Illuminated manuscript, illustration of St Godric kneeling in prayer with rosary
(undisplayed upper portion shows Virgin and Child, teaching Godric her song)
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (To the Greater Glory of God)
First Reading:
From: James 4:1-10
The Source of Discord
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[1] What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is not your passions that are at war in your members? [2] You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. [3] You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. [4] Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. [5] Or do you suppose it is in vain that the Scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit which He has made to dwell in us"? [6] But He gives more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." [7] Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. [8] Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind. [9] Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection. [10] Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will exalt you.
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Commentary:
1. "Wars" and "fighting" are an exaggerated reference to the contention and discord found among those Christians. "Passions", as elsewhere in the New Testament, means concupiscence, hedonism, pleasure-seeking (cf. verse 3; Luke 8:14; Titus 3:3; 2 Peter 2:13).
St. James points out that if one fails to fight as one should against one's evil inclinations, one's inner disharmony overflows in the form of quarreling and fighting. The New Testament often refers to the good kind of fight, which confers inner freedom and is a prerequisite for salvation (cf., e.g., Matthew 11:12; Romans 7:14-25; 1 Peter 2:11).
"How can you be at peace if you allow passions you do not even attempt to control to drag you away from the 'pull' of grace?
"Heaven pulls you upwards; you drag yourselves downwards. And don't seek excuses--that is what you are doing. If you go on like that, you will tear yourself apart" (St J. Escriva, "Furrow", 851).
2-3. St. James is describing the sad state to which free-wheeling hedonism (specifically, greed for earthly things) leads.
"You do not receive, because you ask wrongly": "He asks wrongly who shows no regard for the Lord's commandments and yet seeks Heavenly gifts. He also asks wrongly who, having lost his taste for Heavenly things, seeks only earthly things--not for sustaining his human weakness but to enable him to indulge himself" (St. Bede, "Super Iac. Expositio, ad loc.").
4-6. The sacred writer warns that inordinate love of the world, which stems from ambition, is incompatible with the love of God. "World" here has the meaning of "enemy of God", opposed to Christ and His followers (cf. note on 1:26-27). The teaching contained in these verses echoes that of our Lord: "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matthew 6:24).
The Saints have frequently reminded us--by their lives as well as their teachings--that inordinate love of the world is incompatible with the love of God: "Worldly society has flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise even God, whereas the communion of saints is rooted in a love of God that is ready to trample on self" (St. Augustine, "The City of God", 14, 28).
"Unfaithful creatures!": the original Greek simply says, "Adulterers" (feminine) and the New Vulgate, "Adulterers" (masculine). This echoes the symbol the prophets often use (cf., e.g. Hosea 1:2ff; Jeremiah 3:7-10; Ezekiel 16:1ff) of the marriage of God and His people sealed by the Covenant. St. James, therefore, is not referring to the sin of adultery; he is berating those whose excessive love for the things of this world makes them unfaithful to God.
5. The original Greek is open to various interpretations and the quotation as given here is not to be found in the Bible. Translated word for word it means: "Jealously he loves the spirit which dwells in us." It is not clear who "loves"--God or the spirit; and "the spirit" may mean the soul or the Holy Spirit; moreover, the jealousy can be either something good or something bad (like envy). It might perhaps be translated as "The Spirit who dwells in us jealously loves us" (which is how the New Vulgate translates it).
Although this sentence does not appear literally in the Bible, St. James may be referring not so much to a specific passage as to an idea which often occurs in the Bible when it depicts God as a jealous lover (cf., e.g., Exodus 20:5; 34:14; Zechariah 1:14; 8:2), who expects His love to be returned wholeheartedly; this very human kind of language is a most moving evocation of God's immense love for man. St. Alphonsus teaches: "Since He loves us with infinite love, He desires all our love; that is why He is jealous when He sees others having a share in hearts which He wants entirely for His own. 'Jesus is jealous', St. Jerome said (Epistle 22), in the sense that He does not want us to love anything that is outside Himself. And if He sees that some creature has a part of your heart, He is in a sense envious of it, as the Apostle James writes, because He tolerates no rival for our love; He wants to have all our love" ("The Love of Jesus Christ", Chapter 11).
6. The sacred writer foresees the possibility that some may draw back from this "jealous" love God expects to be reciprocated: but God never expects the impossible; He gives us all the grace we need to do what He asks: "All my hope is naught," St. Augustine exclaims, "save in Your great mercy. Grant what You command, and command what You will" ("Confessions", 10, 29).
However, only people who are humble are given this grace, and have it bear fruit. The proud, who are full of self-love, even fail to realize that they need grace, and so they do not ask for it, or do not ask for it properly. The second part of the verse is a literal quotation from Proverbs 3:34 (according to the Septuagint Greek): it is an example of the "poetic" form, with the characteristic antithetical parallelism of Hebrew verse. St. Augustine, in his explanation of the fact that the Bible refers in places to the sins of prominent men, urges his readers to be humble, commenting that "there is scarcely a page in the sacred books which does not echo the fact that 'God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble'" ("De Doctrina Christiana", 3, 23).
7-10. Some ways of countering pride are identified here: basically what is required is a sincere and deep conversion, which must begin with the humility of recognizing that we are sinners and in need of purification. The tone of these verses is reminiscent of the way the Old Testament prophets upbraid the people of Israel for the unfaithfulness to Yahweh.
To draw near to God the sinner needs purification. "Cleaning your hand" should not be understood as referring to the physical ablutions of the Jews (cf. Exodus 30:19-21; Mark 7:1-5); but should be taken in a moral sense--purification from sins, and upright actions (e.g., Isaiah 1:15-17; 1 Timothy 2:8). Of all the possible ways of being purified and converted (for example, the penitential rite at Mass, a visit to a shrine, or fasting), "none is more significant," [Pope] John Paul II reminds us, "more divinely efficacious or more lofty and at the same time easily accessible as a rite than the Sacrament of Penance [...]. For a Christian, "the sacrament of Penance is the ordinary way of obtaining forgiveness and the remission of sins committed after Baptism" ("Reconciliatio Et Paenitentia", 28 and 31).
7. When someone resists the devil's temptations, the devil leaves him alone: he cannot force a man to commit sin. The "Shepherd of Hermas" (a work by an anonymous Christian writer, around the middle of the Second Century) elaborates on the same idea: "Be converted, you who walk in the commandments of the devil, commandments that are hard, bitter, cruel and foul. And do not fear the devil either, because he has no power against you [...]. The devil cannot lord it over those who are servants of God with their whole heart and who place their hope in Him. The devil can wrestle with, but not overcome them. So, if you resist him, he will flee from you in defeat and confusion" ("Eleventh Commandment", 4, 6 and 5,2).
9. "Be wretched": "To acknowledge one's sin--penetrating still more deeply into the consideration of one's own personhood--"to recognize oneself as a sinner", capable of sin and inclined to commit sin, is the essential first step in returning to God" ("Reconciliatio Et Paenitencia", 13).
Mourning and weeping are the external expression of sincere repentance (cf. Matthew 5:4 and note; Tobias 2:6; Amos 8:10): "You are crying? Don't be ashamed of it. Yes, cry: men also cry like you, when they are alone and before God. Each night, says King David, I soak my bed with tears. With those tears, those burning manly tears, you can purify your past and supernaturalize your present life" (St J. Escriva, "The Way", 216).