Pearls and Pigs, part 2

Dear Body of Christ: Shut up! Love, Matt

Seriously. The Church needs to learn to shut up and listen. It needs to stop speaking pedestrian banalities that have nothing to say about real problems that people face. It needs to stop putting up crappy platitudes on their church signs that only serve to alienate and offend. “Jesus is the answer” may contain a nugget of truth, but if we don’t listen to the “question” then the answer will always be the wrong one. Jesus can only be a solution when we know the problem. And, as I said in part one, we often don’t know the real problem in a person’s life. 

Sure this passage can be used in a number of ways, most of them probably valid. Remember this though: context matters, helping to determine what Jesus’ original meaning might have been. Asking, seeking and knocking falls immediately after Jesus’ discussion of planks, pigs and pearls. With the context in mind it isn’t too far of a stretch to tie this passage in with our discussion of throwing holy things before people who aren’t able to receive them and find nourishment from them. In order to be a healing salve we have to stop pushing our holy agenda onto people unable to receive it. Instead we need to ask them what we can do to help. We listen closely to their needs they share and then help appropriately, not half-hazard with our own agenda in mind. Three of the most beautiful words that we can utter for someone else are “I am here.” To be present to the hurts and needs of another human being brings us closer to living fully the life of Christ. The asking, seeking, and knocking primarily is about our relationship to other people, as opposed to our praying to God (the traditional use of that passage). Remember context. Asking, seeking and knocking is first about our relationship to others, not prayer to God. We gently ask to help and then help them in the way that they ask, not in the way that we want them to. In doing this we put the control back into the hands of God where it belongs. I quote again from The Divine Conspiracy:

We can gently but persistently keep our hopeful expectation before them and at the same time before God. Asking is indeed the great law of the spiritual world through which things are accomplished in cooperation with God and yet in harmony with the freedom and worth of every individual.

The church needs to learn to listen, to speak less and hear more. The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us “The more words the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” (6:11). Lose the flippant clichés and come alongside those who mourn and hurt and mourn and hurt with them. In this way we become Christ in the flesh for humanity and then the pearls become real treasure to them.

shalom, matt