Today’s second reading from the letter of St. James is very important in the history of Christianity. In the Reformation, the time when the Christian Church in the West split into multiple denominations, one of the principal issues was precisely what St. James’ addresses.
Martin Luther was a Roman Catholic priest in Germany in the 16 ^th century (1500s). There were essentially only two Christian Churches at the time – the Western Christian Church led by the Bishop of Rome and the Eastern Christian Church. Sadly, the Western Christian Church at the time of Martin Luther was steeped in corruption. Luther challenged the corruption within the Church ultimately leading to the end of Christian unity in the West. One of his major concerns was that the Church had lost sight of the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ. It was only faith in Jesus Christ that could save a person. No works, no litany of prayers, no penitential practices, no sacrificial offerings to the Church could save you. The only thing that could save you was a living faith in Jesus Christ. Luther so emphasized the importance of faith in Christ that persons could forget that they had to make their faith real in the way they lived their daily live.
This is the point that St. James emphasizes in his letter today. “If [faith] does not have works, it is dead.” You can’t say that you believe in Jesus Christ if that faith is not evident in how you live your daily life. Every day we have to renew our faith in Jesus Christ by renewing our commitment to conform our lives to his life. The more our lives mirror his life, the more we can truthfully say that we believe in Jesus Christ. But if our lives – our thinking, our speaking, our acting – do not conform to what Jesus taught by his life and by his words then our faith is dead. Our proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ is false and it cannot save us. There is a famous question that we all need to consider. “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
May all of us work daily to create a mountain of evidence of our faith in Jesus Christ.


Fr. Mark Hallinan, S.J.