James 4:11-17
New Catholic Bible
11 Do Not Judge Others.[a] Do not slander one another, my brethren. Whoever speaks ill of a brother or passes judgment on a brother speaks ill of the Law and passes judgment on the Law. But if you judge the Law, you are not keeping it but passing judgment upon it. 12 There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save or to destroy. Who then are you to pass judgment on a neighbor?
13 A Warning against Presumption.[b] Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we shall head off to this or that town and spend a year doing business there and making money.” 14 Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.
What is your life, after all? For you are like a mist that appears for a brief time and then vanishes. 15 Instead, what you ought to say is, “If it is the Lord’s will, we shall live to do this or that.” 16 But instead you boast in your arrogance, and all such boasting is evil. 17 Anyone who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits a sin.
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- James 4:11 Nothing is more current in the thoughts and conversations of human beings than passing judgment on others and slandering them. This is a usurpation. Only God can pass judgment, and it is he who has established a law—the law of love (see Lev 19:16-18; Mt 7:1-5).
- James 4:13 This is a warning to those people who live only for the glory of their projects, the exploitation of others, and the lure of gain (see Mk 8:36). It reproduces the theme of human weakness (see Pss 39:5-7, 11; 102:3; Wis 2:4; 5:9-14), which obliges people to put their trust solely in God and not in self.
