Visiting widows

James says that true religion consists in “visiting widows and orphans in their distress” (James 1:27). We don’t get the point if we think of “visit” in our first sense of “pay a call.”

In Christ, God has “visited and redeemed His people” (Luke 1:68), and the dayspring from on high visited us (1:78; cf. 7:16). Moses “visited” his brothers when he killed the Egyptian (Acts 7:23). To “visit” widows and orphans means to act, and to act zealously, in their defense.

No accident that the Greek word for “visit” is epispektomai , and has an etymological sense of “look around” or “examine with the eyes.” To visit is to “see” in the full biblical sense, that is, to judge.