26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, B September 26, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Here we are, the prophetic crescendo of the letter of St. James. And when I say “prophetic,” I don’t mean James is predicting the future but that he, like many prophets before him, strongly warns us about sin, death, and judgment. And James gets this preoccupation with damnation from his cousin, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.
Hell is real and people do go there. Damnation is real. It isn’t some medieval masochist who came up with the idea of eternal fire, but Jesus himself who describes it that way, adding the even more grotesque image of worm that does not die. If Jesus isn’t afraid to say it, we mustn’t be either. Not that it’s our first or most common tactic, but the warning of judgment must be part of our proclamation of the Gospel. So, James doesn’t mince words. He very directly speaks to a specific set of sins: Greed. Unjust wages. False Judgment. Murder.
It’s been a recurring theme – most of readings we’ve gotten from James have come back to the spiritual value of money as an expression of our love of God and neighbor. I almost hesitate to reiterate the point because I’ve said it so many times these few weeks, but that’s what James is teaching: If we love money, we cannot love God the way we should. A concrete way to love our neighbor is to use our money to help them. Now James uses a dramatic and darkly poetic image of the wealth itself causing our suffering. This makes a simple point: Wealth. Is. Dangerous. As one famous artist put it: “Mo money, Mo problems.”
To live in luxury and pleasure is to risk your soul, even if you earned the money fairly. Why? Because we’re not meant for this world and if we are too comfortable in this world, we will lose sight of the next – it’s just a part of our fallen human nature. And the love of money, comfort, and pleasure all too often makes it easy to cut spiritual corners, to turn a blind eye to evil, to go along with some sin out of sheer inertia. If your hand – or your wealth – causes you to sin, cut it off.
Of course, the reality is that getting rich “fairly” is actually extraordinarily difficult. When the primary goal of a someone is profit, they inevitably cut corners. It often takes time and happens subtly, but it usually translates to workers getting less and less for more and more labor. We all enjoy cheap commodities made overseas by people paid barely enough – or not enough to survive. Just because someone agrees to a wage doesn’t make it fair. If they are desperate and offered a choice between nothing and an unfair wage, they’ll agree to an unfair wage or hours, but that doesn’t make it right. Even if the employer doesn’t intentionally take advantage of the situation, the fact that he or she is even willing to offer the possibility of overworking or underpaying someone is the problem. Unregulated capitalism tends to treat people as parts of a machine instead of seeing them as persons with dignity. And no, socialism isn’t the answer – it brings a different set of problems – but we have to stop pretending that there are only two alternatives. Wages and hours can be unfair even if someone agrees to it. In a post-Christian culture like ours, part of what sets a Christian businessman apart is that they freely choose to be fair even when they could legally and culturally get away with more. That’s not politics, that’s Scripture.
The evils of the love of money don’t stop there. Economics does affect politics and law. It’s not new to us – James wrote this 2000 years ago and the Old Testament addresses the same problem 1000 years before that – greed leads societies to reinforce the rich with unjust laws and judges. A conflux of social, legal, and economic realities came together to create the must unjust legal decision since Pilate crucified Jesus. There are many other factors, but we can’t pretend that Roe vs. Wade was completely disconnected from greed. As we industrialized, our culture put more and more value on a certain kind of labor – labor that pregnant women were not capable of doing. Be attentive! I’m saying our culture was wrong to devalue the contribution of women – pregnant women included. Rather than cooperating with the unique capacities of women, our society devised a way to hold their procreative powers against them. The fact that a woman can legally choose to just stop being pregnant makes it easier for companies and the culture to blame them for it and refuse them work or opportunities. The Church is pro-life because she is pro-woman. Catholic Social Teaching demands culture and companies work with the unique powers of woman, not that they suppress them in the name of profit or the GDP.
And that’s only one example. The whole of our past with slavery and racism is another massive example. Plenty of welfare laws actually work against keeping families and marriages together.
Finally, James speaks of murder. Besides the example I’ve just mentioned, this applies in another way. It is a reference to Jesus’ teaching that however we treat the least among us is how we treat him. Jesus is the “righteous one” who “offers you no resistance.” He was murdered by his own people because they feared the loss of power and the wealth that comes from it. Whenever we overlook suffering because we are too comfortable, whenever we deprive workers a fair wage, whenever we enact laws that harm the poor for the convenience of the rich… we are in a sense killing them and therefore murdering Jesus who is in them. And for that, we risk damnation.
But the flip side of this dire news is the good news of the Gospel. Being a Christian is just sourly depriving ourselves of luxury. It is much more what our psalm says: “the precepts of the Lord give joy to the heart.” Joy, unlike pleasure, has a spiritual and more eternal dimension. It can also coexist with and even increase in the midst of suffering and self-denial. James’ aggressive and prophetic warning is a call to repentance, not an invitation to despair. Embrace it, embrace the cross of self-denial and you will know joy. “Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!” Indeed, he has given us his spirit. We are all called to be prophets, to proclaim the wealth of heaven that makes the wealth of this world rotten by comparison. We have only to embrace it, to speak it, to live it. Why? Because that’s what love is… that’s what love himself has done for us right there… and what he is making present right here.