Where Value Is Earned
Day 207 – 26 July
No Favourite Faces
“My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.” (James 2:1, KJV)
Two Visitors
Picture a Sunday morning foyer, and two strangers arriving within a minute of each other. The first steps out of a gleaming car in a beautifully cut suit, all polish and confidence, and the welcome team straightens as one; he is greeted warmly, walked in personally, and seated where everyone can see him. The second shuffles in behind, jacket frayed, shoes gone at the heel, and the same team softens its smile to something thinner; someone gestures vaguely to the back and hopes he settles somewhere unobtrusive. Every one of us can picture it, because every one of us can feel the pull of it. And before we congratulate ourselves that we would do better, it is worth knowing that this exact scene, the gold ring, the fine clothes, the shabby visitor, the best seat and the floor, was staged in writing nearly two thousand years ago (James 2:2-4). James put it there because he knew his readers had already lived it. So have we. The stage set changes; the instinct has never needed updating.
Receiving the Face
James gives the instinct its name, and the name is a picture. The word behind “respect of persons” is προσωπολημψία (prosōpolēmpsia, “partiality” or “favouritism”), a compound of πρόσωπον (prosōpon, “face”) and λαμβάνω (lambanō, “to receive”). Word for word, it is the sin of receiving the face. Inside that Greek compound sits a fossil of an older Hebrew idiom, “to lift the face,” drawn from the courtesies of the East: on meeting a great man, the lesser bowed his face towards the ground, and if the great man favoured him, he raised the bowed face, lifting it as a sign of regard. From there the phrase entered the courtroom, where Israel’s judges were commanded to lift no faces at all: “Thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour” (Leviticus 19:15). To receive the face, then, is to let the surface of a person decide their treatment, to read the suit, the ring, the accent, the title, and to hand out warmth and welcome according to what the reading promises. It is judgement by packaging. And notice what James calls the people who practise it: “judges of evil thoughts” (James 2:4). The usher in the foyer thought he was only seating guests. James says he had quietly set up a courtroom, tried two men on their clothing, and delivered two verdicts.
The Screen
The world’s orchestras stumbled on a confession of this some decades ago. Auditions had always been held face to face, the candidate walking onto the stage in full view of the panel, and the great ensembles remained overwhelmingly one kind of person. Then a simple change was introduced: a screen. The musician now performed unseen, a number instead of a name, footsteps muffled, nothing crossing to the judges except sound. And the composition of orchestras began to shift, notably towards women, whose playing, it turned out, had been excellent all along. Sit with what that screen admits. The panels were made up of superb musicians, trained ears, people who sincerely believed they were judging tone and technique alone. Yet the face had been reaching the verdict before the music finished its case. They were receiving the face without ever knowing they did it, and only a sheet of cloth finally silenced its testimony. The screen is a confession in furniture: we cannot be trusted to see a person and hear them fairly at the same time.
The Judge Who Needs No Screen
Now lift this to the throne, because here the whole month’s deepest truth comes into view. “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34); with Him “there is no respect of persons, nor taking of gifts” (2 Chronicles 19:7). He receives no faces, and He needs no screen to manage it, because His seeing works from the opposite direction to ours. We read surfaces and guess at depths. He reads depths, and surfaces carry no evidence at all: “man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), the looking being spoken to our understanding, since He has no eyes and needs none, all things lying open before Him at once. Nothing about a person’s packaging, the wealth or the want, the polish or the fraying, adds a grain to the scales of His regard or takes one away. This is His unchanging nature, and never a discipline He maintains. And James presses the point somewhere sharper still: “Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom?” (James 2:5). The very man waved to the floor by the usher may stand, in the true courtroom, an heir of the kingdom. The foyer got the seating exactly upside down. And sweeter than all of it, the old blessing prays that “the LORD lift up his countenance upon thee” (Numbers 6:26). The idiom returns transfigured: He lifts His own face towards us, the favour of the King turned on people who could never earn it, and He turns it on the shabby and the splendid alike.
The Premise Under the Whole Week
Look back down this week and one truth surfaces under every day of it, unnamed until now. We began with the low mind that grants every person their full reality, and the outward watch that looks to their interests; we laid down rivalry, lengthened our tempers, learned which weights to share, and took the seat alongside with a building word. Now ask a single question of all six: for whom? For which of the people beside you? And the answer every day quietly assumed is: for any of them, for all of them, with no sorting first. Regard that went only to the impressive would be no humility at all; a lookout kept only for the useful would be networking; encouragement reserved for the promising is investment. The whole week’s love has been resting on the Fourth Affirmation, that God shows no favouritism, and asking us to regard the people beside us as He regards them: without receiving a single face. That is the crown of the week, and the reason the month’s title holds true. Where is value earned? In the unwatched hour, with honest weights, among the people beside you, and offered to every one of them alike, because the One we resemble in it has no favourite faces.
Declaration
Today I close the courtroom I never meant to open. I catch myself reading suits, accents, titles, and shoes, and handing out my warmth by the verdict, and I lay the gavel down. The surface of a person is done deciding their treatment at my hands. I give the shabby visitor the welcome I would give the splendid one, and I regard the overlooked with the honour I once saved for the impressive, because the packaging was never the person. Every practice of this week, the regard, the watchfulness, the patience, the shared weight, the building word, I now offer without sorting anyone first. I have been received this way myself: read at the heart, welcomed without credentials, favoured beyond anything my surface could claim. So the welcome in me today is the one I was given. No favourite faces. Every person beside me, whole.
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