James asks the question everyone in this scattered church was already asking about one another. 1"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?" He locates the cause inside them. 1"Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?" The battle is inside the people who are fighting it. 2"You desire and do not have, so you murder." Whether he means literal killing or the hatred Jesus called murder in the Sermon on the Mount, the logic is the same. Wanting something badly and not getting it does not stay contained. It spills into conflict with whoever seems to stand in the way. Even prayer gets caught in the current, 3"you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions." James describes a prayer aimed at feeding the same appetite that started the fight.
Then the tone turns sharp. 4"You adulterous people!" James drops his usual "brothers" and reaches for language from the prophets, where Israel is pictured again and again as an unfaithful wife. This is covenant language. And "friendship" in the ancient world meant sharing one mind, one set of values, one whole way of seeing reality with another person. To be a friend of the world is to have quietly adopted its scorekeeping as your own, its rivalry, its competition, and its grasping. God does not ask for a divided share of anyone's loyalty. He wants all of it, the way a husband wants his wife's whole heart, and that wanting is what love looks like.
James turns to grace in the middle of the rebuke. 6"God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." Whatever a divided heart has done, grace is larger than the offense and available the moment pride gives way to humility.
The remedy comes in a deliberate order. 7"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." Submission comes first and resistance second. Resisting evil was never meant to be a lone act of willpower. It works because a person has already lined up with God, and an enemy already beaten at the cross has little ground to stand on against someone standing that close to his Lord. 8"Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." James calls the divided ones 8"double-minded" and asks them to grieve, because sorrow has to be honest before joy can mean anything again.
Then comes the concrete test. Nothing shows a divided heart faster than what we say about other people. To speak against a brother, James says, is to speak against the law, because it sets the speaker up as a critic over God's own word, deciding which parts of "love your neighbor" apply this time. There is one seat on that bench, and it belongs to God alone. 12"Who are you to judge your neighbor?"
Think about the last quarrel you had and name the desire underneath it. Submit that desire to God before you try to resist anything. Then ask whom you have judged this week, and get down from the seat that was never yours.
Prayer
Father, you yearn for the whole of us. Forgive the quarrels our own unmet desires have started, and the prayers we aimed at feeding them. We submit to you now, and we draw near, trusting you to draw near to us. Humble us, so that in your time you may lift us up. In Jesus' name, amen.