The Tree Is Always Known By Its Fruit

2 My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality. ² For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, ³ and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here in a good place, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit by my footstool,” ⁴ have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? ⁵ Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? ⁶ But you have dishonored the poor person. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into the courts? ⁷ Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

⁸ If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well. ⁹ But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. ¹⁰ For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. ¹¹ For the one who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery but you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. ¹² So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. ¹³ For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

¹⁴ 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? ¹⁵ If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food ¹⁶ 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? ¹⁷ So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17 (NRSVue)

I’ve always imagined the writer of the Letter of James to be a deeply practical person, the kind of person that you could imagine as a highly effective community organiser, who sees the world clear-eyed and free from illusion, the kind of person who will instinctively hit at the core truth of a thing and be capable of explaining that truth plainly and effectively. The central themes of this passage are obvious on their face, and James’s argument is similarly clear and to the point. If you live a life rooted in faith in the love of Jesus, that life will inevitably leave traces around it, through the actions that you perform in the world. The markers of such a life involve fairness, mercy, love, compassion, and practical action (literally feeding people); one cannot be said to truly live in the faith of Jesus without these markers inevitably showing up.

James begins the passage (2:1) by stating plainly that the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not permit anyone to play favourites and show partiality to any one over any other. This is a call for redress, however, for the community James addresses needs to be reminded that the equality of the Gospel life is non-negotiable.

The systems of the world around you might demand that you accept different levels of worth, and in turn demand that you police these levels yourself (2:2-4). When you do that, however, you are not only forgetting the core truth of the Gospel – God chooses to focus their attention on the needs of the poor and the powerless (2:5) – you have somehow become the same as those who oppress you, who ignore justice and use the courts as their playthings (2:6), who use your adherence to the Gospel as a central justification for their oppression of you (2:7, 9).

Instead, you are called to show love towards your neighbour – not an affable willingness to do what is necessary to just get by, but a true love that centres their needs – as the Gospel demands of people when they show love the way that Jesus showed it (2:8, 10).

This demands an understanding of our lives as a collection of threads, radiating out from our souls within, that are woven together with the threads of everyone else (2:11). We are so shaped by these threads, and the way of life that emerges as a result of centring the law of love (2:12), that one’s faith will inevitably emerge through the actions of the person (2:14). For example, you would be merciful more than judgmental (2:13), and you would ensure that people have their basic needs met (2:15-16).

A life truly shaped by the faith of Jesus will result in actions/works that speak of the life of Jesus all on their own. In other words, if you are capable of not acting when you see a need to show mercy, or to feed someone who is hungry, or any of a number of different ways that a life shaped by the Gospel can manifest in someone’s life – a life without works – then you cannot say that you actually have faith. Again: faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (2:17).

Now that we’ve laid out the general framework of this passage, let’s return to the specific circumstances to which James was referring: people were showing partiality to people who not only didn’t need it (due to the massive amount of power they held), they didn’t deserve it (due to their deceit, manipulation, oppression, and abuses of power). This is a situation that is easily understandable, for it needs no translation: a fundamentally unfair and unjust power imbalance where those without power are forced to accommodate the desires and egos of those with power. This is the very definition of unfair, and we can all understand why.

We seem to know, almost instinctively, what feels fair to us, and what doesn’t. Almost from birth, we have a firm grasp on what emotions we feel – and how those emotions make our bodies feel – when we are convinced that we are being treated unfairly. Give one child two of something, give another child one, and – regardless of whether you have a good reason (or really any reason at all), and regardless of how carefully you explain why you did so, I can almost guarantee that the child with one thing will cry foul, and invoke the sacred invocation, known to literally everyone, everywhere: “That’s not fair!” Cue the inevitable explosion of anger, mingled with a gut punch of frustration, shock, and disappointment, and you have all of the essential elements of the experience of unfairness that every human has felt at least once in their life. Some amongst us, lest we forget, have this experience with far more regularity than others.

Of course, the challenge inherent in judging by the metric of fairness lies with the lack of any standard, universally-accepted, objective measurement of “fair” that would apply equally, to all, at all times.  Fair is irretrievably bound to circumstance and context, as fairness is nearly devoid of meaning outside of people interpreting its meaning.

For example, I am an adjunct in the humanities, whose main ministry vocation is in writing the kind of stuff you’re reading right this minute. I am deeply enmeshed in the life of my faith community, work that demands countless hours of work a week, work that I will never get paid for. I am certain that very few people see the balance between my paid labour and unpaid labour as fair. Yet, that wouldn’t tell the entire story of fair, at least not as I view it.

Here’s the argument made by so many idealists and dreamers to justify their often paltry income: life isn’t just about making money. While some of you might be wearing a knowing smirk right now, please do not mistake me: I am a true believer. I know that I am not earning anywhere close to what I could in some other fields. And I’ve come to accept that each dollar less in my paycheck equals one minute more I get to spend alone and doing work I love. In this specific circumstance, in this specific context, I have come to see a pathway for me through life where I can accept a measurement of fairness that serves my own needs, and answers to my own terms.

Yet, on another level, this situation will never, ever be fair: you will never be able to convince me that a scant few hundred people owning over 90% of the accumulated global wealth is fair on any level other than some Salvador Dali surrealist fever dream of reality – oh, wait, that’s our current reality. Eek!

The very foundations upon which society is built, and the fabric which weaves it together, are fundamentally, radically, unfair. Any attempt on my part to find some measure of fairness in a system that is unfair at its roots is a way to reclaim my autonomy from the system’s rapacious clutches. For the market, exchange is everything, and so finding a level of exchange one is willing to accept in order to engage in the life of the market is unavoidably bound up in power, and the vastly unequal distribution of power across society that seems to be a feature of late-stage capitalism.

So yes: when I take a measure of my life, I use a different metric than the market, mainly because I refuse to allow the all-powerful market to determine the tools I use to assess whether I am living a life worth living. My contentment does not suddenly change the truth about reality, nor render it fair and just; in a world where money is the primary means of exchange, where money’s interests are seen as primary above the interests of anyone else, it is nearly impossible to avoid engaging with the market on its own terms. Refusing to allow the market to dictate your own sense of personhood, of value and worth, of identity and belonging: this is what James is talking about here in James 2:1 with his argument about partiality.

James states clearly that his readers are to never mistake an attitude of deference towards the wealthy and powerful as being the same as the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s rather straightforward:  you might be forced to accept your place in a fundamentally unfair world, but you should never take the next step to allow the values of that world to become the values that shape and give meaning and purpose to your life. You will know the tree by its fruit, and the faith by the life that accompanies it. Imagine what a world we could have if we judged someone solely by their fruits, and not by their power, status, and possessions. In the meantime, in this world, our best resistance to injustice and unfairness is to never accept the narrative that they are inevitable.