71: Reflections on James, Part I: only conventional wisdom?

I got back to the albergue and found Helmut sitting at the table.

"Look what I got", I said, showing him my newly acquired Spanish New Testament. "Some pilgrim reading. I only had the gospels with me so far, but I wanted to use this opportunity to study the Book of James."

"The Book of James is interesting, isn't it? It's more like conventional Jewish wisdom than distinctly Christian theology."

"Yeah, he sounds a lot like the Proverbs. Talks about keeping the tongue in check, about not being too certain about what you'll be doing in the future, and that kind of thing..."

"Of course, there are echoes from the Sermon on the Mount as well".

"For sure. But there isn't much of the mysticism, the 'not I, but Jesus' talk that you get in Paul's epistles, for example. James mentions Jesus, like, twice in his letter?"

One monk at Taize had advised me to consider using another book of the Bible for my pilgrimage theme. He said that his impression of me was that I was someone who currently needed to meditate more on God's love, and less on practical wisdom and morality.

But I was not going to change plans at that point. If I'm going to the traditional site of St. James' remains, I'll read St. James' epistle, even if it is a different St. James. And of course I was balancing my readings with the resurrection accounts from the gospels.

The other thing was that I have a habit of making my theme passages the ones that give me most trouble. For most of my life the Book of James was the most accessible of all the Epistles, but over the last few years I had had increasing difficulty with it. If a passage gives me difficulty, I try to spend more time with it and see if I can understand how it all fits together.