One of the peculiarities of the letter of James is that it has so very little direct reference to the life of Jesus. If it was written, as has traditionally been believed, by the James who was the brother of our Lord and who became prominent in the Jerusalem church, then it does seem odd that he would not salt his writing with anecdotes and reminiscences. We'd be only too delighted to have that kind of writing today, wouldn't we? We are very eager for kiss and tell writers, for the folks who were next door to history to tell us all they know. There is a continuing market for books about Upstairs at Buckingham Palace or Downstairs at the White House or the real truth about this sports figure or that movie star. Poor old James really missed a fortune by not telling us what it was like to grow up in the same household as Jesus!
But if James is short on incidents from the life of Jesus, he is at least strong on teachings from the lips of Jesus. In any number of places he repeats, almost word for word, things that we do know that Jesus taught. And I like to think that these teachings and perhaps even others in his letter are his very personal intimate distillation of what his older brother was about. James may still be able to give us his own personal view of Jesus and may be able to focus some things for us in a very special way.
May I ask you to use your imaginations this morning as we do our best to enter into the heart and mind of James the son of Joseph and Mary, James of Nazareth, and let his insights, partly from what we can read in the Scriptures, partly from a consecrated imagination, teach .us something about this important theme, "How To Tell the Truth"
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Do you know me? Probably not. I don't even carry a Judean Express Card. My face is not all that familiar, and my name is a very common one, a problem I hold in common with that pastor of yours. It does not distinguish me from all the others who carry it. And although I have become influential in the company of believers, still not many know me or understand fully what I have been through.
First, my name and my origin. I am Yakov ben Yoseph, James the son of Joseph. My mother was Miriam; you know her better as Mary. I grew up with my parents in the town of Nazareth in the region known as Galilee, working around my father’s carpenter shop, attending lessons and daily prayers at the synagogue, learning the traditions and laws of my people from the rabbis and from my parents, and, most of all, elbowing for room in a crowded household with all my brothers and sisters. We were by no means wealthy, and it was crowded, very crowded. I had several sisters, and you know how much room girls use up and how noisy their chatter is; and as for my brothers, well, most of them were younger than I and so at least I could maintain something of an upper hand with them. But one brother was older, and let me tell you, he is the one who made things really crowded.
Now you must understand that in recent years I have undergone a change of heart about this elder brother of mine. But I must also tell you what it felt like when we were growing up. You must understand what it meant to be Number Two, trying harder all the time, when you had this number one to reach for.
In the first place, there was the matter of his birth. My parents did not say a whole lot about it, but every now and again, especially when I just did some typically younger brother pranks -- every now and then they would remind me that I dare not treat this one lightly or roughly, that he had come from the Most High and that his birth was very, very special.
Frankly I never quite knew what to make of all that and was glad that most of the time my mother kept all these things and just thought about them inside. It's hard enough to be the younger brother, trying to measure up to all the things your big brother can do without having to think of him as somehow endowed of the Lord, God’s gift to Nazareth.
And then there was this manner he had. So inquisitive, so penetrating, so provocative. He would say and do the strangest things. Why, I remember that when he was twelve and I was just a couple of years younger, my parents took him up to Jerusalem to the Temple for his bar mitzvah. And do you know the rascal just walked off and disappeared, kept us waiting around and scouring the place for several days. I told my father that all this sitting around was boring, boring; that we should just up and leave him. And in fact we almost did, but Mother found him deep in conversation with the priests and teachers at the temple. They thought it was just wonderful that he could ask all those confusing questions. As for me, I really thought it was kind of impertinent, kind of uncool. I mean, kids are not supposed to show intellectual curiosity. You can get tagged as a square, as a nerd, that way.
To sum it up, Jesus and I did not get along all that well. Of course part of the problem was that you could never quite get to him. No matter what I did, there was a certain impenetrable side that I never could reach. And as we moved into young adulthood, about all I can say is that we grew further and further apart.
When Jesus got to be about thirty years old, he abruptly left the carpenter shop – and, I might add, increased my work load proportionately, because our father Joseph had died by then. And Jesus my brother became Jesus the wandering rabbi. Off he would go, with a scruffy looking band of malcontents following after him: twelve of them, by actual count, and a couple of them were also named Jacob or James. Please, please, please do not get me confused with those nuts! Off he went, all over the countryside, preaching and speaking and doing all sorts of things. Those of us who had stayed at home – I might add, who had stayed at home doing what the Law prescribed, taking care of our aging mother – we got worried.
We got worried because sometimes Jesus appeared to preach sedition, and we wondered if the authorities might come down on him and on us. We got worried because he obviously had very little respect for the leaders of our people and was never happier than when he was tagging them as vipers and snakes. And we got very, very worried when word got back to us that he was commanding demons to do this or that; some hog farmer was reported to be very upset about his herd and we understood we might get a bill for a small fortune in unclean swine. Jesus was commanding demons and more than that was holding himself out as indestructible. I mean, how would you feel if it was your brother screaming out that he was greater than the prophet Jonah and more splendid than old King Solomon? You'd be upset too.
And so I got my brothers Joseph and Simon and Judas together – sad to say, Mother insisted on coming with us – and we went out to find Jesus and bring him home. He needed to be withdrawn from circulation in a hurry before he could hurt himself or us. But, do you know, when we got to the place where he was teaching, he was worked up into a fine tantrum. When he learned that we had come for him, he launched into a grand rhetorical gesture and a speech about how his real mother and his real brothers were those who followed him and did God's will, as he saw it, of course. And we were rebuffed, completely rebuffed. What a gloomy desperate family we were that night.
Well, that same night I made a crucial decision. I decided that the only way I could protect my family against danger from our non-conforming elder brother was to follow him at a safe distance. I would simply stay in the shadows behind him wherever he went and would keep an eye on him. He wouldn't even have to know I was around. I certainly wasn’t about to become one of his ridiculous fishermen, but at least I might be able to keep him and the family from harm.
Now you must know that he jarred me, he startled me many times. You see, I had become in our household the upholder of the Law. I had drunk deep at the font of Jewish wisdom and had become more orthodox than the Pharisees, more righteous than the rabbis, more pious than the priests. Anything you believed, I believed better. And so it got to the very roots of my soul when I saw Jesus do some things.
I think especially of the time when he was tested by the legal scholars about the crime of adultery. A man and a woman had been caught in the act, as the saying goes, and they brought her to Jesus for a judgment. What? You're wondering why they didn't bring the man also? Well, come on now, boys will be boys, you know.
They brought the woman to Jesus for judgment, and he knew perfectly well what the Law said. Stone her. Stone her. In fact, I nearly blew my cover because my hands got to itching to be in on this act of well-deserved execution. But listen to my brother: Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone. As for you, my daughter, go and sin no more.
At first I was shocked. Such a careless disregard for the will of God. But when I saw her face, when I read the relief and the joy on it, I learned something. I learned something about truth: that truth is not always what the rulebook says. Truth is what compassion dictates. In fact, I made a quick note about what I learned. Would you like me to read it for you?
"Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God." Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger – I began that day to change, just a little, maybe, but nonetheless to change.
Change or no change, my worst fears began to materialize. As the weeks wore on, I found my steps tracing those of Jesus in the direction of the Holy City, Jerusalem. Already the word was out that the authorities wanted him for questioning, maybe wanted to squelch him. Something about disturbing our special Judean relationship with Rome. Uneasy bedfellows, I thought.
But then it happened. In a swift series of events that took my breath away, they came to arrest him, thanks to one of those rascals he had insisted on picking up, one Judas Iscariot, the betrayer. He it was who led the temple authorities to Jesus when there was no adoring crowd about. He it was who sold my brother for a miserable pittance, thirty silver coins. And again I nearly blew my cover; I almost jumped out from behind the olive tree where I had been hiding. But it would not have served any use. It would have helped Mother if I were to be arrested too.
And something else stopped me as well. Something else glued my feet to the ground. It was Jesus' look, it was his reproach to Judas. Where you would have expected venom and fire, there was only a question. Where you might have anticipated accusations and name-calling, there was only this: “Judas, would you betray the son of man with a kiss?" Would you use the instrument of love and of greeting to bring down another human being? I say, that glued my feet to the place where I stood as if I had been one of the ancient deep-rooted trees that grew there. And in my astonishment I learned something else about truth-telling, something else about the way the truth penetrates best: that malicious accusations are not necessary, that most of us are convicted simply by the truth itself. Jesus taught me that night simply to let the truth work, that I do not have to help it along by screaming negatives from the housetops. Later, in fact, we heard that Judas in remorse had taken his own life; that’s how powerful simply truth is.
Here, if you like, is the way I wrote it down: “Do not speak evil against one another. He that speaks evil against a brother or judges his brother speaks evil against the law and judges the law. Who are you that you judge your neighbor?"
Truth, you see, is truth, and does not need embellishment by you or me. If someone is in the wrong, I do not need to run all over God's heaven smearing his name. It is enough to let truth be truth.
After that night, you must already know, everything went down the tubes, just as we had all feared it might. Imagine the horror of seeing my brother – trouble though he had been, but still my brother – flung up on a Roman cross. And my precious mother, having to see all this happen. I was too weak, too distraught even to reach out to her, and somehow Jesus knew that and commended her to the care of one of his followers.
But the only reason I am here to tell you any of this is that in a few days everything was different again, wildly different. The rumors began to grow quickly, rumors that in my more cynical moments sounded like something he would have claimed, and yet how could he? He was dead and gone; had I not seen it with my own eyes? But the rumors were abroad that he was alive again, raised from the dead and appearing here and there. This I was not prepared for, this I could not handle. When I learned that he was supposed to have met with the twelve, I could dismiss that as the ramblings of a dozen fanatics. But when I heard that a gathering of some five hundred had experienced him, I was shaken, truly and deeply shaken.
How can I tell you about what happened next? It was in the stillness of an early morning, as I tossed fitfully on a borrowed bed, not able to get any real rest for trying to make sense of all that had been happening, all that I had heard about. And out of that stillness I heard my name being called, Jacob, Jacob. That voice, I knew that voice! Here he was, Jesus my brother, alive, in my room. Jesus my brother? No, Jesus my Lord. Alive, to be touched, to be seen, present and approachable, the Lord himself, never again to be doubted.
And I could not help but recall all the promises he had made, how he had said that this he would do, how he had declared that he would suffer many things and die and then return for us. I could not help but see that it all made sense because he made sense. In the integrity of his life there was truth and he did not have to make extravagant claims or explain unexplainable lapses. Jesus never had to take a fifth amendment or fall back on a failing memory to interpret his words. He lived in such integrity, he backed his claims with his life. And truth, you see, is best served with integrity.
My notebook served me well again, and I put it this way: “Do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, that you may, not fall under condemnation.”
Indeed, brothers and sisters, take it from Jacob/James, born into the household of Jesus and then born again into the very life of Jesus: Truth is first of all spoken with compassion. Truth, when simply presented, does its own convicting. And truth is believable when backed by a life of integrity. I hope you learn these lessons as I did from him who not only taught and told truth, but who is truth.
