Published December 4, 2024
Words matter. They express but also shape our thoughts, which in turn frame the way we live. Here’s an example: The words of the Nicene Creed are crucial to Christian belief. They’ve summarized and guided the Christian faith for 1,700 years. We recite them routinely every Sunday at Mass, but there was nothing routine in their origin. Good people argued, fought, and died in formulating them, and their influence over the centuries has been massive. Simply put, words matter for two reasons. They convey or distort reality, and they enrich or mislead both the persons who hear them, and the persons who use them.
As a result, if words become corrupted, wrote the philosopher Josef Pieper (in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power), “human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.” He described the intentional abuse of language – so common in modern politics – as “an instrument of rape” because it violates the human right to truth. But sloppiness, inaccuracy, and well-intended compromise in the use of language can be just as damaging as deceit in their effects. We can gradually lose our convictions by draining away the strength of the words we use to express them.
This is why I’ve always found the Epistle of James so compelling, especially during Advent. Written by James the Less, chief elder of the early Church in Jerusalem, the text makes for a bracing read. It’s clear. It’s forceful, It’s practical. And it’s brief.
While his spirit is fraternal and his intent is to encourage the faithful, James has very little time for ambiguity or excuses. There’s an urgency, a zeal, to his words that flows directly from his witness to a world-changing event, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His message is simple: The “before” and the “after” of Christ’s mission are two radically distinct realities. And unless self-described Christians want to lie to themselves and everyone else, they need to act in accord with what they claim to believe.
The letter’s central message is found in verses 1:22 through 1:25:
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer that acts, he shall be blessed in his doing.
The theme is reprised in verses 2:14 through 2:17:
What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
For James, “even the demons believe – and shudder.” The faith of demons is lifeless because, in their pride and treason against God, they refuse faith’s obligations. James’s point is not that good works can somehow “earn” salvation because they can’t. Salvation is a free, unearned, and unearnable gift of God’s love. It’s not a religious transaction: “If I do this, God, then you will do that.” But if we claim to believe with our words, then our actions will naturally show it in our behavior. Otherwise, we’re living as frauds.
And what behavior does a real faith imply and require? Just this: support for orphans, widows, the sick, and the poor in all their differing conditions; a humble awareness of our mortality; a refusal to be deluded by wealth or status; a steadfast confidence in God despite setbacks and obstacles; a disciplined tongue unwilling to speak poison; and patience in suffering.
Maybe most uncomfortably for those of us in the “developed” world, James warns that “friendship with the world is enmity with God,” and “whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” We Catholics have spent decades assimilating and fitting into a very comfortable American way of life; a life rich in material advantages. It’s worth considering what we’ve become in the process.
The words I’ve just written, of course, are an exercise in self-indictment. But that’s the point of Advent, isn’t it? We’re called to examine ourselves candidly and thoroughly, and thereby prepare for the coming of Jesus, both at Christmas and the end of time. To borrow some words of Alfred Delp, the Jesuit priest martyred by the Third Reich, we’re “no longer a people of clarity who know about this one Lord [Jesus Christ] and who stand in simplicity, without usurping the Lord’s rights, without betraying our duty to him, or bargaining. We have become a people of many lords, somehow divided, somehow separated” both from God and each other as genuine disciples and believers. Instead, we need to embrace “Advent [as] a time of being deeply shaken, so that man will wake up to himself” and the purposes for which God made him.
What was true for Delp in 1940s Germany is no less true for us Christians here, in our own country, today. The liturgical season we’ve just begun calls us not to applaud the Gospel as a collection of good teachings, but to “burn with a desire” for personal conversion and the salvation of the world.
The only question that matters this Advent is whether Jesus Christ is really who the Epistle of James claims he is: the center of history, the Lord of creation, the God of life who warrants the passion of our hearts. In the time we’ve been given, are we living in AD 2024 or 2024 CE; in Anno Domini, “the year of Our Lord,” or just another 12 months in a morally vacant “Common Era.”
We each get to choose – and to act accordingly.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
