Pearls before Swine - by Adrian Plass
Saturday, November 06, 2004 (07:20:00)

Posted by Conx

Have you noticed how some bible verses are more or less invisible for years? Then, quite suddenly, it is as though an unseen hand places those words before your eyes in such a way that you must take notice of them. This happened to me very recently when I found myself really wanting to know what Jesus meant when he said that we should not cast our pearls before swine.

What pearls?

What swine?

Why shouldn't we feed the latter with the former?

As I thought about these questions a kind of understanding began to form in my mind. Those who have waded through the swamp of my prose in the past will not be surprised to hear that my interpretation is a very subjective one. But you never know, it might send your thinking off into much more profitable directions.

First of all, then, I thought about the fact that pearls are actually formed by oysters as a reaction to and defence against a foreign body or irritant - usually a piece of grit. The result of repeated accretions around the unwanted invader is something that, to human eyes at least, has always been regarded as being very beautiful and extremely valuable. The same thing has happened in my own life. There have been troubles and weaknesses and negative influences threatening to occupy and spoil aspects of my life, many of them having their origins in my teens. I take no pride or satisfaction in these difficult, dark intruders, but I do greatly value the way in which God has formed a pearl of protection around each of them. He has not removed them, because he is good enough to allow me to remain the person that I am. I wear these pearls as symbols of my vulnerability and as illustrations of the way in which God can make something beautiful out of weakness.

The knowledge that vulnerability is not a sin (Jesus himself is the clearest example of this) can be very helpful to those who have been intimidated by 'perfect' Christians.

I am proud of my pearls.

Who are the swine?

Well, interestingly enough, in this context they are Christians who suffer what seems to be an overwhelming compulsion to put me right. They become very agitated when I appear to be casually open about deficiencies in my Christian life, or the way in which my personality and experience are affected by events or circumstances from my distant past. They undoubtedly think that they are being helpful but they have actually got it wrong. They want to heal my uncertain teenage years and my tendency towards flippancy, and my scepticism towards most human organisations, and my habit of hanging about on the edge of things, waiting to see if the truth will end up inside or outside the circles that we nervous Christians seem obliged to form all the time. I've decided I don't want them healed, any more than a red-haired person would want the colour of his hair healed, or a left-handed person would want his left-handedness cured or a person who likes singing in the bath would want that habit drawn out of them by the roots, like some sort of verruca.

One of the most wonderful things offered to us by God is his permission to follow Jesus without becoming somebody else. Paul the apostle, for instance, remained, in crucial ways, exactly the man that he had been before his Damascus Road experience, but because of a brand new, God-given perspective, redirected his energies, talents and tendencies towards a completely different goal.

These helpful 'swine' want to remove everything that makes me different from the kind of person that exists only in the context of those strange acts of corporate dishonesty that some Christian congregations specialise in.
Why do they do it?

I suspect that, in the main, this obsession with spiritual blandness springs from a combination of fear and unbelief. I have written elsewhere about insecure leaders being like children left in charge of a house. The task is so worrying that they make up a set of horrendously impossible rules in an attempt to control a situation that appears frighteningly complex. Those who are anxious to get others 'fixed' are often plagued with worry and doubt in exactly the same way. They would have found Jesus terribly worrying two thousand years ago. The even worse news for them is that he hasn't changed at all.

All right, I've probably generalised far too much, but the issue is an important one, and its central truth is worth repeating.

Pearls are valuable things, each one formed around an unwanted, irritant. In their beauty, they transfigure something that could have turned very ugly. Don't let anyone take them away from you.

Copyright (c) Adrian Plass