Out of the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.
James 3:10 (WEB)
in its setting: James 3:7-12
1 Where we are
Jia Hao is twenty and six weeks in. At twenty past eight on Monday the pour-over queue runs to the door, and while weighing beans he says something quick about what his colleague eats and does not eat. Three people laugh. The colleague laughs too, then turns back to the milk fridge. For the next four hours the counter is very polite. What Jia Hao wanted then was to be in — six weeks of being the new one, and a laugh is the quickest proof that you belong. What he is afraid of now is that saying sorry will make him, out loud, the thing he suspects they already think he is.
2 What the passage is doing
James is writing to congregations scattered, and a few lines earlier he has them in the room: the man with the gold ring gets the good seat, the poor man is told to stand at the back. Then he turns to the mouth. A spring does not pour out fresh water and salt water. He is not scolding a slip of the tongue; he is saying the mouth reports the source. This ought not to be so, he says — to people who thought the room was fine, because everybody had agreed.
εὐλογία
eulogia · blessing; a good word spoken over someone
Eulogia is built from eu, well, and logos, word. It is not a religious formula but the ordinary act of speaking well of a person, out loud, where others can hear. James puts it in the same sentence as its opposite and says both are coming out of one opening. English hears "blessing" as something churchy; the Greek keeps it at counter level, in whatever you say about a colleague while three people are listening.
3 Taking it with you
You may be the one at the other end of that counter, watching him work the floor twice as hard to get the temperature back. You cannot restore him by laughing again. What Christ did was go outside the group — mocked, named, put out of the city — so that your place in God's household rests on his blood and not on how the room is reading you. That is settled, and no joke lands hard enough to unsettle it. So when it is your mouth, you can afford to go to the person, not the room. The person is owed something truer, and you are free enough to pay it.
A prayer you can pray
Father, I want to be liked more than I want to be honest, and I have used other people to buy my place in the room. Thank you that my place with you was bought by Jesus and not by anything I said. Give me the nerve today to go to the person I hurt, plainly, without an audience. Teach my mouth to speak well of people when nobody is laughing. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
