(Proverbs 2:1-11; James 1:1-12)
One of the good things about being a parent is that there are a lot of great children’s books; in fact, the really good children’s authors are some of the best writers going these days. Though many adult books ought to go right from the publisher to the recycle bin—including many best-sellers—there are a lot of books written for kids which most adults would do well to read. One of the authors who comes to mind for me when I say that, and certainly one of the most respected authors of children’s novels out there, is E. L. Konigsburg.
A trained chemist who decided she lacked the temperament to work in that field—during her master’s work at the University of Pittsburgh, she twice blew up the laboratory sink—Konigsburg started writing fairly late, in her mid-30s, after the last of her three children was in kindergarten. She started with a bang, though, winning the 1968 Newbery Medal for her first book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler—and seeing her second novel finish as runner-up that same year, the only time that’s ever happened. 29 years later, she became one of just five people to win two Newberys—and set the record for the longest gap in between wins—with her novel The View from Saturday, which might just be the best book of her long and illustrious career.
That is, of course, the book from which I took the title of this message, and I did so for good reason. The View from Saturday is a book which says that life only makes sense when you look at it from the right perspective. It’s the story of four gifted sixth-grade misfits—Noah Gershom, Nadia Diamondstein, Ethan Potter, and Julian Singh—and their teacher, Mrs. Olinski, newly paralyzed from a terrible car accident and adjusting to life in a wheelchair. Mrs. Olinski chooses Noah, Nadia, Ethan and Julian to be their school’s sixth-grade Academic Bowl team—but it’s Julian, a recent immigrant from India with a rather different outlook on life, who makes them a team by inviting them to tea at his house every Saturday. The book intersperses the account of their final match, in the championship—which they of course win, becoming the first sixth-grade team ever to beat the eighth-graders—with chapters in which the team members, gathered for tea, tell each other their own stories.
It’s a brilliant book, and the title is the key to understanding it. It’s fundamentally about the way that the view from Saturday—first, the Saturday tea parties, and second, the great Saturday on which they win the championship—changes the way the members of this team see everything else about their lives, and ultimately changes them. In the view from Saturday, their lives look very different, and say very different things about them, because they themselves are different—and better. From that angle, everything else makes sense; from that angle, looking backward, they are able to see themselves clearly enough to see the way forward.
E. L. Konigsburg has captured something very important here: life only makes sense when looked at from the right perspective. This truth is critical to understanding the Christian life, and especially to understanding the letter of James. To be sure, there are many who would see little value in understanding James. For such a straightforward, plainspoken book, it’s an odd one, with an odd history; partly because it’s so plainspoken, people have tended to treat it too simply, as a book they don’t have to think to understand, and that’s caused all sorts of problems. Most famously, Martin Luther took it to contradict the letters of Paul and proclaimed it a “right strawy epistle,” even going so far as to tear it out of his own copy of the Bible, and in so doing set in motion centuries of Protestant neglect. This is unfortunate, because it’s a profoundly important book for our understanding of the Christian life, and one which rewards study.
Perhaps the most important thing to note is that the first chapter serves as a sort of overture to the rest of the book, setting out the themes which James will explore at greater length in chapters 2 through 5. In so doing, he’s able to set these smaller themes in the context of the overarching themes of the book; in my judgment, there are two, closely related. One, which finds its best statement in James 4:4, is that there are two ways set before us—the way of friendship with the world, and the way of friendship with God—which are mutually exclusive. This contrast between the two ways drives much of this book. The other is that the way of friendship with God only makes sense, to borrow from E. L. Konigsburg, in the view from Saturday—or perhaps we might say, the view from Sunday. From the world’s perspective, this way of life makes no more sense, and has no more value, than did the lives of Noah, Nadia, Ethan and Julian; but just as Saturday gave those four gifted young people a new place to stand to see their lives in a new way, so faith in God gives us a new place to stand, so that we can see our lives in a new way.
From the world’s perspective, life is all about us; from the perspective of faith, it’s all about God. From a human perspective, the life of faith makes no sense, because we can’t control how God will take care of us; from the perspective of faith, we can see that he will always give us what is best for us, and always in time. And a human perspective on how to live the Christian life breaks down, because it understands neither the depth of our sin nor the goodness of God, into either legalism or lawlessness. The perspective of faith helps us to see just how bad our sin is, and just how thoroughly it permeates our lives—and just how great a gift our salvation is, and how wonderful the grace of God is, and how much better God is than anything this world has to offer; it inspires us to gratitude for that gift and the desire to please God, and to know God, and that is what drives the kind of life that pleases him. Indeed, only that can produce the kind of life that pleases him, because what he wants most of all is for us to seek him.
It’s in this light that James says, “Whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it pure joy.” From a human perspective, that’s ludicrous. Consider it pure joy when your back gives out, or your knee, or your hip, and you need surgery? Consider it pure joy when you fight temptation? Consider it pure joy when someone you love is sick? Consider it pure joy when you’re threatened and your home is attacked? That takes a lot of nerve to say; but that’s what James says. He’s not saying you should be happy when trials come—it’s not as if we’re supposed to say, “Oh goody, I’ve just been evicted from my home, isn’t this wonderful”—but in the midst of trials and the struggle and suffering they bring, we should find joy. Why? Because unlike happiness, which is rooted in our circumstances, joy is rooted in the promises of God through Jesus Christ, and in our certainty that he who made those promises is faithful to keep them.
One of those promises is that God is in control in everything that happens to us, using it for our good; and so James says here, “Consider it pure joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” We talked about the importance of endurance last week from 1 Timothy 6; it has been often and truly said that the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint, which means that if we’re running to win, we have to be able to keep up the pace, even when it’s hardest. Here, James adds the observation that it’s precisely in doing this, in facing trials and not giving up or backing down, that we build endurance. Just as exercise tries our muscles in order to force them to respond and grow, building physical strength and endurance, so trials force us to respond and grow as whole people, building strength of character and the ability to endure difficult times without losing our faith. Of course, if you overstress your muscles, you’ll hurt yourself, and a trial too great for us to handle would do the same; but we can trust that God won’t send us any trials we can’t handle—even if, as Mother Theresa once said, we might sometimes wish he didn’t trust us so much. It’s simply that, as we saw last week, the only way to build endurance is to reach what we think is our limit—and keep going.
As we face trials, the testing of our faith produces endurance in our faith; and as we grow in endurance, we mature in the work God has called us to do, bringing that work ultimately to completion. And note the purpose James declares for this—not simply that we each might do good things, but so that we ourselves might be perfect and complete. Ultimately, it’s not only the things we do that are the work in view here, but it’s us—we are the finished product. The idea is, as NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, that the deed perfects the person: as we endure trials and act in faith and hold fast to God and do his will, God works in us through these actions to transform and perfect us, to bring his work in us to full maturity, so that we may be perfect and complete, with no areas in which we fall short.
Now, as we’ve already noted, from a human point of view, this all sounds very fishy; to really understand it, we need a different perspective, a view from Saturday. Put another way, we need more than human wisdom, we need the wisdom of God; we need the ability to see ourselves and our world truly, and to turn that true perception into proper action. That’s what biblical wisdom means: to learn how to live in accordance with the will and character of God, and then to live that way. Thus James says here, “If any of you don’t understand this, if this doesn’t make sense to you, then ask God for wisdom to be able to understand it; and if you ask God, who gives to everyone generously and without complaint, for wisdom, he’ll give it to you.” It is, after all, God’s desire that we know him, that we know his will for our lives, and that we do his will; if we ask him to give us the wisdom we need to be able to do that, the new perspective we need to see our lives as he sees us, we may do so in the certainty that he will give us what we ask.
This is why James comes down so hard on doubt. He’s not talking here about those who struggle to believe, who are committed to faith in God but find it hard going; rather, he’s talking about someone we might almost call a professional doubter, someone who truly has a divided mind and heart—they have one foot in the community of faith, and one foot in the world, and they just aren’t willing to take that second step all the way in. It’s not that they doubt that God can give them his wisdom—but they’re doubtful that they want it; and that sort of doubt disables prayer, and is absolutely lethal to the life of faith. Such people are, as James says, unstable, driven and tossed about by every gust of wind, like waves on the sea.
By contrast, if we take that second step, if we commit ourselves to live by faith, even though that might seem very uncertain from the world’s point of view, we find that we stand firm and fast on a solid rock. To the world, that seems hard to believe, for all the world sees is our faith, and our faith isn’t enough by itself to hold us up—some days, our faith is strong, but other days it’s weak, as it’s unclear to us what God is doing, or even if he’s doing anything with us at all. But the key here is that our faith doesn’t need to support us, for we haven’t put our faith in our faith—we have put our faith in Christ, and no matter what trials may come, no matter what testing we may face, Christ is the solid ground beneath our feet, the firm foundation of our lives, and the anchor who holds us fast in even the worst of storms.
