Monday 25 January 2021

My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. – James 2:1

Today's Scripture Reading (January 25, 2021): James 2

In "Living, Loving, and Learning," Leo Buscaglia says, "Don't walk in my head with your dirty feet." I understand the prohibition. I live in a world of division and partitions.  It is a world that is filled with prejudices. And what is even worse is that the world seems to want to convince me that their biases are and God-approved. They want to walk around my head with their dirty feet. And when you walk around with dirty feet, you always leave footprints.

James lived in an era of prejudice, and often they were prejudices that many believed were God-approved. It was an era where prejudice was common and based on ethnicity, nationality, economic class, and religious background. People were judged as being either a Jew or Gentile, the free were separated from the slave, the rich removed themselves from the presence of the poor, and the educated Greek culture looked down on the uncivilized and primitive Barbarian. For many, these were the accusations the people used against each other to prove that they were better and more worthy of consideration than their opponents.

Jesus stepped into this era and taught something different. He frequently ignored the barriers, calling the tax-collector and the prostitute to follow him and showing his love and concern for people that the culture had discarded. But in the days of Jesus, there are indications that James, the little brother of the Rabbi, thought that his big brother was mistaken. In those days, he held the teachings of Jesus with contempt. It wasn't until after Jesus's resurrection that James began to realize that his brother was the Messiah, and he began his journey to accept the teachings of Jesus.

By the time that he writes his letter, he agrees. The old prejudices that Jesus rejected now needed to be rejected by the church and its leadership. Believers could not follow the favoritisms of the past. It was time for a change. Later, Paul would expand on James's teaching that "believers in … Jesus Christ must not show favoritism." He would write to the Galatian church, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:28-29). And then, Paul would expand again on this teaching in his letter to the church at Ephesus

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility (Ephesians 2:14-16).

In light of all of this, maybe it is time that we demand that those around us "stop walking around our heads with their dirty feet."

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: James 3

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