James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad: Greetings. (James 1:1)
Do you remember writing letters way back in your youth? I say way back, but possibly some of you are not as gray as I am becoming. It used to be, before social media, one got a piece of paper, a pen or typewriter, and wrote to people; then you put it in an envelope, stamped it, and sent it in the mail. It may be that somewhere in school they tried to teach you the parts of a letter. At any rate, we used to start a letter something like:
“Dear Grandma,
How are you?”
We chewed on our pencils awhile, and then went on with our news and at the end, we usually said something like,
“With love,
Jeanette.”
(With apologies to my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Campbell, who tried desperately for me to say ‘Sincerely’ instead of ‘Love’, as she thought it didn’t sound official unless it was sincere. I didn’t get her reasoning then or now, but I still sign personal letters that way. Business letters, I sign “With Respect”)
In James’ day, a letter, written on parchment, was usually meant to be shared. Parchment was expensive stuff, you didn’t waste it, so, many times, letters were written to groups. The letter writer would say who the letter was from and to whom it was going in the beginning and the person who received it read it, shared it and sent it on. The Amish do a similar thing with their round-robin letters to each other. Someone starts with a letter to a relative, the person receiving adds the local news and mails it to the next relative, who adds more news and sends it on until everyone has caught up and the letter gets back to the first person, who starts another, like as not. In Bible times, they gave their own pedigree at the beginning, and they ended with good wishes. James’ letter is no different. And he meant it to be shared.
“James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” is his proper introduction to whoever would be reading this letter. Was he the head of the Jerusalem community at this point? Possibly. He doesn’t need more of an introduction but that he is the servant of Christ, that is, also their equal, as they are His servants, too. He wrote of himself as a bondservant. A bondservant was a permanent servant, someone who expected to live out his life in the service of another. He doesn’t say, James, the head of the church in Jerusalem. He doesn’t say James, one of the original twelve apostles. James, the one there when He died, who saw him after the resurrection, James, who lived and worked with him, who was sent out to preach and did miracles. No, he said, I am James, I am the slave of Christ.
James, the servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ…now he tells us who he is writing to:
“To the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad: Greetings.”
The twelve tribes? This book was written to the Jewish Christians who at that time, comprised most of the church. Many Jews hadn’t accepted yet the idea that there could be Gentile or non-Jewish Christians. We all had a lot to learn about the grace of God back then, and today as well. James was trying to lead us into a closer walk with God and correct some errors he saw popping up in the infant church, and since at this point, that church was pretty much Jewish, he addresses this to Jewish Christians. Does that mean it has no bearing on us? No, of course not. The entire Bible was written for all of us. God is no respecter of persons. Let’s look at it this way.
Have you ever planted a seed and waited for it to sprout? The seed is a small, hard, dry-looking thing; you wouldn’t think there was any life inside. But put it in good soil, add water, warmth, sunlight, and in a few days, the shell cracks, the tiny sprout inside aims for the sun. It sends roots down and leaves up, and shortly, there’s a plant. The period this book occurred in was seedling time. In this time period, Jews were just beginning to think of Gentiles as being someone they ought to be telling about Jesus. It just didn’t occur to them that anyone but Jews could be worthy of our Lord’s gift.
God had planted His people at the crossroads of the trade routes along the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Gentiles crossed over it, docked in its harbors, and trade was everywhere. You would have thought they’d have realized they were supposed to be a light for the world, but they got so worried about being defiled they made up thousands of laws to keep themselves safe from the world they were supposed to be saving. And then Christ came, the Christ who was the Son of God and the Son of Man, who had Gentiles in his genealogy – and not necessarily nice gentiles, either. Ruth was from Moab; Rahab was a harlot; Tamar was a Canaanite; Bathsheba had been married to Uriah the Hittite before king David had him killed and took her on as one of his several wives. Back then, the most important purpose of Jewish genealogies was to highlight the purity of one’s Israelite ancestry. Yet Matthew highlights the black sheep in the background of Christ, the Gentiles. And the Gentiles were females! Oh, dear! That really ought to have sparked some problems in the Jewish believers. (Did not Jewish men pray each morning “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, Ruler of the universe who has not created me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.”) That ought to have been a sort of warning sign God wasn’t done with the rest of the world or its attitudes yet, but it wasn’t until after 50 A.D. that it was officially a part of the church work to go to Gentiles. It took a church business meeting to do it. Can you imagine that business meeting? I think it may have gotten loud.
It sort of reminds me of congregations that have gotten hidebound, the “we are all that is” sort of people. They don’t see the wider world out there, waiting to be reached. They think of themselves as having all the truth and it’s all theirs, hoarding it like hidden treasure. Jesus was trying to get them past that mindset, sending a vision to Peter just before he met a Roman centurion and pushing Paul out into the Gentile world.
James addresses his letter to the Jewish Christians, all twelve tribes of them who had been scattered abroad by persecution. Does this mean James’ book isn’t for us today? Of course not. If it were not important, it wouldn’t have been included in the Bible. Remember, it is possibly the oldest of the New Testament books. It predates the gospels. It gives a balance to the overzeal of Paul. But I’ll get onto that discussion later in the book. Right now, what is the practical lesson here in this first verse?
“Greetings.” Greetings are messages from our hearts to someone else’s heart. Greetings used to be letters, and then phone calls, and now social media. With so much hate, anger, disrespect, and outright hostility in the world, wouldn’t it be grand if all of us agreed to simply send at least one friendly greeting to someone every day, like a random act of kindness? The person you pass as you go to work, the receptionist in the lobby, the security guard, the clerk who checks you out at the store, your own family, a person on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of a dozen other social media platforms; just say something kind, something encouraging. You will make their day lighter; you will make your heart softer. If just the people who call Christ their Lord did it, (And the last PEW report I saw said there were 2.18 billion of us Christians out there) we’d have over 2 billion words of kindness sent out into this old hurting world every day. Don’t you think that might make a difference? So, from this old Christian and James, both of us the bondservants of Christ, to all His people everywhere, greetings. And I send it with a smile and an imaginary hug to everyone. Greetings.