Pearls Before Swine: A Fresh Look at an Old Proverb
In Matthew 7:6 we find one of those perfectly-cut gems of proverbial wisdom that Jesus was famous for. “Do not give what is holy to the dogs or cast your pearls before swine,” he warns us. “If you do, they may trample them under feet and turn and tear you to pieces.”
It is certainly one of his best-remembered sayings, and also, probably, one of his least understood. At least, when I googled “what does it mean to cast pearls before swine,” I got all sorts of generic explanations of the saying, almost none of which had much to do with anything Jesus might actually have meant when he said it. Collinsdictionary.com suggests that if someone is “casting pearls before swine,” it means that “they are wasting their time by offering something that is helpful or valuable to someone who does not appreciate it or understand it.” Dictionary.com says it means “[wasting] good things on people who will not appreciate them.” And Gotquestions.org says that it has to do with sharing the gospel with someone who continually scoffs and ridicules Christ.
Certainly, all these definitions fall roughly in line with how the saying gets used now-adays, but when you look the verse up in Matthew’s gospel and try to read it in context, it seems like Jesus has something much more specific in mind, than simply a general warning not to waste something good on someone who doesn’t appreciate it.
In its original context, Matthew 7:6 comes as an apparent stand-alone proverb, following an extended teaching about not judging others, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. I say “apparent,” because, even though almost every commentary I’ve read on Matthew sees this verse as a “one-off” saying of Jesus dropped into this passage about judging others, sort of at random, I have come to believe that Jesus’s warning against throwing pearls to pigs is actually much more closely connected to his warning about judging others than any of us might suspect.
Admittedly, on the surface, the proverb in Matthew 7:6 doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything that comes before it or anything that follows. When I scratch the surface, though, I can’t help but think that this vivid image, both ridiculous and sobering, of a fool who risks getting torn apart by swine, because he foolishly cast his most valuable possession—his pearls—to them, is actually meant to be a proverbial summary of Matthew 7:1-5, a metaphorical description of how foolish and risky a thing it is to judge our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Let me explain.
In Matthew 7:1-5 we have a negative imperative—that is to say, a prohibition—against something that comes pretty naturally to human nature: “Do not judge.” The motivation for this prohibition is then given: “So that you yourself will not be judged,” and then the reasoning: “Because you will be judged by the same standard you use to judge others.” In other words, “If you judge others, you will, in turn, come under the same judgement you use against them.”
From here, Jesus gives us a metaphorical description of what it is like to judge others: it’s like trying to remove the speck from your brother’s eye while you have a plank in your own eye (vv. 3-5). The image is both ridiculous and sobering (made especially sober at the end, when Jesus calls the hypothetical person who might judge his brother in this way a ‘hypocrite’).
All this is well and good, and pretty straight forward, but notice how closely verse 6 follows this pattern: it begins with a negative imperative (do not cast pearls before swine). We’re then told that if we throw pearls to swine, the swine will trample the pearls and then, in turn, tear at us. What we’ve done to the pearls, so to speak, will happen to us. And as with the image of the guy with a plank in his eye, this image, too, of casting precious pearls to ravenous swine, is equally ridiculous and sobering.
Taken together, these parallels suggest that verse 6 (the saying about casting pearls before swine) is meant to be a follow up, proverbial elaboration, on what it means to judge our brothers and sisters, and why we dare not do so.
If the parallels are not clear, yet, they might become clearer if we simply asked ourselves: “In what ways is giving holy, or precious things (in verse 6) analogous to judging others, the way Jesus describes it in verses 1-5?”
As soon as you frame it like that, a number of obvious parallels bob to the surface. Like the person who judges his brother, the person who treats a “holy thing” contemptuously is being a hypocrite. Like the one who—by judging his brother—ridiculously ignores the beam in his own eye, the one who throws precious things to filthy swine is acting like a fool. Like the one who will be judged for having judged his brother like this, the one who lets pigs trample something (the pearl) that should be highly prized and deeply valued will be trampled and torn by those same pigs in return.
When you see it in this light, Matthew 7:6 functions as a kind of proverbial warning-bell, a quick, vivid, ready image meant to flash across the mind any time you are tempted to cast disparaging, self-righteous, hypocritical, or simply-uncharitable judgment on another. Because, if you give into that temptation and judge your brother or sister, Jesus says, you’ll be no better than the pathetic fool who takes a precious pearl that they ought to be cherishing, and instead of treasuring it, they toss it in the mud before some filthy swine cherishing (and if it’s not clear yet, let me state it bluntly here: the pearl is the brother or sister you are judging, in that moment, and by judging them, you are taking someone who should be loved and treating them as though they are worthless). It’s a ridiculous thing to do, but also foolhardy, because the truth about judging is this: we will be judged by the same standard we use to judge others; and if that’s so, then it’s all kinds of guaranteed—in the terms of our pearls-before-swine analogy—it guaranteed that after we’ve tossed the pearl that is our brother to the “swine” of self-righteous condemnation—those same swine will turn and trample us likewise.
May this picture give all of us pause, the next time we find ourselves standing in judgement of others, or feeling tempted to do so; may it remind us, with all the good humor and profound wisdom that characterized the best of Jesus’s teaching—that to do so is the spiritual equivalent of throwing pearls to pigs.
Bring Back the Buffalo (VII): Sharing the Table
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Galatians 2:11-21 is one of those obscure passages in the New Testament that does not get nearly as much attention in popular-level, evangelical Christianity as it probably deserves. I doubt, for instance, that anyone has ever made “When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face” their life verse, but even so, in Paul’s vivid recounting of the dust-up he and Peter (Cephas) had over the issue of shared table fellowship in the Antiochian church may be one of the most poignant depictions of the Gospel—how it was understood and how it functioned in the life of the early church—as any we might come across in the early church.
The issue at stake in this passage is the question of whether Jewish believers can, or should, share table with Gentile believers. Can circumcised and uncircumcised Christians eat together? Initially, Peter and Paul both answered this question with an unequivocal “yes.” One of the most fundamental implications of the Gospel—they believed—was that because all are saved equally through faith and Jesus, and because we are emphatically not saved through our adherence to the Mosaic law, *because,* in other words, it’s by grace we are saved through faith, and this not of works, lest anyone should boast, both Jews and Gentiles are free to eat together at the same table. Not only can they, they actually signal the Gospel in its purest, most fundamental form, every time they sit down together and break bread together.
This is why, Paul goes on to explain, when some “Judaizers” from Jerusalem came and started criticizing the Jews for eating with the uncircumcised in Antioch, and Peter bowed to the peer pressure and withdrew from their shared table—when Peter declined to eat together with the Gentiles, to appease the Judaizing element in the church—Paul “confronted him to his face.” His refusal to share table with the Gentiles, after all, was a betrayal of the Gospel at its deepest level.
From a biblical scholarship perspective, this passage is vital to our understanding of the origins and early life of the Christian church, because it shows us the first Christians, wrestling with the implications of their message, in real time.
From a ministry perspective more generally, this passage is crucial to our understanding of Christian community, and what reconciliation in the Gospel really looks like, because here we see two distinct groups in the church—the circumcised Jews and the uncircumcised Gentiles—two groups who historically were alienated from each other and at enmity with each other. And yet, they had all come to believe in the same Jesus for salvation, and had all received the same baptism as the mark of their belonging in the same family of God. How do they bury the spiritual hatchet, and come together, and live together as followers of the One Way? How do they signal they have done so, and how do they keep the hatchet buried, even when the wear and tear of community life threatens to resurface it from time to time.
For Paul the answer was simple: the shared meal.
A deep dive into the cultural context of the ancient world would point out how the shared meal functioned culturally as a profound symbol of one’s identification and unity with those at the table; it’s why the early Church was so scandalized in Acts 11:3, to learn that Peter had eaten at the house of Cornelius, the Roman (i.e. Gentile) Centurion. A deep dive into the theological background would point out how, throughout the New Testament, we see the “shared meal” functioning as a spiritual sign of Jesus’s open welcome to receive his grace and enter the Kingdom of God; it’s why Jesus was notoriously known as the man who “eats with sinners,” why he gave us the communion meal as our primary act of worship, and why the early church continually “broke bread together” in one another’s homes. A deep dive into the psychological significance might point out that there is, it seems, a profound psychological bond that forms when we actively and intentionally eat together with others; it’s why studies show that the kids of families that share a daily family meal are more thrive socially, have better grades, stay out of trouble, and have higher self-esteem.
I have been thinking a lot about the spiritual significance and the theological meaning of the shared meal, from a Christian perspective, since returning from a trip our church took out to Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve in Saskatchewan this summer. We went there both to witness and to celebrate the establishment of a self-sustaining herd of buffalo as a gesture of friendship and reconciliation, through the work of Loko Koa, a non-profit organization that supports Indigenous communities and establishes connections across Canada. Our church had been one of the donors for this project, and we were invited to visit the community in June, as part of a cross-cultural encounter.
I’ve shared a variety of thoughts on this trip, looking at it from a number of theological angles, but today, I want to wrap this series up by reflecting on the role that the shared meal plays in genuine reconciliation. Our church’s delegation at the home of chief Peter Bill, the chief of the Pelican Lake band, where he and his family hosted us graciously and generously. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we were invited to participate in a number of cultural experiences—the water ceremony, the sweat lodge, the healing circle—each of which opened our hearts and minds to our hosts in powerful ways.
As powerful as these things were, however, it was during the times we ate together that we formed the kind of understanding that is necessary, I think, for reconciliation to happen. When our defenses were down and conversation was given full space to breathe, because we had nowhere else to be and no other agenda than simply to attend to our basic biological needs for food and drink and safety—this is when we really began to think about our hosts, not just in terms of a culture to understand, but in terms of friends to honor.
Perhaps this is why eating together—such a common-place activity that probably does not get nearly the spiritual attention it deserves—why it played such a central role in the life of the early Church, why it holds such a crucial place in the biblical narrative, why it is so vital to the life of a church community. Because when strangers sit down and attend to their creaturely needs together, something deeply spiritual happens, they cease, at some point, to be simply hosts and guests, and become, in some intangible but very real way: reconciled friends.
At least, if we share our tables with a full sense of the Gospel, in all its significance: that when we were turned away from God and living as strangers in the world, God graciously invited us to his table, a table set with his own broken body and poured out blood. Consummate host that he is, he welcomed us to the feast and feed us with his very life, and now he asks us to extend the same hospitality to others as we have tasted in him.
What better way to show that we truly understand this message, I wonder? What better way to signal our willingness to live out the Gospel? What better way, actually, to enact our desire for reconciliation, than to share table with those we long to be reconciled to?
Whatever else truth and reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous people will look like, I think it will take many more genuine moments like the ones we experienced in Pelican Lake, of strangers sitting down together around the table, and getting up a few hours later, closer together because of the time they took to break bread together and come to a common understanding.
Bring Back the Buffalo (VI): The Cross and the Buffalo Skull
In Jesus and the Victory of God, N. T. Wright argues that somewhat controversial point that for First Century Jews, like those to whom Jesus of Nazareth first proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, “sin” and “forgiveness” were tightly bound together with the Old Testament narrative of exile and return. His position—and in broad strokes, I tend to agree with it—is that in a Second Temple Jewish context like Jesus’, “forgiveness of sins” meant, in particular, forgiveness of the national sins of apostasy and corruption that were the cause of and explanation for the Roman oppression and national subjugation they suffered as a people. He makes the case that they would have interpreted their present situation in terms of the Babylonian exile described in their sacred scriptures, and they would have seen the Roman occupation as evidence that in some real sense the exile had not yet ended. Inasmuch as the Babylonian exile was a direct result of ancient Israel’s corporate, national sin, the “sin” that needed to be confessed and forgiven in Jesus’s Judea, in the mind of a first century Jew, was also corporate, and national in nature.
In N. T. Wright’s succinct assessment: “Forgiveness of sins is another way of saying ‘return from exile.’”
This position was controversial when N. T. Wright first articulated it, mostly because it seemed to undermine the widely-accepted, individualized gospel popular in modern day evangelicalism, that understands “sin” as our personal, individual moral failures and shortcomings that need we need to be “saved from” by making Jesus our “personal” Lord and savior. This popular-level understanding of the Gospel has little room for the idea of corporate sin, that needs to be confessed by a people, in order that corporate forgiveness, in some sense, might be proffered. And yet, in N. T. Wright’s reading of the New Testament, this was at the heart of the historical Jesus’s ministry and message.
He suggests, for instance, that when the gospels relate that the whole region of Judea was going out to the Jordan river, “confessing their sins” and being baptized by John, they were not confessing their individual sins, or even their personal sinfulness. They were “confessing” the fact that Israel was still, in a very real sense, suffering the realities of the exile, and that they were, in another very real sense, implicated in the national, historic sins that had resulted in this situation, and that they wanted the Lord to end the exile and heal their national life.
It's a poignant reframing of the story, though it doesn’t fit neatly on a 4-point Gospel Tract.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea lately, that for the historical Jesus, “forgiveness of sins” might be more about the healing of national, corporate sin than it is about individual absolution from personally-committed sins. It’s been especially helpful to me as I’ve processed my recent trip to Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve, where a delegation from our church participated in a Bring Back the Buffalo initiative with Loko Koa and Tearfund. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the goal of this initiative was to gift a First Nation community with a herd of buffalo, as a small step towards restitution and reconciliation.
Ever since I heard about this project, I found it deeply inspiring and profoundly moving; it becomes more so after you’ve done a bit of research into the horrific story of Canada’s systematic decimation of the buffalo herds that once roamed freely across the prairies, sustaining Indigenous communities and playing a central role in their culture. Throughout the 19th Century, the Canadian government actively encouraged the slaughter of millions of buffalo, both to clear space for settlers and agriculture, and to force the Indigenous people who relied on the buffalo to accept treaties and move to reserves. There were an estimated 30 million buffalo roaming freely on the Great Plains of North America when settlers arrived in the 1600s; by the end of the 19th Century these had been hunted to the brink of extinction.
I have never hunted a buffalo; I’ve never posed for a grotesque photo next to an obscene mountain of bleached buffalo skulls; I was born long after the last buffalo hunt ended on the great plains of Canada. In that sense, I am not “responsible” for the decimation of those herds.
I have, however, benefitted from the prosperity and the security that the nation of Canada enjoys, a prosperity owing, at least in part, to the fact we’ve had so much resource-rich land to make ourselves at home in, land we acquired, historically speaking, through Government policies that exploited and oppressed the First Nations who called this land home before us.
I grew up visiting Elk Island National Park as a child, home to one of the few remaining “free roaming” herds of buffalo on the continent (I put “free roaming” in scare quotes because, even though the buffalo at Elk Island are left to roam at will, the area of the park they’re allowed to “freely roam” amounts to little more than 75 square miles). We used to oooh and ahhh over the buffalo herds we saw grazing peacefully in its meadows and among its trees, but no one ever told me the reason why the entire population of wild buffalo in Alberta could now fit in a 75 square mile enclosure, when they once teemed across the prairies.
In this sense, I am implicated—personally implicated—in the sad story of greed, violence and racism that is the history of Canada’s dealings with its Indigenous neighbors, even though I myself have never personally slaughtered a buffalo.
This is one of the reasons I find N. T. Wright's read on the gospel so compelling, because it reminds us that sin runs far deeper than just our individual shortcomings, that it is woven into the entire web of social relations, both present and historical, that make us who we are and form the context in which we live. The individual first century Jew who went out to hear John and be baptized may not personally have done anything to cause the Roman occupation, but they were implicated in Israel’s national sins nonetheless, and knew it, and received John’s baptism as a profound sign, both of their acceptance of their part in the problem, and of their longing for corporate absolution and restoration.
When we realize that Jesus offers us forgiveness at that broad, corporate level, that through the Gospel we can be forgiven—even of our part in the decimation of Canada’s buffalo herds—it sets us free, I think, from the paralyzing, unspecified sense of shame that often inhibits robust action towards reconciliation, while allowing us still to face these issues squarely, with an honest acknowledgement of our own responsibility in them.
I realize this might be misunderstood. It may sound like I’m saying that, even if Canada’s historic treatment of Frist Nations people was sinful, and even if I have benefitted personally from that sin, well, Jesus forgives me, so it just doesn’t matter.
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
What I am saying is this: that when we come to terms with the implications of the cross in its broadest sense, we discover that even the systemic sins that we may have unwittingly participated in have been judged—condemned and atoned for—in the crucifixion of Christ; and if we accept the Son of God’s death on our behalf for even those sins, he forgives us of that culpability and, in so doing, graces us to pursue right relationship with our Indigenous neighbors, not out of a place of shame or a need for self-justification, but out of a profound longing to live as agents of the very shalom we ourselves have experienced in the cross.
Realizing that Jesus died for our corporate sins, too, sets us free, I mean, to redress those sins honestly and authentically, with no fear of condemnation or need for excuses. I have tried in previous posts to give some ideas of what it might look like to “redress those sins honestly,” but my sense is that, unless such efforts are tied intimately and inextricably to the cross, they can very easily slip into self-righteous virtue signaling that do more harm than good.
When they are done in response to the cross, though, and as the outflowing of the grace we’ve experienced in the cross, they can be done with all the humility and grace, the longing for community and neighborliness, the open selflessness and shared understandings that are so crucial, if our interactions with our Indigenous neighbors are going to result in genuine truth and real reconciliation.
Bring Back the Buffalo (V): Truth and Reconciliation
As a Christian, I find it profoundly significant and deeply sobering that the Government committee tasked to investigate and address horrific legacy of Canada’s residential school system was called the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” I call it significant because “truth” and “reconciliation” are both such heavily weighted words in Christian theology. We confess that Jesus himself is the Truth incarnate (John 14:6) who came to reconcile us first to God and consequently to one another. Similarly, his Gospel is both the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) and the ultimate message of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:20). Churches that are truly transformed by the power of the Gospel, in other words, should be living as God’s agents of truth and reconciliation when it comes to addressing the legacy, not just of residential schools, but the broad history of Canada’s bad-faith dealings with the First Nations of Turtle Island.
And this is why I also call the name of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission “sobering.” Especially considering the church’s culpability and complicity when it comes to Canada’s residential schools, the fact we need a secular, state-run commission to motivate us to pursue truth and reconciliation in our dealings with Indigenous people is a sobering reminder of the church’s past failures to take the lead in this kind of work.
I’ve been thinking about these issues deeply in the last number of months, as I’ve continued to process everything I learned and experienced during my recent visit to the Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve in northern Saskatchewan, where I had the opportunity to participate in a Loko Koa/Tearfund “Bring Back the Buffalo” initiative with that community. In recent posts, I’ve shared a number of ways this trip impacted me, from deepening my theology of creation to broadening my understanding of prayer. The question I’m still wrestling with today, though, has to do with the implications of the cross when it comes to truth and reconciliation. In particular, I’m wondering how the cross might provide us the resources we need to pursue reconciliation authentically, and what a cross-shaped reconciliation might look like when it comes to our relations with Canada’s Indigenous People?
I’m asking these things because, as I continue to reflect on what I experienced at Pelican Lake, I am becoming increasingly convinced that reconciliation must start here, not with pious personal efforts to make a change, but with a humble return to the theological underpinnings for all genuine Christian ethics: the Cross of Jesus Christ. In her book, The Cross and Gendercide, theologian Elizabeth Gerhardt argues that a genuine theology of the cross “shifts the centre of ethics from human experience to the theologia crusis,” rooting it in “the self-giving act of Jesus on the cross” (Gerhardt, The Cross and Gendercide, p. 84). When we ground our ethics like this, in the crucifixion of the Son of God, we discover that “suffering as a result of violence is Christ’s suffering” and that “the cross and resurrection . . . constitute the central historical event that gives power and meaning to the work of justice building and peacemaking.”
This is true, I think, for all acts of peacemaking, but there are several themes in the Gospel that speak with special poignancy to the issue of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. To stretch her point to its inexorable conclusion: Christ himself was with, in, and present to the abused Indigenous child wrenched from her home and forced to attend a Residential School; Christ was there, in, with, and as, the Indigenous parents, despairing of feeding their family because the buffalo herds that once sustained them were decimated by intentional government policy. His suffering gathered up and in some mysterious, divine way, participated in their.
A close reading of 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 is a helpful place to start if we want to grapple deeply with the implications of the Cross when it comes to truth and reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations. Paul is writing to heal divisions within the Corinthian Church, and he does so by urging the Corinthian Christians to live out the full implications of the Gospel: that through Christ we are reconciled to God, and in Christ we are called to seek reconciliation with each other (v.18). Paul’s argument here is subtle but profound. We no longer consider people the way the world considers them, he says (v.16), because Christ’s death “for all” (v.15) assures us of each one’s deep worth in God’s eyes and compels us to love in a similar way (v.14). Transformed by our participation in Christ’s death for the world, we become his ministers of reconciliation, the ones to whom he has “committed . . . the word of reconciliation” (v.19). This is the theological heart of the passage, Paul’s conviction that the cross can and does put an end to enmity between God and humanity—that “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (v.20). What is interesting, however, is that being reconciled to God necessarily requires us to be reconciled with others—those for whom Christ also died—and failure to be reconciled with others is a breach in our reconciled relationship with God. We are “God’s ambassadors” he tells the Corinthians, through whom God makes his appeal to the unreconciled. This appeal is, specifically, “to be reconciled to God” (v. 20), but it is made, of course, as the culmination of an argument urging inter-personal reconciliation in the church. To be reconciled with God, then, we must also seek reconciliation with others.
Paul’s line of reasoning here resonates deeply with the teaching of Christ himself, who promised that “the peacemakers” will be called children of God (Matt 5:11), and who urged his followers first to be reconciled to their brothers and sisters before they present their offering to God (Matt 5:23-4). Though they are not always interpreted specifically in light of the cross, these sayings form the bedrock of the Gospel. Children of a “peacemaking God,” adopted through his son Jesus, will necessarily be his peacemakers in the world; and inasmuch as our worship is predicated on the reconciling work of Christ on the cross, all acts of corporate and individual worship must surely involve “first being reconciled to our brothers.” As Gerhardt puts it: “It is the mission of God’s followers to embrace others (not in the abstract but in reality) as a result of the grace and forgiveness given to them” (Gerhardt, 109).
Modern Evangelicals are deeply conditioned to think about the Cross in individualistic, transactional terms, content to believe that Christ died for my personal sins to save my individual, disembodied soul and simply leave it at that. As a result, we often remain deaf to the clarion call the Gospel sounds, summoning us to see the Face of the Divine in the suffering of those who are or have been abused by institutionalized violence, and to accept our responsibility to live as God’s ambassadors of reconciliation for no other reason than the fact that we ourselves have been reconciled to God in Christ. If we did hear it, though, we’d hear echoing in it, as a somber but hopeful undertone, an urging to take seriously our responsibility, as Christians in Canada specifically, to pursue right relationship with our Indigenous neighbours, authentically, earnestly, and as a humble expression of our faith in the Crucified One.
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