Someone asked me a plain question after study tonight, something about assurance, whether a person can really know they’re saved, and I gave her four minutes and three cross-references when she wanted about fifteen seconds and a yes.
I noticed myself doing it while I was doing it. Reaching for the harder text when the easy one would have served her better. I don’t think I was trying to show off, not consciously. I think I’ve just spent so many hours in these pages that the simple answer doesn’t come to me first anymore. The complicated one does.
Driving home, one verse wouldn’t let go of me, and it wasn’t a gentle one.
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
I have read past that verse more times than I can count, the way you read past a warning sign on a road you drive every day. Tonight I couldn’t. Not many of you. James isn’t writing that to strangers. He’s writing it to people already doing what I do, most weeks, with kids who write down what I say and repeat it back like it settled something. The sentence doesn’t end in comfort. It ends in a stricter accounting.
I’ll say the thing plainly instead of circling it, because circling it is what I do with everything else. I don’t want a harsh judgment. I have wondered, more than once this year, whether teaching was ever actually mine to take up, or whether I talked myself into a role I liked the sound of without asking hard enough whether I should.
James doesn’t stop at the warning, though I notice I always stop reading right where the warning is worst. The next line: we all stumble in many ways. Not the teachers exceptionally. Everyone, including the ones he just told to think twice before volunteering. That doesn’t cancel the stricter judgment. It just means the stricter judgment was never going to land on someone who’d finally gotten it right. It was always going to land on someone still stumbling, doing the thing anyway.
I don’t know if that’s supposed to comfort me. Some nights it does. Tonight it mostly tells me I’m not being warned about a hypothetical failure I might avoid if I’m careful enough. I already qualify, by the plain sense of the text, stumbling and all.
There’s a quieter version of the same math in Luke: everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required. Less alarm in the voice. No less weight in the number.
I don’t have a place to put this fear that makes it stop being uncomfortable, and I don’t think I’m supposed to find one. I think the discomfort might be the correct response to an accurate sentence, and the wrong move would be hunting for a reading of James that lets me stop feeling it. What I keep coming back to, driving home with both verses in the car, is that the warning was written to people already teaching, not people still deciding whether to start. I already started. I don’t think the honest question left to me is whether to be afraid of the stricter judgment. It’s what I do with the fear the next time a kid raises his hand.