What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? … Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. James 2: 14, 17.
I’d like to begin with what, to me, is a rather shocking story.
As some of you know, I am training to be a Reader, that is, a lay minister licensed to preach and conduct certain services. That is why I am preaching here this morning. There are about 35 of us currently in training in the Diocese of Southwark, and in the course of our weekly sessions we get to know something about our fellow trainees, and their experiences in the churches from which they come.
One woman told me about her experience of preaching her first sermon. She was rather nervous, and she asked her vicar if he would listen to the sermon privately in advance and give her some comment. So an evening was arranged for vicar and trainee to meet at the church. She delivered her sermon. But while she was speaking the vicar busied himself with testing the lighting system, wandering round the church switching lights on and off and generally appearing to pay little attention. At the end he seemed disinclined to make any comment, and the trainee Reader felt obliged to ask him what he thought. “OK, I suppose,” he said; “perhaps a bit pious.” On the basis of that, she had to face her first congregation.
In the catalogue of human iniquity this does not rate very highly: nothing more than offhandedness, indifference, rudeness, perhaps a touch of prejudice. There is, of course, a history to the relations between ordained clergy and readers, not to mention between some clergy and women; so perhaps to be shocked was an overreaction. But shocked I still was; and when I examined my feelings, I discovered two elements, one rather silly and the other more serious.
First there was the expectation that ordained clergy ought to be better than the rest of us by virtue of their ordination, as thought that sacramental act spreads over them at least a preliminary tinge of sanctity. I call that a silly reaction because one knows that it doesn’t happen; that clergy are subject to human failings like the rest of us, and that it is unfair of the laity to expect otherwise.
But there was something more that troubled me. I thought to myself: if one lives the life of faith seriously, whether as a priest or as a lay person, should one not gain a certain self-awareness, enough at least to avoid the cruder errors of self-preoccupation, rudeness, indifference, even prejudice? Through prayer and reflection, through confession—and the parish concerned was one where confession is regularly available—one might be expected to gain a sense of one’s own weaknesses and perhaps begin to do something about them. How is it, I asked myself, that people—clerical and lay—can live long lives in the church in apparent unawareness of their impact on others and with so little apparent effort toward what the prayer book calls “amendment of life?”
Now it may be that the priest in my story knows his failings well and laments them bitterly. One recalls Paul’s agonised words in his epistle to the Romans: “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (7: 19). And we all have to accept that we have failings that are only too apparent to others but which we hide from ourselves. But there remains a problem: as members of Christ’s Church, how much is required of us? How different should faith make us? How basic to being a Christian is that call to “amendment of life”?
James, in his epistle, is in no doubt about the answer. The token of faith is a changed life. Without that changed life, faith must be judged unreal: “as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead” (2:26). A great deal is required of us.
This epistle has, of course, not always had a good reception. Luther, insisting on salvation by faith alone, called it an epistle of straw, and had so much difficulty with it that he even questioned its status as a true expression of the gospel. But it also presents difficulties for Christians in our own time. The leading emphasis in much contemporary preaching is on a God who accepts and loves us unconditionally, a ‘non-judgmental’ God who stands with us where we are and apparently makes few requirements. Against that James seems to be setting up the test of works: he is quite clear that, as he puts it, “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (2:24).
There is a real problem here. Put theologically, it has to do with the relationship between repentance and grace, between the requirement that we change and the insistence that God’s love for us is not dependent on any change, or indeed on anything that we do. The doctrine of grace tells us that God’s love is not earned, not a reward for meritorious effort; and yet Jesus calls us to repentance and change of life. The kernel of his preaching, as recorded in the first chapter of Mark, was such a call: “repent, and believe in the gospel” (1: 15). How can free grace and the need for repentance both be true?
Here this morning’s reading from Isaiah may be helpful. The brief extract that we heard—“For the waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert, and the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water” (35: 6-7)—sounds like a classic expression of the free grace of God, of his unmerited generosity. This is what his unvarying love will do, even for the errant people of Israel. And that is certainly part of the writer’s point.
But that promise has to be set within a context (devisors of lectionaries are often not good on context). The section of Isaiah from which this reading is taken begins at chapter 31, and, read as a whole, it has a rather different flavour. It does indeed insist on the faithfulness of God: “the Lord … will be the stability of your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge” (33: 6-7). His generosity to Israel is never in doubt. But it also insists that Israel must change itself if that generosity is to have full expression. This is not a precondition: God is not saying, “you do this, and then I will do that,” in the manner of a human negotiation. He is not setting up some kind of deal. Rather God is saying, “unless you make these changes, I cannot show my generosity to you. You must put yourself in the position where I can be to you that gracious God which, beyond all question, I am.”
What changes does God require of Israel at this point? In essence, that they should abandon their complacency and their idolatry, their sense that everything is pretty much all right as it is and their trust in forces other than God himself: in other words, the tendencies that most of us have most of the time. So Isaiah says, “tremble, you women who are at ease, shudder, you complacent ones: for the vintage will fail, the fruit harvest will not come” (32: 11, 10). To the men he says “woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, and rely on horses, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel” (31: 1). As long as they remain complacent and idolatrous, God can do nothing for them; the transformation of their world, the flooding of the desert with the fruits of grace, is blocked, not because God does not will it, but because his people are not in the place where they might receive it. A change of heart is required, and then God can act; then, indeed, “the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy upon their heads” (35:10), and the fruits of grace will renew the earth.
This passage of Isaiah brings us very close to the meaning of repentance. Often we confuse repentance with remorse, and sometimes, of course, the two go together. But it is possible to be remorseful without being repentant: to regret something that we have done without changing the mindset that brought it about. I wish I hadn’t said precisely that to my sister-in-law but I still think, basically, that she deserved what she got. What God requires of us as Christians, as an absolute minimum, is that we should be prepared for that change of heart out of which changed lives can arise; that we should recognise our need to be other than we are. Only in that moment—when we recognise our deep fallibility and our need for transformation—can he reach us, as in Isaiah he promises to reach out to Israel.
James, later in his epistle, makes a similar point: “draw near to God and he will draw near to you.” But the way of drawing near to God is to make serious changes: “cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind” (4:8). Just as Isaiah does not make the faithfulness of God dependent on the actions of Israel, so James is not making God’s closeness dependent on human virtue. But he is saying that without repentance, without a turning away from evil, God cannot act: his grace is frustrated. “Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (4:9-10).
God’s love is indeed unconditional in the sense that it is eternally available to us, never withheld; but we need to place ourselves in a position where we can receive it. That degree of movement is required of us. That only we can do. We do so by reflection, by prayer, by having a serious sense of how far we fall short and a serious intention of amendment. We should not misinterpret God’s inexhaustible grace as a licence to be as we have always been. Jesus’s preaching is shot through with calls for a change of heart. If we ignore that call, we build a barrier between ourselves and God that not even he can overcome.
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