James 5:7-11: in context

James is writing to people who are suffering and waiting, and his counsel is to be patient, but he does not leave patience as a vague virtue. He gives it an image. Look at the farmer, he says, who waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rains. The farmer's patience is a very particular kind. He has done his part, he has planted, and now there is nothing to do but wait through the seasons, because the crop simply cannot be rushed. No amount of anxiety or effort will make it grow faster; it needs the rains in their time and the slow work of the months. He waits because that is the only way good fruit ever comes.

James applies this to two things at once, the coming of the Lord and, underneath it, the outcome of our own hard seasons. And he notices where impatience tends to spill out: do not grumble against one another, he adds, for the judge is standing at the door. Impatient people waiting for something they cannot hurry usually take it out on the people around them, and James names that directly. Then he points to Job. You have heard of the endurance of Job, he says, and you have seen the outcome that the Lord gave, how the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. That is what sustains the patience. It is not blind waiting; it is waiting anchored in what the Lord's stories turn out to be at the end, compassionate and merciful, even when the middle was agony.

The farmer's patience is a hard discipline in a culture that wants everything now. What am I impatiently trying to force or rush right now, some fruit that can only come in its own season with the rains it needs, and is my impatience leaking out as grumbling at the people nearest me? And could I wait the way the farmer waits and the way Job endured, trusting that the outcome the Lord finally gives will show, as it did for Job, that he is full of compassion?