to endure hardship: to bear up actively under suffering and hard toil, rather than merely being a victim of it
This verb is built from two Greek words meaning "bad" and "to experience," so at root it is "to go through bad things." In older Greek it often leaned passive, describing someone who is simply in a rough spot. But by the time of the New Testament its weight had shifted toward the active side: not just having hardship happen to you, but taking it on and bearing up under it with grit. The best English renderings are along the lines of "endure hardship" or "bear hardship patiently."
First-century readers would have heard three familiar pictures behind the word. It was the ordinary term for what soldiers put up with on campaign: cold, hunger, wounds, the grind of the march. It was also used for the chosen, disciplined hardship of someone training hard for a demanding life, the way a moral teacher spoke of tough, self-denying effort. And it named the honest sweat of a laborer or the steadfast suffering of a person who holds to what is right at great cost. In every one of these pictures the sufferer is doing something, not collapsing.
Paul leans on the word in his last letter to Timothy. His own imprisonment is this kind of hardship (2 Timothy 2:9), and he charges Timothy to endure hardship as part of the work (2 Timothy 4:5). James uses it to ask whether anyone is going through hard times, and his answer is simple: let that person pray (James 5:13).
Because the word carries this active, effortful sense so consistently, it works less like a cry of pain and more like a call to stand firm. Even where the suffering is very real, as it plainly is for Paul in his chains, the word frames it as something borne on purpose, not merely something endured helplessly.
Whether the hardship in James 5:13 covers any kind of trouble or specifically persecution suffered for the faith.
- majorityAny hardship: the word is broad here, forming a natural pair with the good spirits mentioned next, while sickness in the following verse is a separate pastoral case.; BDAG, s.v. κακοπαθέω; L. T. Johnson, The Letter of James, Anchor Bible 37A (Doubleday, 1995); D. J. Moo, The Letter of James, Pillar (Eerdmans, 2000)
- minorityPersecution: the same word group in 2 Timothy suggests nothing of illness, and James addresses a community suffering for its faith in continuity with the persecuted prophets of the previous verses.; R. P. Martin, James, WBC 48 (Word, 1988); S. McKnight, The Letter of James, NICNT (Eerdmans, 2011)