Context No. 683 of 4322 · James

James 3:1-12: in context

1Let not many of you be teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive heavier judgment. 2For we all stumble in many things. Anyone who doesn’t stumble in word is a perfect person, able to bridle the whole body also. 3Indeed, we put bits into the horses’ mouths so that they may obey us, and we guide their whole body. 4Behold, the ships also, though they are so big and are driven by fierce winds, are yet guided by a very small rudder, wherever the pilot desires. 5So the tongue is also a little member, and boasts great things. See how a small fire can spread to a large forest! 6And the tongue is a fire. The world of iniquity among our members is the tongue, which defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature, and is set on fire by Gehenna. 7For every kind of animal, bird, creeping thing, and sea creature is tamed, and has been tamed by mankind; 8but nobody can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who are made in the image of God. 10Out of the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. 11Does a spring send out from the same opening fresh and bitter water? 12Can a fig tree, my brothers, yield olives, or a vine figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh water.

James writes practical wisdom, and few chapters are as unsparing as this one on the tongue. He opens with a warning to would-be teachers, who traffic in words and will be judged the more strictly for it, and then he widens the net: we all stumble, and anyone who never stumbles in speech would be a perfect person. Since none of us is, he turns to what the tongue can do. It is small, but it steers everything, like the bit that turns a horse or the little rudder that turns a great ship against the wind. And it is small like a spark, which is all it takes to set a forest ablaze.

Then he stops offering a way to master it. No one can tame the tongue, he says flatly; it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. The thing he cannot get over is its two-facedness. With the same mouth we bless God our Father and curse people made in his image, and out of one opening come both blessing and cursing. A spring does not pour fresh and bitter water from the same source; a fig tree does not grow olives. The divided mouth is against nature, and James does not pretend it is easy to heal. He just refuses to let us call it normal.

James would not let the mouth that praises God be excused for cursing the people he made. Whom do I tear down with the same tongue I use to bless God?

Sources

James 1:19-26: be slow to speak, and the religion made worthless by an unbridled tongue
Matthew 12:34-37: out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, and the account owed for every word
Genesis 1:26-27: humans made in the image of God, the very ones the cursing tongue turns on