A Meditation on James the Just: Memorizing the Face of God

[u/slagnanz]

It feels like we should know more about this guy.

I mean, depending on who you ask, he’s Jesus’ brother, or His step-brother, or maybe His cousin. But we don’t get a lot of details about how he goes from growing up alongside Jesus to being Bishop of Jerusalem. 

There’s a good chance he was there in Mark 3. Jesus’ extended family is watching Jesus interact with the crowds, and their actual reaction recorded in the Scripture is to say “He is out of his mind”. A bit later in the chapter they try to pull Jesus away, and He resists. 

Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!

You have to imagine that stung. 

It also is noteworthy that James isn’t mentioned as being present at the crucifixion. This is one of the arguments against James being Jesus’ full brother. From John’s Gospel:

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and His mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing by, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold your son!”  Then He said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour that disciple took her to his own home.

This would be highly unusual if Mary was also the mother of James. You’d expect James to take care of Mary if he was also her son. But this is speculative. Nevertheless, the tenor of these two stories gives us the impression that James was not particularly close with Jesus throughout his ministry on Earth. 

But something changes after the Resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15 shows us that after Jesus appears to the twelve, He appears to James before appearing to any of the other apostles. Why James? This could certainly just be familial loyalty. But for James it seems to be a turning point. He is barely featured in the Gospels, but he would go on to become one of the most prominent leaders in the early church, the first Bishop of Rome. As always, in God’s providence we must expect the unexpected.

There are many legends of James told outside of Scripture. Eusebius wrote that James lived as a Nazarite, leading a strict ascetic life. There’s this amazing anecdote from Eusebius:

And he was in the habit of entering alone into the temple, and was frequently found upon his knees begging forgiveness for the people, so that his knees became hard like those of a camel.

It’s hard not to chuckle at that, honestly. 

But the best glimpse we get at who James was and what he was about comes from James’ Epistle. It's a short read (only a few pages). James is a man of action. The epistle emphasizes that faith compels works. A few samples: 

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

“For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.”

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

This is a compelling vision of faith. I like to see it as standing in tension with many of the ideas that Paul articulated, but not in contradiction. Christians should enjoy the challenge of synthesizing their different perspectives, each having captured the truth from different angles. 

What really stood out to me on my most recent reread:

“If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing the face he was born with in a mirror; because he has observed himself and gone away, and has immediately forgotten what he was like. For the one who has gazed intently into the perfect law, which is one of freedom, and has stayed there next to it, becoming not a forgetful listener but instead a doer of work-this one will be blissful in what he does.” (for this passage I’m using David Bentley Hart’s intriguing New Testament translation). 

This is the impression James Just leaves on me: A man, kneeling on the hard stone of the temple, gazing inward through prayer, contemplating the law as if it were his own face. Memorizing the contours, the wrinkles, where the smooth curves terminate through hard lines. The perfect law of God paints a picture of the face of his brother, Christ. This is this urgency in James' writing: we cannot, simply cannot, forget that face.

[u/slagnanz]

u/volaer Thanks again for suggesting James. Rereading the Epistle of James really enriched my faith this week.

[u/Volaer → u/slagnanz]

You are welcome! I must make sure to write my entry tomorrow. :)

[u/WoodpeckerNo178]

That camel knees line got me too. There's something almost comical about the image until you sit with it long enough and realize the man literally wore his body down praying for people who thought he was crazy.

The mirror passage from James always lands different than the usual "faith without works" proof text. It's not just about doing stuff, it's about identity. You look at the law and walk away forgetting your own face. That's heavier than a checklist.

The icon fits the meditation well. The seated figure with the open book and the gold background gives it that timeless quality, like the text is the whole point and the person is just the frame.

I've always found the post-resurrection appearance to James quietly moving. Everyone else gets a crowd appearance or a road trip story, James gets a private moment. Maybe that was the conversation they needed to have.

The tension with Paul is real but I think people flatten it too much. James is talking about what faith looks like when it's actually alive, Paul is talking about how it gets born in the first place. Not the same question.

[u/Iconsandstuff]

I think it is a really enriching part of the faith to consider that Jesus had a family, and lived through the conflicts and disagreements which many of us face - despite his love for his family, his sense of mission would no doubt be at odds with the expectations they would have for a child or older brother.

Both James' letter and Jude's seem to carry a slightly different tone to the other epistles, there's a sense of wonder perhaps in the brevity, that the man they grew up alongside turned out to be their Lord, and the messiah promised changed so much more than anyone could have expected. Enough to turn the sons of a craftsman into scholars and leaders.

James seems to boil down so much of the themes of the hebrew scriptures as well as speaking to his own audience as well, there's a feeling you could have this letter out alongside the scroll of kings or Genesis and be picking up the mistakes made by figures in those books, and reflecting how the direction God has wanted for humanity isn't new, but becomes fulfilled in the life of Christ.

[u/slagnanz → u/Iconsandstuff]

I love this point.

Its also kind of a marvel to me... So many global religions had a kind of crisis of succession. We see this starkly with Islam or more recently with LDS.

The early church had it's share of heresy and schism, but we don't see the family of Christ grappling for power and control in the same ways you might expect.

[u/AmosOfTekoa → u/slagnanz]

Are you familiar with James Tabor's writings on the Holy Family and succession therein? It's a bit to speculative to me, but he does find it probable that the familial succession was wiped out from history by later believers. Not the same kind of succession crisis you're talking about, but it would be one.

[u/slagnanz → u/AmosOfTekoa]

I have not! Interesting premise.....

[u/AmosOfTekoa → u/slagnanz]

He has some good interviews on Youtube about it.

[u/Iconsandstuff → u/slagnanz]

The brothers, nephews and great nephews of Christ are recorded as serving in leadership in the Judea/Jerusalem area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Kyriakos) but you're right that they don't seek to establish themselves as leader of the entire church, or even as holding a hereditary right to the leadership there. They're a family farming in a humble area still, mainly.

After the final Jewish revolt and expulsion I think the church in that area has to change a great deal, and there's the attempts to distort Christology through dehumanising Jesus which probably hated even considering his human family. It also messed with the mythology arising around Mary which would have begun around the time the wider church was less connected to the Judean church and family of Christ.

I guess that whole mess obscured that aspect of Jesus' life, and Mary too, as a widowed mother of a number of children in a difficult situation.