When Faith Works
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it?
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
James 2:14-17
Our epistle reading today (James 2 ) is often seen as part of a Scriptural debate that we’ve heard as being at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, like a heavyweight title match: Faith vs. Works. Who wins the belt of salvation?
There’s a few problems with this. For one, the Reformation was about far more than a problem of works-righteousness and corruption within the church. For two, James is trying to tell us this title bout is a false dichotomy. They aren’t “versus” one another at all, which Jesus also shows us in our gospel reading (Mark 7:24-37). Instead, a different way I’ve been thinking about the relationship between faith and works is that our works, or our actions and activity in the world, might be like a spiritual “check engine light” for our faith. If our actions are not showing the love of Christ, we need to open the hood to re-examine and renew our faith.
In turn, perhaps we can see our faith as more than just an intellectual assent to beliefs, but as something that is meant to move our whole spirit.
Salvation and Theology Obsession
In his snapshot of the Early Church, James points to a perennial problem of many believers. Sometimes, we have too much obsession on me-focused salvation, of “Who is saved and who isn’t.” This is perhaps the first spiritual error of the rich young man who asks Jesus in Mark 10: “What do I need to do to get in?”
It’s not that these questions are altogether wrong, it’s not that our personal salvation doesn’t matter, and it’s not that theology doesn’t matter. In fact, the rich young man discovers how his works-righteousness is doomed to fail (and ultimately that it is by grace, through faith, when the impossible can be possible). The Reformers were right to point out the corruption that can come from works-obsession. Besides clerical corruption, you can be filled with self-righteousness over your work (like I re-discovered while cleaning up after a concert).
But many of us, especially those among us who live in our heads and argue theology, return obsessively to, “Do I have the right faith to get me into heaven?” Maybe this isn’t the question we ask, especially for those of you who read this and aren’t Christian and aren’t sure what to make of the afterlife beyond a metaphor. Maybe instead a part of you asks, “Do I have the right beliefs to make me a good person?”
In either case, an obsession with ascertaining the perfect set of beliefs often becomes a distraction leading us into a convenient intellectual cul-de-sac, far away from having to get ourselves messy. And it often means we are ignoring other parts of our faith lives that also have something to do with salvation. It is almost a tragic trap; we can be so busy obsessively thinking about the nature of faith to achieve salvation that we then fail to live deep within our bones that we really have faith that Jesus Christ has done the work of salvation for us.
So what sometimes comes up in the Church throughout the generations is a sort of theological math problem, “I believe the right things (x), so my sins (y) are forgiven, therefore I’m in heaven (z).” We prepare ourselves well for the scantron test at the pearly gates that surely never comes.
Instead of roiling over, “Does my faith work to get me into heaven (or my secular version of it),” if we rather look at our works in the world as a check engine light, we can start to ask, “Is my faith working?” For James is pointing to a faith that is less like a math equationa and more like, “I know and trust Jesus Christ has forgiven my sins; he has released me from them, he has let them go, he has set me free from their tyrannical burden that weighs down the air I breathe. He did this so that I can be alive not only in heaven, but here and now.”
When this happens, this is a faith that works. When faith works, it is bringing our life more and more consonant with Christ and his music. When faith works, it is following Jesus wherever he takes us even when our self-preserving instincts say otherwise. And when faith isn’t working and our check engine light is on, don’t be like me and my car’s actual real-life check engine light…pay attention to it!
I say all this as someone who thinks “dogma” is an unnecessarily dirty word, for I think the journey is at least as important as the destination towards something like orthodoxy, and I know there is tremendous value in theological discernment in and of itself. The mind is an important part of faith. But Scripture wants to get us away from faith as a head-only thing. Faith in its totality is more than that, James says, and Jesus shows this time and again.
The Four Tendencies
When someone mentions faith, we often think of beliefs, pure intellectual stuff. But everywhere in the gospels, Jesus is connecting our faith to more than just our heads. It includes our heads (“love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind”) but it also is more than that (“love your neighbor as yourself”). Whenever he heals people, he doesn’t say, “Your faith has made your mind right,” but that it has made them whole.1 So often we see how Jesus heals people through their faith, not just healing their bodies but the bodies of their loved ones.
And so it is not “faith versus works,” for faith isn’t just a set of beliefs, but the underlying engine fully animating all of us in a life in Christ. Faith and works go together to make us vibrant wherever we are, even if we are getting older and older and can do less and less, for even if we can’t physically move at all, there is always something for our faith to be doing.
Here’s another way to think of this:
There’s a thing some Hindu practitioners will sometimes mention called the “four yogas,” or four paths to God. Completely independent of this, I once heard my pastor father say something about spiritualities within the Christian tradition. To keep them sensical within Christian theology, I’m going to restyle it a bit and call them the “Four Tendencies.”
The Four Tendencies are four over-generalized ways people tend to be comfortable relating to God. We probably all have one tendency that is stronger than others, and probably at least one tendency that makes us uncomfortable and we prefer to avoid:
1) The head, or the theology and intellectual focus;
2) The heart, or the worship and devotion focused;
3) Contemplation, or meditation, or “deep inner quiet”; sometimes a “I just want to live out in the woods” tendency; and
4) The social action focus, or the justice focus; serving others
The thing with these four tendencies is they’re all right and good. The body of Christ needs them all, and we all need each other who have stronger tendencies. And most of us need to stretch ourselves to practice the tendency we tend to avoid to have a more full-bodied, active faith life.
When it comes to “faith and works,” if your intellectual seeking never enriches your heart or makes you worship God more devoutly, never is balanced by stillness and silence undergirding those religious thoughts, and especially if it never gets you to help others, then you might want to pull over; your check engine light is on.
The Rich, the Poor, and Pragmatism
Another caveat is that when I talk about a faith that “works,” I don’t mean pragmatism or utilitarianism and neither does James. In fact, there will be moments in your life when a working faith will directly challenge the idol of pragmatism, for often Christ calls us to works of faith that are not always “what works” in the world, and are often what doesn’t work by the world’s logic. The works of faith are often what isn’t politically convenient to us, what is materially detrimental, what isn’t the persuasive thing to win someone over, what is so impractical it will surely annoy someone. Sometimes, evil relishes in the pragmatic at the cost our spirit. Sometimes when we face such evil, our faith is the only thing burning in us saying, “If I don’t witness to what is true and good and do everything I can, even if I know it doesn’t work, then I cannot call my faith a true faith…I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t stand up and respond to Christ’s impractical call.” A faith that works is a faith that takes risks, for true faith knows that what we’re risking is worth risking, because nothing could be more precious than keeping our faith alive.
James uses an illustration to show how pragmatism isn’t everything. He talks about how the Early Church would treat rich people when they showed up versus how they treated poor people when they showed up:
My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality. For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Have a seat here in a good place, please," while to the one who is poor you say, "Stand there," or, "Sit by my footstool," have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?
But you have dishonored the poor person. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?
James 2:1-6
There are surely many ways we have overall improved on this from James’ time, but there are surely countless ways in which we still do this unconsciously, especially outside of the church walls. Even until recently, for years and years in New England and other places, wealthy families could buy the pew box they wanted to sit in (did they even read James?). The Church, like practically any non-profit that relies on donations, has been tempted from day one to treat the rich and their opinions as better, if nothing else for pragmatic reasons: after all, their money helps so many. But modern non-profits that rely on wealthy donors begin to treat those donors as their customers, and it is these customers who are always right.
James is saying the works of faith are not about whether our faith is getting the numbers up. It’s not about if faith is achieving, but is my faith alive? And how do we know if it’s alive? Look at what we’re doing.
The Opening, the Oars
A woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."
But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go--the demon has left your daughter."
….
They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened."
And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
Mark 7:25-29, 32-35
So when we (finally) look at our gospel story and what Jesus is doing in these two healing stories, we can look at what happens when our faith “works.”
First, let’s take the deaf man with a speech impediment. While it is faith that sparks this story, it is not even this man’s faith that is needed, but the faithful love and devotion of his friends, just like the man lowered down through the roof (Mark 2). And like so many people that he heals, Jesus does not cure this man so that he can think right and have the correct beliefs. To our faith, Christ says Ephphatha…be opened! And so Christ heals him into his whole body becoming alive and thriving. From the ground of faith, we accept Christ’s invitation to dwell in us, with us, and for us, witnessing to him as we “go and do likewise.” This is a working faith; faithful work.
As for Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, this is a story where Jesus’ dialogue makes many of us uncomfortable. While there’s more to untangle than I can get to about his dog analogy, one thing that we can certainly learn about is faith.
The only times Jesus is ever explicitly “surprised” or “amazed” in the gospel is at the faith of others (or lack thereof). This story is another example where he shows that amazement again at the woman’s response. Against what would have been most of our better judgment in her shoes, she talks back to Jesus. It’s scandalous. But not only is he okay with this, he loves her for it. In some ways, this story is a model of what honest-to-God, earnest theological wrestling looks like: “Jesus, I hear you saying one thing…but I also know you say something else.” This woman isn’t testing God, but relating to him honestly, wrestling with him in faithful love. And so this woman shows that when your faith is really working, you might even find yourself challenging Jesus in the love you know he lives in. When this is born of true faithful wrestling, not only can he take it, he delights in it. This is a working faith; faithful work.
There is one final old illustration about faith and works I need to share lest there be any confusion. Many versions are floating out there, and this one is one I’ve modified. It goes like this:
An old Scotsman had a rowboat, taking people back and forth across the sea, pulling two oars over and over. One day a passenger noticed the Scotsman’s oars had words on them. On one oar the word “faith” was carved, and on the other oar the word “works.” The passenger asked him why. Without saying a word, the Scotsman put down the “faith” oar in the base of the boat. Using just the “works” oar, he rowed over and over and over. The boat went around in circles. The man then dropped that oar and began to ply and ply with the oar called “faith.” Again, the little boat went around in circles. So the old man picked up both oars, rowing them together, and they quickly rippled through the water. He finally spoke. “Works without faith are useless, and faith without works is dead. But faith and works pulling together bring us home.”
I will admit that in some ways, the “check engine light” analogy is flawed. If we do not have works and fruits of the spirit and rest on the laurels of our heady beliefs, it’s more like our car isn’t working at all, but we’re sitting in the driveway saying, “But hey, I’ve got this car.” So I challenge us all to grab both oars, opening up past our comfortable tendencies into a fuller life in the body of Christ. May your faith become alive through the One who died that we might live.
Mark 5:34; Greek sozo, σῴζω