The Royal Law (James 2:8-13

⁸ If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. ⁹ But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. ¹⁰ For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. ¹¹ For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. ¹² Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, ¹³ because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

James now calls on all Christians to obey the royal law, as he calls it, and love their neighbors, whoever they may be. This is the center of what God desires his people to be. If we show partiality to someone then we break this law, betray our faith in Jesus and commit a sin (9). In the Jewish world from which James emerges, breaking the law meant rebelling against God, placing our own will over his. Obeying God’s law, of course, brings eternal life and membership in his kingdom.

When James writes of respecting the law, he means all of it, as we see in the next two verses. He believes that if you claim you follow the law, and break one element of it, then you break all the law. Once again, we see his devoutly Jewish origins for this was a common belief in Judaism at the time. We should not, though, dismiss him as just a stickler for legal details. Rather, many Jews saw the law as the expression of God’s will for humanity and so keeping it meant that you oriented your life toward doing God’s will. Notice how he began the passage condemning favoritism, by which he means prejudice against the poor. But in verse eleven, he writes of two other sins: adultery and murder. We would see these as much more serious sins, but James sees them all as equal. They all show we do not love our neighbor and thus do not follow God’s will.

In the final verses here, James insists that those who do not show mercy will not be shown mercy. Obviously this echoes what Jesus says in Matthew 6:15 and what we repeat as part of the “Our Father”. James goes even further, asserting that “mercy triumphs over judgment.” If we show mercy to others then we have no reason to fear God’s judgment of us. This leads us into the next section of the letter which focuses on living our faith.