Warning to the Rich

For a stretch James stops instructing and starts pronouncing. He rounds on the rich, not the merely comfortable but the oppressing wealthy, in the voice of an old prophet.

Come now, you who are rich, weep and wail over the misery to come upon you.

This is not advice. It is a warning of judgment already on its way, and it opens with weeping rather than a way out. Then James describes their wealth in the past tense, as though the rot had already set in. Their riches have decayed, he says, their fine clothes are moth-eaten, their gold and silver corroded. Moth and rust and rot, the ordinary enemies of anything stored up too long, have quietly done their work. And in James's telling those things are not just ruined, they are witnesses: the corrosion will testify against the owner and eat his flesh like fire. The wealth that was meant to be a defense has become the proof against the man who piled it up. Then James names the sin at the center of it.

Look, the wages you withheld from the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.

The money kept back from the men who worked their fields is not silent. It cries out, and the cry carries all the way to God. That is the charge underneath all the luxury and the rotting finery: wealth built by holding on to the wages owed to the very people who mowed the fields and brought in the harvest. Two more strokes fall.

You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in the day of slaughter.

They have lived in luxury and self-indulgence, James says, and fattened their hearts in the very day of slaughter. And worst of all, they have condemned and murdered the righteous, who offered them no resistance. It is a hard passage, and it is meant to be. James is telling the mighty that God hears the ones they step on, and that hoarded, unjust wealth is not security at all but a case being quietly built.