James ends the letter the way he began it, with patience under trial, and the whole last chapter pairs patience with prayer as two sides of one posture. He starts with a farmer. A farmer cannot make rain fall or force a crop to ripen ahead of its season. All the waiting in the world will not speed up what only God's timing can bring. Then he warns about waiting badly, which turns easily into blaming whoever is closest.
He points to Job, and here he changes words. For Job he uses the word from the letter's first chapter, steadfastness, staying put under unresolved suffering. Job never received an explanation, and James does not claim he did. What James says readers can see is the purpose of the LORD, that 11"the Lord is compassionate and merciful," working underneath everything Job endured without answers.
Then prayer, and James assumes every condition of life belongs inside it. 13"Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise." If someone is sick, he is to 14"call for the elders of the church," the ordinary plural leadership of a local congregation, summoned by the sick person to pray over him in his own care. 15"The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick." James insists that the God who is asked hears, whatever shape his answer takes, and that healing and forgiveness, body and soul, belong inside the same prayer.
Confession comes with it, and it is shared. 16"Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed." Then the line James wants remembered: 16"The prayer of a righteous person has great power." The righteous person James has in mind practices the undivided devotion he has asked for since the first chapter, the opposite of the double-minded man who is unstable in all his ways.
For the proof he picks an unexpected moment from Elijah's life. He chooses Elijah praying for drought and then for rain, a smaller moment than the widow's son raised from the dead. What James wants us to see is that Elijah was 17"a nature like ours." He was prone to fear and even despair, as anyone knows who remembers him under a broom tree soon after this same drought. If that man's prayer moved heaven, then ordinary prayer offered by ordinary people is not too small for God to answer.
The letter ends with almost no ceremony, only this. 20"Whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins." Bringing back a wanderer is named, in the last words of the letter, as the highest work James can imagine. It is the whole letter in two verses: the letter has been calling readers back, from double-mindedness to wholeness and from a dead faith to a living one. The letter ends by inviting them to do for someone else what it has been doing for them.
Wait like the farmer, and pray about whatever you are waiting on. Confess something to one person you trust this week. And ask whether someone you know has wandered and is waiting for you to come and find them.
Prayer
Father, teach us the farmer's patience, waiting on your timing and not our own, and Job's steadfastness, trusting your compassion before we see its purpose. We bring you our suffering in prayer and our joy in praise. Make us quick to confess and to pray for one another, ordinary people whose prayers you have never counted too small. If we wander, send someone to bring us back. In Jesus' name, amen.