Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
“Less is more.” “Lay your egg and get off the nest.” “This is not a hostage situation.” “If you want to teach a class, get a classroom.” “Be brief. Be bold. Be gone.”
These were recommendations my Franciscan editor would repeat often to me and other contributors in my 25 years as a regular writer for St. Anthony Messenger Press’ Homily Helps. It was work that I loved.
Given his demand for down-to-earth brevity, my practical editor, if he were assisting 4th century bishops in deciding what would be included in the New Testament, would have put the Letter of James at the top of his list. (The Council of Rome set the canon or “official list” of our 27 books in 382 CE.) Our first reading today, James, is to-the-point and filled with advice about the trials of life. It is the first of the “Catholic Epistles,” addressed not to one particular church (eg. Corinth, Galatia, Thessalonica, etc.) but for the whole church in every time and place.
If writing specifically for us today, James might put it this way: “faith must be lived where the rubber meets the road.” Where trials and temptations abound and especially where the poor suffer at the hands of the rich, James calls his hearers to fervently live the faith in the trenches.
James promotes not a pie-in-the-sky faith but a right-here-and-now faith. And we who claim Christ must not merely hear the Word, but live the Word (1:22). But it would be a mistake to read James merely as a handbook of helpful advice. Being grounded is a good thing but, as far as James is concerned, practical Christian living must revolve around the person of Jesus Christ.
Just as James comes as “the servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1), so his desire that his hearers (90% of the ancients couldn’t read and heard this letter in liturgical assemblies) might revolve around the same Christ. All Christian faith comes down to this relationship with the person of Jesus. Everything else is peripheral. Without a relationship with the Lord, the whole of our sacred writings would be, as St. Thomas Aquinas liked to say, “mere straw.”
Luther referred to James as “the Epistle of straw” and wanted to reject it from the Lutheran canon because it counters his absolutism around “Faith over works.” “Faith without works is dead,” James wrote, 1,450 years before Luther.
What “practical” steps might we take as we enter into Lent on Wednesday? As a guide for the upcoming forty days, be sure to pick up our annual Lenten Discipleship Challenge booklet from the Ite Missa Est discipleship committee. Daily meditations with practical suggestions/action steps were written by parishioners from throughout our Family of Parishes. These are found in the church bulletins and vestibules. It may prove to be an invaluable tool for “where the rubber meets the road.”
-Timothy J. Cronin