Canter Bridge

A modest tributary to the stream of biblical wisdom carries the thought that it is proper to choose mourning over celebration. The funeral home is, at moments, a more wisely chosen venue than the dance hall. Sadness, sometimes, produces when rejoicing has become an amiable pickpocket, slapping backs and telling jokes while relieving us of our substance.

James’ letter picks up on this counter-intuitive wisdom motif, one that intrudes all the more awkwardly for the degree to which we have bought the line that self-fulfillment is the inalienable right and anchoring core of our existence:

Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

James can pen lines like this and expect of his readers careful attention rather than derisive laughter because he shares with them a number of assumptions.

First, he believes they occupy a stage on which a powerful adversary stalks with opportunistic astuteness:

Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, ‘God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says,’God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Second, James’ thinking about human experience has become saturated with the idea—common among those who find themselves powerless yet with their integrity intact—that God is the one who vindicates and lifts up. The corollary of this conviction is that people who lives high lives are to be suspected of self-exaltation and, therefore, presumed to be in danger of imminent collapse.

If one believes such things about human affairs, then happiness is a ruse. One embraces that joy which comes, unsolicited, to the carefully and quietly laid boards of one’s house. But to go out to the streets in search of it is the folly of the morally blind.

At the same time, one awaits—to run after it would be presumption—that moment when suddenly and to the astonishment of people who presumed to know how the world works the Lord lifts up the humble man, reverses the fortunes of the righteous woman, puts a song into the heretofore empty mouths of children who have been taught how to sit quietly, obediently, expectantly in anticipation that something worthy was just around the corner.