Benjamin T. Randall

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Bible-study: 2018/09/23 (St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, McMinnville) – James: Week 4 - 3:13-4:3,7-8a Once again, for the sake of brevity – or for some other reason that I cannot fathom, the architects of the Revised Common Lectionary have redacted some verses from the midst of what seems, to me, to be an already concise, well-rounded discourse on a single theme: [Ask for a volunteer to read the passage, including the missing verses, 4 and 5.] Our topic, then, this morning, as you may have already guessed, is that notorious and likely, to us all, very familiar, “green-eyed monster,” which Iago, warns his friend, Othello, in Shakespeare’s play of that name, ‘doth mock the meat it feeds on’:1 In verses fourteen and fifteen, James uses the word, “envy” – in Greek ζῆλον [“zeelon”] or ζῆλος [“zeelos”], and in chapter four, verse, 2, he uses “covet,” which is from the same “root,” ζηλοῦτε [“zeelouté”]. (And from this, of course, we get the English noun “zeal” and its derivatives.) And then, additionally, in the section that we “replaced,” he said of God that He ‘yearns jealously’[v.5], which, in the original, is the synonym φθόνον [“phthonon”]. That he should choose to address this issue confirms the letter’s much remarked upon ‘Semitic feel’;2 it reinforces the impression of it as an almost “organic” extension of the Old Testament: James “tone,” or his “style,” it is often noted, by commentators, is especially evocative of that of the prophets;3 and his ‘language’ generally ‘is very Septuagintal’;4 that is to say, very similar to that of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was widely dispersed and read and quoted in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st century A. D..5 And he seems, in his own composition, to have “relied” on it ‘heavily’.6 Perhaps it sat next to him, open, on the table as he scribed (or dictated)?

1 Shakespeare, William (1903), The Tragedy of Othello, London: Methuen & Co., 135-136. 2 Witherington, Ben, III (2007), Letters and Homilies for Jewish Christians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Hebrews, James and Jude, Downers Grove, I. L.: IVP Academic, 388. 3 Moo, Douglas J. (1985), James (Tyndale New Testament Commentaries), Nottingham, U. K.; Downers Grove, I. L.: InterVarsity Press, 210 & 211. 4 Witherington (2007), 388. 5 Dines, Jennifer M. (2004), The Septuagint, London, U. K.; New York, N. Y.: T. & T. Clark (A Continuum Imprint), 4-5. 6 deSilva, David A. (2012), The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 48.

Sunday

Benjamin T. Randall

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And in there – in the Septuagint – those terms are employed hundreds if not thousands of times. Now, the thing to notice is that James is principally concerned, in this passage, to address (the problem of) human jealousies and the conflict – the discord – that they cause, which are a ‘hideous’ thing: ‘[jealousy – wanting what others have and wishing it was ours] destroys friendships and marriages.’7 It poisons our lives and communities, if we let it. And yet our culture – or way of life – seems dependent on keeping us in a constant state of dissatisfaction with our lot, and looking greedily at “the Joneses,” only now they’re not immediately living next door, but on television on The Bachelor or, a few years ago, MTV Cribs: An interesting study by a scholar, Susan Matt, published by the University of Pennsylvania, makes the case that the United States’ remarkable growth into the world’s sole superpower was driven by a “redefinition” – a rehabilitation - of covetousness at the beginning of the nineteen-hundreds. She argues that ‘America could sustain a full-fledged consumer economy only after men and women has overcome their religious reservations about materialism and had developed an emotional style that emphasized the value of pleasure, indulgence, and desire[,] and downplayed the importance of restraint and delayed gratification.’8 But James condemns such an attitude, and claims God is “opposed” to it too: [4:6]. Instead, he urges Christians to be a ‘peaceable’ people ‘willing to yield’.[3:17]. “Willing to yield” to perceived deficiency, to felt injustices; to say, “I like that but I can go without.” “It’s nice, but I don’t need it.” “I feel I’ve earned that, but that doesn’t mean I should have it by right.” And he attributes those feelings or ‘cravings’ of wanting the belongings or position of others, by implication, to ‘the devil’.[4:7] That isn’t to say they are foreign to us, however: At the beginning he describes the maneuverings of the ambitious person malcontented with a humble status, as an ‘earthly’ “wisdom,” which emerges from ‘your hearts’: [3:14-15]. The finger of blame, therefore, of judgment, points with justification at us. How does that make you feel? Are you a jealous person? Do you find yourself looking, longingly, at the possessions of those around you? [Discussion.] Given the force with which James condemns envy, it is interesting that, in verse

7 Strauss, Richard L. (18th of May, 2004), ‘A Jealous God’, Bible.org, available at https://bible.org/seriespage/21-jealous-god (accessed September 21, 2018). 8 Matt, Susan J. (2003), Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930, Philadelphia, P. A.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 3.

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five (of chapter four), as I mentioned earlier, he remarks that God ‘yearns’ with jealous feelings. So, how can this be? Well, according to the Scriptures, there is such a thing as a ‘righteous jealousy’. Consider marriage. ‘I can be jealous over my relationship with my wife in a wrong way or in a right way. For example, if I feel resentment or anger merely because I see her talking to another man, that would be self-centered possessiveness and unreasonable domination – in other words, sinful jealousy. It would stem from my own selfishness or insecurity rather than from my commitment to her and to what is right. But, on the other hand, if I see some man actually trying to alienate my wife’s affections and seduce her, then I have reason to be righteously jealous. God gave her to me to be my wife. Her body is mine just as my body is hers. I have the exclusive right to enjoy her fully, and for someone else to assume that right would be a violation of God’s holy standards.’9 And we hear many times, in the Old Testament, that God experiences ‘righteous jealousy’ – in the book of Exodus, in Deuteronomy… When He sees the Israelites flirting with pagan cults, taking sacrifices to the shrines of the Canaanites on the “high places.” But we must be clear that His reaction, [h]owever emotional it may [seem] to be, …is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against [H]is holiness.’10 Furthermore, [i]n speaking of God[,] we may not forget that all our terms are analogical’; that [a]ll our ideas of God are finite and unworthy efforts to conceive His glory’. And so whilst the Bible ‘teems’ with anthropomorphic language’, we mustn’t imagine that it means to describe the very same phenomenon as we experience:11 His responses to our acts – even the most monstrous – are never ‘involuntarily extracted.’12 And this is a terribly important point. A god who is overwhelmed by instinctual passions to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” would be no such God whatsoever: a creaturely being like that is one who can be manipulated, misled. It is one who would not just act – as we would want them to, to use their supernatural abilities to shape events to bring about greater goods – but also, potentially, mis-act in the heat of a moment, and then have cause to regret. And then, perhaps, to be taken by self-doubt, and to wallow and hesitate. And this would be terrifying, and make them unpredictable. And this is how all the ancient pantheons were.

9 Strauss (2004). 10 Carson, D. A. (2000), The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, Wheaton, I. L.: Crossway Books, 69. 11 Tymms, Vincent (1904), The Christian Idea of Atonement, London, U. K.; New York, N. Y.: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., 311-312. 12 Lister, Rob (2013), God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion, Wheaton, I. L.: Crossway, 204.

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But in the first century, the (classical) philosophers, having concluded that such gods could be no such thing, concluded that the creator, if there was one, would be different, the reverse; He would be, to use their jargon, impassible. Rationally, this must be true. And in the Bible we find ‘bridges’ to their kind of thinking. Indeed, the (early) “Church Fathers” made a great deal of what surely wasn’t a coincidence.13 But their emphasis on God’s emotional stability wasn’t without qualification: ‘a majority of the notable Fathers had a "two-pronged” balance in their doctrine of divine impassibility’14 – of a God ‘who is responsive rather than reactive to the world, and one who is deeply involved in human history without being at its mercy.’15 And this should matter to you. It means that God isn’t some remote, disinterested “iceberg”16 but rather has chosen to love you; to know you. And because it isn’t a love that has sprung from your physical beauty or your pheromones or as the consequence of some uncontrolled chemical reaction in the brain or how charming you are, will love you when you fail to be lovely. It means that He has decided to be vulnerable, but needn’t be; that His concern for me ‘goes unobstructed’ unless He decides to withdraw it for an objective cause such as a failure for me to appropriately reciprocate.17 This is why He is jealous when I give my adoration to things that don’t warrant such affection and commitment. And James reminds us of this as he confronts us with the reality of our “adultery.”

13 Weinandy, Thomas, O. F. M. (2000), Does God Suffer?, Notre Dame, I. L.: University of Notre Dame Press, 88. 14 Lister (2013), 21. 15 Eklund, Rebekah (2016), Jesus Wept: The Significance of Jesus’ Laments in the New Testament, London, U. K.; New York, N. Y.: Bloomsbury / T. & T. Clark, 122. (My emphasis.) 16 Tymms (1904), 311. 17 See: Sirvent, Roberto (2017), Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine, Cambridge, U. K.: James Clarke & Co.