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JAMES - Be Doers of the Word, and not Hearers Only
Studies in the Letter of James (by Dr. Richard Thomas)
Chapter V
Warning against Wealth (James 5:1-6)
JAMES 5:1-6
1 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you. 2 Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and your silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be for a testimony against you, and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up your treasure in the last days. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies. 5 You have lived delicately on the earth, and taken your pleasure. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned, you have murdered the righteous one. He doesn’t resist you.
The poor we have always with us; the rich are never far away. Even in the world’s most destitute cities the rich rub shoulders with the poor during the day; while at night they withdraw to their luxurious haunts or homes to keep their needy fellow-citizens out of sight and out of mind. Is there a connexion between the class addressed in 4:13 and those denounced in 5:1? The opening phrase ‘come now’ is the same for both, and gives notice of stern warning. Although the two groups are not identical, they are allied in a quest for prosperity and in their indifference to God. The group mentioned earlier consists of merchants, the latter group of exploiters, landowners – what we nowadays would call developers.
Among the members of early Christian congregations were not a few affluent personages (1:10; 2:2). We should have expected such men to rise above the standards of worldly practice in their treatment of tenants and labourers, and perhaps imitate the example of Barnabas (Acts 4:36,37). Clearly many had failed to do so, finding the patterns of pagan behaviour more to their liking. With characteristic bluntness James reproaches the rich for their excesses, and admonishes them to weep and howl for what awaits them. ‘Howl’ renders a Greek term cognate with the Latin original of the English ‘ululate’ the vaguely musical wailing sound that professional mourning women make at funerals and weddings. The time for ululating is now, whilst yet there is hope of saving your soul.
Someone might ask whether there is an inconsistency in the apostle judging the rich, when he has just been inveighing against criticism and abuse. Two points need to be made: He speaks as inspired by the Holy Spirit; it is God who judges and warns. We dare not argue with him. Moreover, the accusation is not directed to any one person. A class of individuals having been described, the hearer of the word has to decide whether the charges fit him. He may shrug his shoulder and deceive himself that the matter does not concern him (1:22); or else he may concede the point and resolve to make amends before it is too late (Luke 18:22; 19:8). The rich young ruler and Zacchaeus each showed a different response, the first went away sad, the second opened his heart, hands and his home.
James ranges himself alongside the great OT prophets whose denunciation were both God-inspired and just. They were unheeded by most of those who heard the spoken words announcing imminent disaster. But the march of events irreversibly brought about the predicted doom.
The teaching of Jesus is reflected in the thrust of the passage and the usage of verbs proper to decaying and corrosion (2,3 cf. Matthew 6:19-21). James more specifically employs three verbs, the first relates to grain or fruit, the second to clothing, the last to bullion. Whether or not gold tarnishes is beside the point; in a real sense it perishes with the owner and has no value to him in his misery or death (Acts 8:20).
Gold or silver have properties which set them above the base metals. These solid and sterling qualities rarely pass on to their owners who generally display the baseness and meanness that James roundly condemns. If the love of riches is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), that love is further debased into greed as the object is gained. The root is evil; so the fruit is moral and spiritual ruin. James uses the handy metaphor of rust or corrosion to illustrate this outcome. Corrosion eats into the ‘flesh’, the innermost part of one’s being. Whether slowly, like rust or fast like fire it destroys the body, which after all is the sole concern of the materialistically minded. Some manuscripts link ‘as fire’ with what follows to give the stored up judgment an eschatological dimension (36).
Four summary charges are made against the accused, in ascending scale of gravity:
- You have heaped treasure (36), without which no one can start on the road to riches.
- You have lived in pleasure (5a), not an invariable rule with the affluent.
- You have battened on the deprivation of the exploited (56), with the implied indictment of utter disregard for those unfortunates.
- You have penalised the innocent and in some instances crushed them (6).
Obviously, few rich men would plead guilty on all counts, but on the principle stated in 2:10, one misdemeanour is enough to render a person guilty of having broken God’s law.
A century ago churchgoing Victorian industrialists practiced comparable forms of exploitation. Pious Southerners owned and ill-treated hundreds of slaves in the Deep South. Conditions have improved steadily since for the lower classes, through the efforts of a legion of social reformers, among them outstanding Christians.
Are these evils a relic of the past? They are still widespread. Newspapers frequently report on areas of the world where injustice and despoilation are the order of the day: Bolivian tin mines in the Northern province of Brazil, the treatment of Bantus in South Africa or Pariahs in India. Let us watch and pray that we may not fall into such temptations, heap treasure, live in pleasure, turn a blind eye to iniquity.
Since the Greek for ‘righteous’ in verse 6 comes in the singular some church fathers considered it as a reference to Christ, the Righteous One who was unjustly condemned and brutally put to death. Whether or not we have here a direct reference to Jesus, He does suffer through the persecution and martyrdom of His saints (Acts 9:4). It is said of Abel, the first of the innocents to suffer and to die, that his blood cried out to the Lord from the ground (Genesis 4:10). The Lord of Hosts (Sabaoth) still hears the cries of all who suffer wrongfully and as it would seem without redress (4). Yahweh’s title in the context is one that recalls His acts of providence. He will protect His people and grant their petitions (1 Samuel 1:11). He will requite their foes (1 Samuel 15:2). This he continues to do in our day, punishing executioners and exploiters: “Vengeance is mine I will repay” (Romans 12:19).