Elijah Was Like Us

James closes with instructions for a praying community. Is anyone in trouble? Pray. Is anyone happy? Sing praise. Is anyone sick? Call the elders to pray and anoint. Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. Then he says something meant to remove the last excuse. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.

The phrase to hold is that Elijah was a human being, even as we are. It is easy to place the prophets in a separate category, men who stood on mountains and called down fire, men to whom prayer came differently than it comes to us. James will not allow it. Elijah got afraid and ran. He lay under a broom tree and asked to die. He complained to God that he was the only one left, and he was wrong. He was, in other words, like us. And he prayed, and the sky closed and opened.

James is not promising that our prayers will control the weather. He is dismantling the belief that effective prayer requires a special kind of person. The power is not in the pray-er. It is in the one who hears. A righteous person, in James's sense, is not a spiritual giant but someone who is right with God through faith and living honestly in that relationship, which is exactly what the letter has been describing for five chapters.

Look at the range of prayer in these verses. Trouble, joy, sickness, sin. There is no situation James can think of that does not have prayer as its first response. And he makes it communal. Confess to each other. Pray for each other. Call the elders. The picture is of a church that talks to God together and out loud, not a collection of individuals managing their private spirituality.

So the turn toward life is to pray as if you were Elijah, which is to say as if you were an ordinary person who has been told the truth about God. Pray for the sick person you know by name. Confess the sin you have been carrying to someone who can pray with you. Ask for the rain you need. The heavens are not closed to you because you are not a prophet. They were not closed to him because he was one.