I was born a black-and-white thinker.
Do this, and you’re rewarded. Fail, in even the tiniest way, and you’re punished — even if only by your own heart.
In my world, A + B always equaled C.
Then, tragedy struck my life in my mid-20s. I became suddenly, deathly ill. After a week of decline and eventually coma, the doctors predicted I would die within 24 hours.
But I didn’t.
I learned that His rules were there to show me I would never be able to keep them. That His principles were for my protection, not my perfection.
No one knew why I got sick, and no one knew why I got well. My story was a miracle, and I knew it. Everyone knew it. But even that good news didn’t help me face a long, painful road of recovery with grace.
For weeks I sat in a wheelchair, defenseless, trying to relearn the lessons of infancy: writing my name and dressing myself and holding my own head up again. I fretted over why this had happened to me. I had always been a good girl — better than others, I thought. I had tried to do the right things.
Now, I was angry at God. I was angry at myself. I must have slipped up somehow to deserve this, I thought. I must have failed in ways I hadn’t realized.
And so I prayed. Howled, to be honest. I cried my heart out to God, longing for Him to show me the mistakes that had led me here, blaming Him for the mess if He couldn’t produce valid reasons.
I opened my Bible looking for justification for my anger — for evidence that He had failed me. And God began to answer with fresh eyes for His Word, which I had read and studied and memorized all my life, but never really understood. He began to break my black-and-white thinking with the colors of His undeserved mercy.
I learned that His rules were there to show me I would never be able to keep them. That His principles were for my protection, not my perfection.
I saw that my badness was my trust in my own goodness; I had made myself my own judge and my own savior.
There in those days, unable to rise on my own or do anything for Jesus at all, I learned that lavished mercy both on people who knew they were wrong and on people, like me, who thought they were so very right.
It doesn’t take a deep read through the book that James wrote to see my natural-born self in his words and his tone; Jesus’ brother is a black-and-white thinker, through and through:
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves (1:22).
If anyone thinks he is religious without controlling his tongue, his religion is useless (1:26).
And, at the start of chapter two, James blurts this out: Don’t show favoritism to rich people over poor people, he writes. If you do, you’ve become judges with evil thoughts (2:4).
A+B=C.
Yet, James had been painted with the colors of the gospel, too. He was Jesus’ spiritual brother as much as he was his earthly one.
That’s why, in order to understand James’ teaching on partiality, we must go back to where it begins: My brothers and sisters, do not show favoritism as you hold on to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ (2:1, emphasis mine).
If we cling to the gospel, James says — if we truly have faith in our glorious Savior instead of placing our trust in our own ideas of the way things should be — there’s no way we can treat one person better than another.
We can’t choose who gets favor because we’ve been given favor we didn’t deserve.
We can’t play favorites with our mercy because God offers mercy to all regardless of social status, race, and gender — to the poor and to the rich, to the Jew and to the Greek, to slave and free, to male and female (Galatians 3:28).
Ultimately, however, we won’t show favoritism because, under God’s new math, A+B no longer equals C. Jesus smashed that equation through His death and resurrection. Neither the poor or the rich — nor you or I — get the treatment we deserve.
We get redemption for our rejection. We get forgiveness for our failures.
We get pardon for our pride.
Our law has now changed to love: Indeed, if you fulfill the royal law prescribed in the Scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well (2:8).
So, we can read James’s warning against favoritism with a gospel lens now: if you treat one person better than another, haven’t you made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? (2:4, emphasis mine).
Playing favorites is playing God, says James. The sin of favoritism is a sin of forsaking the gospel, our faith which teaches that our glorious Lord Jesus Christ is the One True Judge, and He’s erased these lines between love.
Don’t go back to that A+B=C life again, James begs — the kind you find when a girl sits self-righteously in her wheelchair and feels comfortable being a judge after she’s already received mercy.
The kind where you’re crushed by the weight of being your own savior.
The kind where you live under guilt instead of grace:
If, however, you show favoritism, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all (2:9,12).
If we find ourselves in this place, the gospel can and will restore us if we repent and surrender. We can begin to speak and act as those who are to be judged by the law of freedom (2:9).
Just like learning to walk and write and work all over again, God will patiently, gently teach us the most essential lesson of spiritual infancy once more: Mercy triumphs over judgment (2:13).
