Biblion Bible Commentary
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Is Anyone Among You Sick?
James 5:13-16
13 Is any among you suffering? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praises. · WEB
Three conditions are met with three responses, and the healing passage credits the prayer rather than the oil or the elders.
Verses 13 and 14 set out three cases in the same form. Suffering — let him pray. Cheerful — let him sing. Sick — let him call for the elders. Every answer is something the person does, and the third differs from the others only in that he cannot do it alone.
The initiative stays with the sick man: he calls. The elders are summoned rather than dispatched, and nothing suggests an office moving on its own authority.
What they do is stated in two participles. They pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. The letter supplies no formula, no gesture, and no explanation of the oil — a substance used in that world for both medicine and consecration, and the text does not choose. What it does specify is the name the anointing is done in.
Verse 15 then places the effective agent carefully, and it is neither the oil nor the elders: the prayer offered in faith is what restores the sick person, and it is the Lord who raises him up. The verb is worth a note, because the versions divide over it — it is the letter's ordinary word for saving, used of souls at either end of the book James 1:21 James 5:20, and some versions render it here as healing and others as saving. The ambiguity is in the Greek rather than in the translators. And the clause about sin is conditional — if he has committed sins — which declines to assume illness implies guilt, while allowing that sometimes it does.
Verse 16 widens it from a sickbed to the congregation, and the two commands are mutual: confess to one another, pray for one another. The letter that spent a chapter on what the tongue destroys ends by giving it something to do.
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