Throwing Pearls to Swine
Mathew 7:15-28
I have a history with this scripture. I don’t love it. (That is my history of wrestling with the scripture, not the scripture itself) As a 20 something trying to decipher scripture and understand my life in relationship with God, I struggled to “unpack” the meaning of this excerpt from Mathew. At least in my mind, I hoped I was struggling with the meaning, because I didn’t like my odds of NOT being a sheep in wolves clothing, NOT being the one who would soon hear, ‘I never knew you; depart from me evil doers’, and NOT being the foolish one building my house on sand. Even at 20 when I tried to convince myself of my virtue, these were images that made me aware of my lazy, foolish, and flawed character. On top of that my favorite fruit is a blackberry…which does come from thorns…so more or less, I could flog myself with this scripture or ignore it.
When I read this scripture as a 55 year old, I can find myself right back in that place of seeing either self judgement or self deception. However, I can’t square this notion with my deep faith in a God of grace and unconditional love. I can’t make this scripture stand alongside a creator who made beauty, a savior who gave up everything for me, and a holy spirit who often reminds me that I am beloved by the God of the Universe; through whom I can feel both God’s pleasure and God’s grace. How can that God also say, ‘I never knew you,’ or ‘depart from me evil doer?’
I was “helping” David with his math homework last night. David was frustrated with me because I could find the answer, but I could not explain, nor figure out, how I knew the answer. In a similar vein, I feel like I know the “answer” or meaning of this scripture, but I want to know why it might mean something different than my 20-year-old interpretation. I found help in reading the rest of Matthew 7. Ultimately, I made a diagram that looks like this attached picture:
I was focused on the outcomes, focused on the fruit. I was wondering what good fruit or mighty works look like, or what I did wrong to not be known by god and enter the kingdom. This diagram is all of the examples in Matthew 7. The emphasis is not on the fruit as I saw it, but the emphasis is on the foundation, the basis for the fruit. I wonder if this means that what is actually good fruit and bad fruit, what is a mighty work and what isn’t, good gift and evil gift; we have only an earthy ability to discern. Therefore, the more important faith action for us is accepting, remembering, and leaning into our Rock, our Foundation, our Sound Tree, seeking the Narrow Gate. The answer is not in the fruit, because we simply do not understand the fruit. If we base our action on the sand, in the thorns, in false, self-deceptive, hypocritical, easy gates, the fruit is not discernably good or bad; it simply doesn’t matter. If our fruit looks great, but we are not known by our savior, we are simply throwing pearls to the swine.