James 5:13-20 Commentary

Jesus’ most faithful followers are often people of faith in action. We want to actively love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. Christians feel called and expected by God to do things like share the gospel, worship the Lord, care for people who are materially needy and be good stewards of God’s creation.

This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s repeated call to prayer may, as a result, seem like a summons to a poor use of our time. Why, after all, should God’s dearly beloved people spend time praying when there’s so much good to that needs to be done? Can’t we just reserve prayer for the times when we feel that we can’t make a difference in our world?

And yet James basically ends his call to Christian action that fills his letter with a call to the action that is prayer. Not once but six times he uses some form of the word that we translate as “prayer” in our pericope’s eight verses. Perhaps, then, there’s something to the adage, “Too busy not to pray” after all.

James fills this Lesson with various scenarios of human misery and trouble. “Is any one of you in trouble [kakopathei]?” he asks in verse 13. He literally asks something like, “Is anyone among you suffering hardships?” Some English translations render kakopathei as “suffering.” Yet by not explaining just to what he refers by that Greek word, James leaves it to the Spirit to apply it to any number of maladies, including physical, emotional, or spiritual trials.

The misery that verse 14 describes seems more straightforward. “Is anyone among you sick [asthenei]?” The apostle almost certainly primarily has what we think of as physical illness in mind. However, citizens of the 21^st century recognize that illness can take a variety of shapes. In fact, James literally asks his readers if any of them are “weak” or perhaps even “feeble.” It suggests that the “sickness” about which the apostle writes is basically any scenario in which people feel powerless or helpless.

The meaning of verse 16’s misery must largely be inferred. There, after all, James invites Jesus’ friends to “Confess [exomologeisthe] your sins [hamartia] to one another and pray [euchesthe] for one another that you may be healed [iathete].” His pairing of confessing our sins to each other with praying for each other suggests that that for which we sometimes pray for each other is forgiveness. The iathete (“healing”), in that understanding, would then refer to God’s forgiveness.

Verse 17 refers to Elijah’s work of prayer that addressed a need for both some kind of drought and relief from drought. The prophet recognized that at times God’s people needed rain, and at other times they needed the rain to stop, likely as a sign of God’s displeasure with those who were making them miserable.

In reflecting on these occasions for prayer, preachers might explore with their hearers a couple of things. James almost certainly doesn’t intend his list of needs about which we should pray to be exhaustive. Yet the range of occasions on which he insists prayer is appropriate is comprehensive. Prayer is appropriate in the face of both personal and creational crises. It’s also appropriate in all cases of misery. So this Sunday’s Lesson at least implies that prayer is always appropriate for God’s dearly beloved people.

What’s more, James’ call for such all-encompassing prayer isn’t just counter cultural. It also arguably runs counter to Christian conventional wisdom. After all, when we learn of someone’s illness, what’s compassionate Christians’ most natural response? Rather than pray about it, don’t even Jesus’ friends first ask the sufferers whether they’ve taken medicine or have consulted with professionals? And how do we naturally respond to someone’s confession of sin? Instead of committing that to prayer, we almost immediately assure the “sinner” of God’s grace – or scold them for their faithlessness. In fact, God’s adopted sons and daughters sometimes turn to prayer only as a last resort when all else has failed.

In this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson James commends an entirely different perspective on the most appropriate response to any kind of suffering. “Is any one of you in trouble?” he asks in verse 13. “Let them pray [proseuchestho].” This invitation reflects a godly confidence that God is the source of all good things, including relief from any sort of misery we experience. So, James summons Christians to respond to various troubles by praying to God about them.

In verse 14 the apostle asks, “Is any one among you sick? Let them call [proskalesastho] the elders of the church to pray [proseuxasthosan] over [ep’] them and anoint [aleipsantes] them with oil [elaio] in the name of the Lord.” To some 21^st century perspectives this response doesn’t just seem strange. It also seems hopelessly antiquated.

But we shouldn’t let that distract us from the fact that James’ call reflects a faith that all good things, including healing, come from God’s gracious hand. So the most appropriate Christian response to any form of sickness is always to somehow bring that sickness and its sufferer to God in prayer.

Such expressions of our dependence on God for restoration, adds James in verse 15, produce results. “The prayer offered in faith [tes pisteos],” he professes in verse 15, “will make the sick person well [sosei]; the Lord will raise them up [egerei].” This language is startling and provocative. It’s, after all, death, salvation, and resurrection language. Verse 15 reminds Jesus’ friends that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is certainly capable of saying “yes!” to our prayers for people by raising them from their “sickbeds.”

The apostle goes on to profess that God’s might also extends to people’s salvation from our sins. “If they have sinned [hamartias],” he writes in verse 15b, “they will be forgiven [apethesetai].” This implies, as we noted earlier, that God’s forgiveness is part of God’s gracious “yes!” to prayers of confession and for forgiveness. When God’s people admit our failure to love God above all and our neighbor as ourselves, God responds by graciously “healing [iathete] [16],” that is, forgiving us.

Hebrews 5:17-18 goes on to reflect on God’s power displayed through what God makes: “Elijah was a man [anthropos], even as we are. He prayed earnestly [proseuche] that it would not rain [me brexai], and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again, he prayed, and the heavens gave [edoken] rain [hyeton], and the earth produced [eblasten] its crops [ton karpon autes].” Again, Christians don’t want to let what may seem like an ancient cosmology deflect our attention from God’s longing to say “yes!” to our prayers for God’s creation.

In verse 16b James, in some ways, summarizes what he has written about the power with which God graces prayer. There, after all, he writes, “The prayer [deesis] of a righteous person [dikaiou] is powerful [poly ischyei] and effective [energoumene].” Obviously, the apostle isn’t claiming that prayer is all by itself powerful enough to conquer every ill. While James professes that Christians’ prayers make a difference, their power stems from the God who graciously answers them in ways that are best for God’s people. So, The Message is (again!) onto something when it paraphrases verse 16b as “The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.”

This profession, however, raises some tough questions for which it offers no obvious answers. Perhaps chief among them is the “no” God sometimes gives to God’s adopted children’s prayers. Preachers want to handle this with great pastoral sensitivity. We can, however, note that this is a “wisdom saying” rather than a failsafe prescription for God’s “yes’s.” In other words, James is describing the way he has observed God often responds rather than offering a perfect formula for ensuring that God will always answer “yes” to our prayers.

What’s more, preachers can humbly say that God’s “no’s” to our prayers for things that seem right and good are not a reflection of our failure to be righteous – or even pray rightly. God’s “no’s” arise not from our shortcomings, but God’s own mysterious but always loving plans and purposes. Those plans as well as the “no” to prayers that God sometimes gives are sometimes mysterious, but always somehow for our good.

What’s more, James’ profession of prayer’s power and effectiveness is not an invitation to Christian inaction. We don’t pray and then simply wait for God to do something about things like injustice and suffering. What James 5, instead, summons us to is a proper perspective on both prayer and righteous activity. Jesus’ friends always preface, bathe, and bracket our attempts to relieve any suffering with a prayerful profession that God is the one who will turn both our prayers and actions into something that will make a difference in the lives of people and the whole creation.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

In her riveting account of growing up materially deprived in the American Midwest entitled, Heartland, Sarah Smarsh writes about, among other things, her understanding and practice of prayer: “Life increasingly felt like the courthouse where Grandma worked — dangerous people and innocent victims, with poor people like my family filling both roles. The only thing I did harder than study and read was pray.

“I sometimes prayed on my knees until they hurt as a sort of sacrifice to a God I’d been taught dealt in trade. My prayers were for my family, but also for me in a quest for a better life. That quest, I thought, was threatened by a B on a test in school. ‘I promise that I will stop stealing baseball cards,’ I’d pray out loud, ‘if you will let my report card be all A’s’.”