Knowing the coming Judge as the one who endured for me changes the waiting of endurance into, indeed, a “we can hardly stand the wait.”
James 5 is the only place where the prophet Job is mentioned in the New Testament. Among the various ways we might want to consider the “waiting” theme that the season of Advent presents, the one seemingly most ready at hand (especially as it endures the hustle and bustle of Christmas marketing, party preparation, and the yuletide jingle sung by soprano rodents, We can hardly stand the wait; please, Christmas, don’t be late!) is that of eager anticipation, excitement, exhilaration, elation, and joy. Sounds like a sentiment to match the Gaudete (“Rejoice!”) theme of the third Sunday of Advent. But be careful here, the kind of waiting this epistle lesson prompts us to think about is not, on its face, an eager-anticipation, we-can-hardly-wait kind of waiting. It is the Job kind of waiting. Enduring. Patience, as in long-suffering, with an emphasis on suffering because we are talking about Job!
Amid the circumstances he felt, the loss of his property, the loss of his children, the loss of his health, the sincere but insufficient advice of his friends and wife, as well as the spiritual attack behind the veil (Job 1-2), Job endured and did not sin against God with his lips (Job 1:22; 2:10). Here is opportunity to preach Christ through the pericope of an epistle many avoid because of its seeming Christlessness. The “epistle of straw” is actually an epistle of faith, breathed out by God through His agent as an encouragement to wisdom and reception of the good and perfect gifts of the giver-God (James 1:16), revealed in Jesus Christ. Just as all wisdom instruction throughout the holy scriptures is fulfilled in Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), so also the wisdom examples in James are types of Christ as well. The key of David, the key to the scriptures, the key to getting James right in any and all of his selections, is the Christ; and the preacher of James 5 needs to see the shadow cast by Job and his patient endurance leading all the way to Jesus who, like a lamb before His shearers is silent, opened not His mouth (Isaiah 53:7; Matthew 26:63; Mark 14:61; John 19:9; 1 Peter 2:23). This is the easiest, most practical, and most salutary move you can make to deliver the Christ. Focus there, and you have hit the nail on the head.
On the other hand, the easiest pitfalls to make in preaching this text roll right out of that assertion by doing the opposite of delivering the Christ. They spend time not on Jesus, but spin wheels on the wisdom examples in James, reheating them, warming them over, as if the task of preaching is to describe what is going on in the word with a little more flower or explanation. This is the greatest pitfall of expository preaching, particularly in wisdom genres; think Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount, and any parables. Parable, fable, apothegm, joke, maxim, anecdote, law instruction, and all things didactic, you should not have to explain them. Explaining them defangs them, ruins jokes (as we all know), and, frankly, describing such things in sermons is not doing what a sermon is for, which is delivery of the Christ in law and gospel, delivery of the Christ who kills and makes alive. The sermon is not there to talk about Christ. It is there to deliver the goods, to proclaim Him dead and living, for the life of your hearers and for the life of the world. There is nothing more insufferable from the pulpit than scads of historical context and linguistic information meant to illustrate the particular ways in which first century shepherds shepherded sheep or farmers farmed their farms. Save such stuff for Bible class. Your people do not need a ten-minute summary of Job to get the point of this passage. They do need to hear Christ dead to kill the sinner and alive to raise the saint.
Your people do not need a ten-minute summary of Job to get the point of this passage. They do need to hear Christ dead to kill the sinner and alive to raise the saint.
Exegetically, there are a couple of interesting things going on here worth noting. I focus your attention on just a couple of vocabulary words. Polysplankhnos is a hapax legomenon (one of those words which only occurs once in the New Testament) and it describes the Lord at James 5:11, the Lord who is compassionate and merciful. But the word plays with splankhnoi, the term in Greek for guts (this is a Lord with a lot of ’em) because the seat of emotion in Hellenistic Greek idiom is not primarily the “heart,” as with us modern westerners, but, rather, the guts. When Jesus has compassion on the crowds, the verb used is splankhnizomai (refer to Matthew 14:14, Luke 7:13, and other). Multi-gut Jesus is filled-to-the-brim-compassionate Jesus. James’ Lord is the Lord of Exodus 34:6: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
Another word to pay attention to here in James 5:11 is telos. James’ Jesus is the one whose end, goal, “purpose” (in the ESV), His telos is that He has compassion and mercy. That is evidently what Job is all about. James is interpreting for us, and an interesting interpretation it is! Rather than spin out theological speculation on theodicy or the problem of evil, wisdom literature or Old Testament oddities in this unique poetic, dramatic, narrative text, James very matter-of-factly puts two points together. You have (1) heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have (2) seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful (James 5:11). The purpose, the goal of endurance, its proper end, is to demonstrate and deliver the multi-gut Jesus, the filled-to-the-brim compassionate Jesus, the Lord, the Lord, who is merciful and abounding in steadfast love.
The end, the fulfillment of all things, the goal to which all things in Heaven and Earth are directed and to which God in Christ is guiding you and your hearers, that end is at hand. This is the one final bit to consider as you craft your sermon this week. The eschatological focus of James reveals Christ as the Lord who is coming, who is at hand, and who is judge. What can transform the waiting under the pressure of longsuffering and endurance, being patient under the slings and arrows of the world, Satan, and sin? What can transform that waiting to the waiting of joy and eager anticipation in the face of that day of judgment? Only the key to James, the key to the scriptures, the key of David, the Christ whose patience, like that of Job, led Him to not open His lips in a charge against God, but led Him, rather, to endure suffering, endure His passion, endure the cross, and with it the slings and arrows of the world, the Devil, and your sin and mine. Knowing the coming Judge as the one who endured for me changes the waiting of endurance into, indeed, a “we can hardly stand the wait.” Something to rejoice about on Gaudete Sunday! Amen, come Lord Jesus!
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Additional Resources:
Craft of Preaching-Check out 1517’s resources on James 5:7-11.
Concordia Theology-Various helps from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, MO to assist you preaching James 5:7-11.
Lectionary Kick-Start-Check out this fantastic podcast from Craft of Preaching authors Peter Nafzger and David Schmitt as they dig into the texts for this Sunday!
The Pastor’s Workshop-Check out all the great preaching resources from our friends at the Pastor’s Workshop!
