Lenten Reflection – Day 3 of the Great Lent
Doers of the Word – James 1:22 – 2:5
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” (1:22)
Three days into the Great Lent and already a danger presents itself. We have heard beautiful words — about spiritual combat, about forgiveness, about walking in the light. We have perhaps nodded along, felt stirred, even resolved to change. But St. James, that most uncomfortably practical of the Apostles, now stands before us and asks a disarmingly simple question: What have you actually done?
It is possible to fast perfectly, to attend every service, to read every reflection — and still be a hearer only. The mirror is in our hands. Whether we walk away unchanged is entirely up to us.
The Man in the Mirror
“For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.” (1:23–24)
James compares the hearer who does not act to a man who glances at his face in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like. We have all lived this. We see ourselves clearly — in prayer, in a moment of conviction, in the stillness of a Lenten evening — and walk straight back into the same patterns by morning.
St. Nikolai Velimirović reflects on this with characteristic directness: the person who hears the word of God and does nothing is worse off than the one who never heard it, because he has added the sin of contempt to the sin of ignorance.1 The word of God is not information to be filed away; it is a surgical instrument meant to cut and heal.
The Great Lent places a mirror before us every single day — in the Scripture readings, in the prostrations, in the prayer of St. Ephrem, in the emptiness of the fasting stomach. The question is not whether we see ourselves. The question is whether we will act on what we see.
The Law That Sets us Free
“But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.” (1:25)
James calls the Gospel the “perfect law of liberty” — a phrase that startles, because we do not normally place “law” and “liberty” together. But this is precisely the paradox that the Fathers never tire of exploring: true freedom is not the absence of constraint but the presence of love. The person who obeys God’s word is not enslaved by it; he is liberated through it, because it restores him to his own true nature.
But St. Maximus the Confessor teaches that the human person was created to move toward God by love, and that sin is fundamentally a misdirection of that movement — a turning of the soul’s desire toward created things rather than toward the Creator.2 The commandments of God are therefore not arbitrary restrictions imposed from outside, but descriptions of what the healed human person naturally does. To keep them is to become more fully oneself. To break them is to lose oneself.
This is why fasting, when rightly understood, feels not like deprivation but like homecoming. We are not being punished; we are being restored.
The “law of liberty” is the blueprint of the human being as God intended him to be, and the Great Lent is the workshop in which that restoration takes place — provided we do the work, and not merely admire the blueprint.
Pure and Undefiled Religion
“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” (1:27)
James sweeps aside every external marker of piety and reduces religion to two things: mercy toward the suffering, and inner purity. Everything else is decoration.
St. John Chrysostom, who perhaps preached more forcefully on almsgiving and care for the poor than any other Father, returns to this theme with relentless urgency throughout his homilies. In his Homily 48 on the Gospel of Matthew, he declares that Christ does not ask us at the Last Judgement how many times we fasted or how long we prayed, but whether we fed the hungry and clothed the naked.3 And in his Homily 50 on Matthew, he makes the startling claim that the altar of sacrifice which God most desires is not the one in the sanctuary but the one walking past it — the poor person, in whom Christ Himself is hidden.4 He writes that this living altar can be found everywhere, in the lanes and the marketplaces, and that one may sacrifice upon it at any hour.
This is not to diminish the liturgy or the fast. It is to insist that they must bear fruit outside the church walls, or they bear no fruit at all. The orphan and the widow — the most vulnerable people in the ancient world — stand as representatives of every person whom the world has discarded and forgotten. To visit them is not charity in the sentimental modern sense; it is recognition — the recognition that Christ dwells precisely where we would rather not look.
As we fast today, ask: Who is the orphan or the widow in our life? Whose trouble have I been too comfortable to notice?
God’s Upside-Down Kingdom
“Has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?” (2:5)
James concludes with a truth that the world finds absurd and the Church finds easy to forget: God has chosen the poor. Not because poverty is virtuous in itself, but because the poor are less likely to mistake their possessions for their identity. They know what it means to depend on God, because they have nothing else to depend on.
St. Isaac the Syrian writes that poverty of spirit — which begins with material simplicity but extends to the surrendering of the whole self — is the doorway through which the soul enters the presence of God. The one who is full of himself has no room for God. The one who is empty, God rushes in to fill.5
This is the great reversal that the Gospel announces and that the Great Lent enacts in miniature. We empty ourselves — of food, of entertainment, of opinion, of self-regard — so that God may fill us. We descend so that He may raise us up. We become voluntarily poor so that we might discover the riches of the Kingdom.
For Our Journey Today
Do one thing. The reflection you have just read is itself a mirror. Before you walk away from it, choose one concrete action — a word of kindness, a gift to someone in need, a visit to a person who is lonely. The doer of the word, says James, will be blessed in what he does. Not in what he knows, not in what he intends, but in what he does.
Bridle the tongue. James connects true religion to the discipline of speech. Today, practise deliberate silence at one point where you would normally fill the space with words — and notice what that silence reveals about you.
Look at those you overlook. Pay attention today to the person in “filthy clothes” — whoever occupies the margins of your world. See Christ in them. That is pure religion.
Lord Jesus Christ, who had nowhere to lay Your head and who chose the poor of this world to be rich in faith, deliver us from the sin of partiality. Open our eyes to see You in the least of our brethren. Grant us not only to hear Your word but to do it — today, in this body, in this place. May our fast bear the fruit of mercy, and may our worship find its completion in love. By the prayers of the Theotokos, the holy Apostle James, and all the saints, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.
- St. Nikolai Velimirović — The Prologue from Ochrid, translated by Mother Maria (Lazarica Press, 4 vols., 2002). ↩︎
- Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, translated by George C. Berthold, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1985), pp. 36–65. ↩︎
- St. John Chrysostom: Homily 48 on the Gospel of Matthew (on Matthew 13:53–14:12), availed from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 10: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew ↩︎
- St. John Chrysostom: Homily 50 on the Gospel of Matthew (on Matthew 14:23–36), availed from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 10: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew ↩︎
- The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, translated by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, 1984; revised 2011) ↩︎
