Before Jesus came into the world, many people thought the Messiah would be a powerful warrior who would overthrow the Roman authorities and establish a thriving political kingdom. But when he was born, the Messiah did not receive a king’s welcome; instead, he was born in a barn. Rather than exercising worldly strength and military might, he accomplished his great work by dying a shameful death as a falsely accused man. By these things, we see clearly that God’s purposes in the world heavily contradict our earthly notions of what is good, strong, and desirable.
In much the same way, God’s people, following in the footsteps of their saviour, are not called to be wise according to the standards of the world. They are not called to speak with powerful rhetoric and amass power and wealth for themselves. Instead, they are to preach a foolish message to a broken, dying world as broken vessels with no power of their own.
The nature of God’s kingdom has always been upside-down. All throughout Scripture, we see that the last will be first, the poor are rich, and the weak are strong. In so many ways, Scripture challenges the assumptions we don’t even realize we hold deep within ourselves. In the book of James, we find a call to embrace the upside-down nature of God’s kingdom by the way we treat others in the church.
Beginning in chapter 2, James speaks of the sin of partiality and calls his hearers not to evaluate people according to the standards of the world. We are not to give preferential treatment to those who dress nicely, look clean, speak eloquently, and have plenty of money to spare. Most especially, God’s people are called not to allow their preference for such people to affect the way they do ministry—not to pander to those who benefit them financially. In the same way, we are called not to be dismissive toward those who outwardly appears poorly dressed, unkempt, and who seem to have no means to benefit the church financially. To neglect such people would be to implicitly embrace the values of a world that rejects God, and to act this way would be to betray the fact that we don’t understand the way God works or the way he designed his kingdom to operate. James himself would say, “Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?” (James 2:5)
And so let us be a people who fight against the temptation to judge our fellow human beings according to the false standards of the world, and let us instead seek to see people as God sees them—as dignified people, made in the image of God, who, like Jesus himself, might just surprise us and put us to shame if we make the mistake of judging a book by its cover!
All the best,
Luke