.”⁸ We can’t judge—that is, we can’t respect the rich over the destitute—lest we be judged by the destitute, who, after all, are “heirs of the Kingdom he has promised to those who love him.”⁹ We don’t want our lack of mercy towards the destitute to cry out against us in the ears of the Lord of armies.

Even when James later speaks of faith and works, he doesn’t stop speaking of justice and mercy—and courts. The only example of faith and works involving assembly life also involves how we treat the destitute. Faith with works means giving the destitute “the body’s necessities.”¹⁰ The judicial language, echoing the earlier language about mercy and judgment, comes in towards the end of James’s discussion of faith and works: “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

James himself was later the victim of an unjust court, according to Josephus. He was stoned to death after a trial rigged by the high priest on charges that, we may infer, James was not guilty. One commentator, Ralph P. Martin, argues that James got stoned for criticizing “Sadducean priests and their associates who despised and exploited the poor.”¹¹

Reflection 1 — Undivided mercy

Mercy in James is both judicial and charitable. We also use the word “mercy” in both of these senses, but we try to be clear about which sense we mean. The Bible’s writers don’t do that. To them, mercy is at once judicial and charitable. It’s theopolitical. This all-at-once-ness of mercy is what James calls the “Law of freedom.”

Reflection 2 — Wealth and oppression

We wonder why rich people would tear down systems designed to benefit everyone else. Do they really need more money? people ask incredulously.

No, but they need more power. This is part of James’s message: “Do not the rich oppress you?”¹² Don’t separate the rich man’s attractive trappings, James says, from the rich man’s oppression. Many of us find this biblical view of the rich unbiblical. How could our job creators end up oppressing us? But the New Testament equates the rich with unjust power. As James Harrington taught us almost four centuries ago, wealth inequality leads to rule by the rich. Under an oligarchy, and especially under a plutocracy, the laws and the courts that enforce the laws become unjust and oppressive to the poor.

James makes me reflect also on my own oppressive role in perpetuating another kind of system. As a consumer, do I resemble the absentee landlords in the New Testament’s advanced agrarian economy? Longenecker describes them:

Significant numbers [of farm laborers], however, were tenant farmers, who rented their farms from “absentee landlords” (customarily at exorbitant costs and for short periods of time), or were slave-tenants tasked with the responsibility of extracting the yields of the land for the landowner.¹³

I seldom think of, and I never do anything to check on, the working conditions of the people who make a lot of the stuff I buy.

By reflecting on both social safety-net systems and trade systems, I look at how those oppressed by the rich can themselves oppress the destitute. I suggest here the kind of oppressed/oppressor dichotomy that James raises in his two debtors “parable.”

It’s complicated, but the complication works within perhaps the most morally clear and forceful letter I’ve ever read.

Reflection 3 — My imperial charity

I wonder if we have a difficult time with James’s notion of faith and works not because it contradicts Paul’s—it doesn’t—but because it contradicts our notion of charity. We Westerners often do charity consistent with the Roman Empire’s notion of benefaction.¹⁴

Benefaction is another way that wealth translates to power. Jesus points out to his disciples that rulers use benefaction. Then he tells them that they can’t be benefactors:

“The kings of the Gentiles domineer over them; and those who have authority over them are called ‘Benefactors.’ But it is not this way for you; rather, the one who is the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the servant. For who is greater, the one who reclines at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at the table? But I am among you as the one who serves.”¹⁵

Don’t just give the servants money, Jesus is saying. Let the servants rule. After all, as James says, the destitute will be ruling in the kingdom we’re called to model together now.

James’s example of faith without works—the good wishes of “be ye warmed and filled”—hits home, or at least hits my home.¹⁶ I cut a check (or I Venmo), but my giving often serves to underline the financial gulf between me and my charity’s objects. Under this imperial model, I don’t give when it would hurt—when the giving would shrink the great gulf between me and the destitute.

Reflection 4 — The times

I think each zeitgeist brings out new things from scripture—even new ways of reading scripture. In our times of increasing economic injustice, James may be ripe for another harvest. Martin points out that no other New Testament document “has such a socially sensitized conscience and so explicitly champions the cause of the economically disadvantaged . . .”¹⁷

James’s economic justice is as close to Jesus’s gospel as James was to his brother Jesus.

Our times are challenging, but for us Western Christians, the biblical readings that our times make fresh may present us with even bigger challenges.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Matthew 18:21-35.

2. James 2:1-4 (Hart, New Testament, 457-58).

3. James 2: 6 (Hart, 458).

4. Bruce W. Longenecker, Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge, U.K. ; Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub, 2010), 24 (quoting John S. Kloppenborg). For a summary of how the rich oppressed the poor in New Testament times, see Longenecker, 19-35.

5. James 5:4 NNAS.

6. James 2:8-12.

7. James 2:8-13.

8. James 2:12-13 (Hart, 458).

9. James 2: 5 (Hart, 458).

10. James 2: 16 (Hart, 458).

11. Longenecker, 131.

12. James 2:6 (Hart, 458).

13. Longenecker, 23.

14. For an overview of ways the Roman world supported the poor, see Longenecker, 60-107. Luke Bretherton points out that “An order of beneficence may be generous, but it is fundamentally unjust. By contrast, an order of blessing aims to cultivate a just and loving form of common life.“ Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 71 (italics in the original).

15. Luke 22:25-27 NNAS. Citing these verses, Bretherton distinguishes between “self-aggrandizing and impenitent beneficence” and “eschatological blessings and participation in the people of God.” Bretherton, 72. Bretherton explicates Jesus’s connection of beneficence with unjust power: “After Christ, the difficult discernment is whether configurations of rule and structures of privilege have become self-serving and are masking, thorough the operations of an order of beneficence, the domination of others.” Bretherton, 72.

16. James 2:16 KJV.

17. Longenecker, 128.