1:19-21 – James open this section of thoughts by
expressing commonplace wisdom from the Old Testament proverbs—be quick to
listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. The first two commands need no
explanation; most everybody understands the advantages to this kind of
practice: if we truly are quick to listen and slow to speak, we will have
greater understanding of others, less miscommunications and hurt feelings, and
the things that come out of our mouths might actually be worth listening to.
But although everyone understands the truth of that premise, most people find a
great deal of difficulty in putting it into practice. As we’ll see, James notes
that this isn’t the only area in which we may listen and agree, and then go out
and fail to practice what we’ve heard. The third injunction—“slow to become
angry”—is a repeated theme in the Old Testament, and it’s almost always said
about God: he is slow to anger and rich in love. In the same way that God
extends his grace and patience toward us, with our manifold faults, we too must
learn how to extend grace and patience toward one another. In v. 20, James
notes that “human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.”
We must always note that, when we see the word “righteousness” in our Bibles,
it could just as easily have been translated “justice” (the two ideas are
encompassed by the exact same term in Greek). So here James may have in mind
our internal righteousness—i.e., having a quick temper will not help us along
the path of personal virtue that we ought to be walking—but he might as well
have in mind the external justice of the situations we face. God is the one
good Judge of all things, and we need his wise judgments to bring justice over
against all the evil and suffering of this world. We humans, in our anger, do
not further the ends of God’s great plan to bring this justice which sets all
wrong things right. If anything, it gets in the way. So James’ advice is clear
and incisive: get rid of all the evil and sin in your life, and accept the word
planted in you. That word is, first and foremost, the message of Christ
himself, the true Word, whose life and power grows within us just like a
spiritual seed that breaks forth and blossoms. But James also has in view the “word
of God” in the sense that the Old Testament prophets used that phrase: the
things God has told us, which we ought to be doing. This word—Christ in us, and
the binding counsels of God for living a life of holiness—is both the heart and
the practice of our salvation: the word which can save you.