I came across a verse this morning that just didn't seem to fit.
Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.
It sits between the bit about not judging people and the bit about asking God for things. It doesn't belong to either. I thought that if you took it out, nobody would notice. The sermon would run on perfectly well without it.
I was wrong.
By the time you reach chapter seven you have been a long way with Jesus.
You have heard that the poor in spirit are blessed, and the ones who mourn, and the ones who are hungry for things to be put right. You have heard that you are the salt of the earth. You have been told not to be angry, not to swear oaths, not to hit back, to love the people who are against you. You have been told to give without letting anyone see you do it, and to pray without performing, and not to store things up.
And then, just before this verse, you have been told not to judge. To take the log out of your own eye before you go near the speck in anybody else's.
That is what I had been reading. Stop measuring people. Stop sorting them.
And the very next thing he says is: some people are dogs, and some are pigs.
Lest they trample them underfoot.
Trample. I have read the word about the salt many times.
You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
It is the same word. And in the whole of Matthew, those are the only two places it appears.
Which changes what the pearl is.
I had always read the verse as being about the truth. Don't waste good teaching on people who won't have it. Don't argue about God with someone who only wants a fight. That reading works, and I have used it.
But if the trampling word comes from the salt, then it is not about teaching at all.
The pearl of great price. The treasure in the field. A man sells everything he has for it. By chapter seven I have been shown what God is like — that he is faithful to people who are not faithful to him, that he keeps loving where there is no reason to — and I have been told to live that way myself. Not to hit back. Not to sort people. To give without being seen.
That is the pearl. Not me. What I have become.
And I have just been told to hand it out.
And then he says: ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened.
I have usually heard that verse read as being about wanting something. A job, a healing, a way out.
Here it comes straight after being told that some people will trample what you carry. I don't think that is an accident. If you have been given something like that, and told to hand it out, and then told that not everyone can be given to, the thing you need next is not a job. It is to know the difference.
So you ask.
There is a man I visit in prison. If you asked the officers, most of them would tell you he is the hardest man in there. His life was a mess before he came in and it has only got worse since. He is broken.
If anyone is a candidate for the grace of God, it is him.
I have gone back to him many times. There are people who think I have gone back more times than I should have.
I still don't know whether he is a dog, or a pig, or someone I should give a pearl to.
The you this reflection leans on is traced in You; and for another verse that could be cut without anything breaking, and was kept anyway, see A Place for Salt.