Pigs and Rice
For those of you with a delicate disposition and don’t eat meat, then please turn away now!
Most Brits would agree, there’s nothing better than a bacon sandwich! Whether you like your rashers smoked or plain and your bread toasted or not, loaded with ketchup, brown sauce or with an egg, the faithful bacon sarnie is the perfect way to start the day and the perfect antidote to a late night on the town. What about a Sunday Roast Dinner of Pork with apple sauce and a thick layer of indulgent crackling? My grandparents were butchers and so you can imagine there was a wide variety of meat on offer in their household. In fact the nick-name I had for my maternal grandfather was Grandad Meat because he would come to visit us each week armed with a huge box of meat from his shop. They were big fans of pigs’ trotters, something you don’t tend to get on your average restaurant menu these days and today my dogs are partial to a pig's ear occasionally - it keeps them well occupied for an hour or so.
Hog Roasts hearken back to medieval times when whole pigs were skewered on to a spit and turned by the roasting fire. Nowadays these are still enjoyed on special occasions but without of course the poor slave having to turn the spit continuously. Although we rarely see the banqueting tables displaying a whole head of pig nowadays, brawn is still used in making stock for pies and soups. There are plenty of delicacies on offer for those with a more robust meaty appetite such as liver, kidneys, heart and sweetbreads (we won’t dwell on that one!) And for those of us who have a preference for a more exotic twist, a thick slice of gammon with a tropical ring of pineapple to garnish is a good alternative. Then there’s the sturdy pork chop cooked in cider and honey with a mustard sauce and we can’t forget bangers and mash – one of the greatest of British staples. Feeling hungry?
It's true that us westerners love our pigs and it’s the one animal that you can eat virtually everything from it. In fact, it is often said that the only thing you can’t eat from a pig is it’s squeak! To those of us meat eaters and our western way of thinking, pigs as well as being wonderful animals, are just great to eat and there are many ways to describe the various cuts of meat that can be consumed. We enjoy the many facets of the pig so much that we don’t say we are going to eat pig, we eat, bacon, ham, pork, gammon, crackling, chops, loin, liver, ribs.... the list goes on. Because the pig is so important to our culture and our way of eating, we have a wide variety of words to describe it.
Now let’s look at rice. Rice is an important staple in the east. Take Indonesia for example, they have a specialised vocabulary to describe it. They have fields of padi, bags of beras and plates of nasi. In the west however, rice is eaten, but there are fields of rice, bags of rice and plates of rice - it’s just known as rice. There is of course egg fried rice, pilau rice, basmati rice and wild rice, but it’s all rice to us.
You must by now be wondering what on earth am I getting at? What’s the point of bringing all this talk of food into a sermon?
Actually, food isn't really the point. It's more a case of language, specifically words. Words are the raw materials of language but language is much more than words. Language can be spoken within culture, often ironically, leaving things unsaid that are so obvious to us, we just assume they are obvious to everyone else in the world. When we assume that something is self evident, we tend to leave it out of the conversation.
Assuming things can cause a real lack of understanding. In fact cultural assumptions can affect our interpretation of scripture and this becomes a problem. Spoiler alert! Take for example the birth of Christ. We picture Mary and Joseph in a lonely scene trudging by donkey, just the two of them in the thick of winter, to Bethlehem. In reality their journey to Bethlehem would have been in the company of both sides of the family, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles - the whole clan. Hence no room in the Inn.
In virtually every nativity play I’ve seen; the three wise men appear bearing their gifts of gold frankincense and myrrh. But tell me where in the bible does it say there were three wise men? I can tell you. Nowhere! There were three types of gifts but not three kings. Because there were gifts of three kinds, we have assumed that there must have been three Kings! We have rewritten the way we interpret the Scriptures to accommodate our assumptions. In those days, three men travelling with such precious gifts would have been robbed. In actual fact, there would have been a large entourage with the magi who traveled from the East to Bethlehem, following a star that they understood to have such world-changing significance that they journeyed many hundreds of miles, taking many months to do so. Jews were forbidden to seek guidance from the stars, but these magi believed that the heavens were declaring to them that a King greater than they had been born.
It's highly likely that Jesus was born in late September, during the seven day Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. The heavens themselves declared the birth of the King of the Jews, the Messiah, through a star. And John later described the Messiah as the Word that became flesh and 'tabernacled' among us. On the eighth day following the Feast, He was presented to God, circumcised according to the law of Moses. On that eighth day Simeon announced that he had seen his Salvation and could depart this world in peace, having witnessed the "light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of Israel.”
We have misinterpreted scripture and put our own cultural assumptions into this Christmas story and reshaped the biblical narrative to fit our values and assumptions. It’s tradition and folklore that have added various details about those wise men, the journey that Mary and Joseph made to Bethlehem and the time that Jesus was born.
The pigs and rice analogy applies to language and vocabulary but it also proves the point that language is structured around what we value. We have more specialist words to describe the things that mean more to us than the things we don’t class as important. As a result our language develops over time and we either tend to ‘throw out’ terminology that is no longer part of our everyday existence or develop new terms and narratives that we use more frequently. Who knew 50 years ago that ‘woke’ would be a word? Who knew then that the words computer, video, downloading, software and internet would become part of everyday language? When I was growing up, fibre was found in a bowl of Weetabix, not overhead in telephone wires.
We view things according to the culture in which we live and unless we are widely traveled and have spent time living in a very different cultural setting, we find it very hard to appreciate how others, particularly in the East and Southern Continents think, speak and interact and this can lead to misunderstandings. You could say, that viewing the Bible through the lens of Western glasses can lead to blurred vision.
The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New in Koine Greek (or everyday common speaking Greek). Rather like our pigs and the Indonesian’s rice, the Greeks had at least six words for love, four of which are used in the New Testament. They are Eros, Storge, Philia and Agape. The Greeks were well known for their philosophy, their drama, history and beauty, but they were also known for their nuanced understanding of love. The first kind of love, eros, represented the idea of passion and desire. In actual fact, the early Christians faced a problem similar to the one we have today in that society was so corrupt, ‘love’ mainly meant sheer lust. In Anders Nygren’s book, 'Agapé and Eros', he defines eros as a desire in search of satisfaction. Eros seeks its object in order to satisfy its own hunger. Eros seeks its object for the worth and value it has for its own self-fulfillment. Unlike agape (which we will come to in a moment), eros seeks its own.
Secondly there’s Storge which is the fondness people share between families, especially between parents and children. The New Testament combines this word with the third kind of love, Philia to form the word philo-storgos which Paul uses to command us to be ‘kindly and affectionate to one another’ in Romans 12:10.
Philia-love speaks of warm-hearted, spontaneous affection, friendship and liking. Thankfully God never commands us to have this kind of love for everyone. Our reactions to different types of people are often beyond our control. God the Father loves the Son in both this affectionate way and in the love of choice which is of course the Greek word Agape.
Agape-love has also been misunderstood by many. It is commonly known as ‘divine’ love which is misleading because it is used for love from man to God and from God to man. It is also used for love between people. It is divine in the sense that it is the love that God commands, the love of choice. Even if someone does not ‘appeal’ to us we can still show ‘agape’ love to that person, accepting them, treating them right and doing all we can to build up that person in the faith if they are a believer or to bring them to Christ if they are not.
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is a very well-known portion of scripture that employs this agape kind of love. We are told to agape-love our neighbour as ourselves (John 13-17) – something that many people find extremely difficult if taken in the wrong context of affection and actually liking someone. The upper room discourse is full of both agape and philia love. John 3:16, that famous verse that tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life, expresses that God decided to love us because it is His nature to love. He agape-loves the sinner not because we are lovely and likable. As it doesn’t seek it’s own, this agape love is extended to the unlovable because it is for their good.
Does all this mean that we Westerners don’t value love quite the same as the Greeks? No! But it does explain how love is intended to be understood within the framework of the New Testament and how misunderstandings arise when another language has several words for something and ours has only one. Understanding that it is a choice we make to love our neighbours helps us to not only carry out God’s commandment better, it gives us an appreciation of choosing to do things for others, rather than doing them because we have to ‘feel’ a certain way in order to do so. Our agape love is concerned with what we can do for each other in order for us to benefit from the love that the author of love, wants to give.
In the west we are often oblivious to the things that were considered so valuable and so intrinsically vital that they were left unsaid and misunderstandings have therefore arisen because it was assumed that the reader automatically knew about the culture and practices of the time. Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel, as discerning and revolutionary of their time as they were, would have had little comprehension of how to describe the visions they saw in light of today’s western cultural setting. Even when John wrote the book of Revelation, which was relatively speaking closer in time to us than it was to Moses, he could only describe what he saw in terms of the knowledge he had at that time. To him it was obvious that the events and visions that he saw were never to be interpreted in chronological order, nor were the groups of characters he saw all to be interpreted literally. Ultimately the book of Revelation is an integrated book full of imagery and symbols written originally in the Greek but with a Hebraic mindset and perspective. Revelation is one of the most misinterpreted books of the bible simply because we have failed to appreciate the customs and rhythms of Ancient Eastern culture (more of that on another sermon).
To Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, whose narratives very often appear to contradict each other in terms of the order in which events happened, chronology was not something they considered to be relevant. What mattered to them was how something happened, not the timing. Sequence (chronos in the Greek) was irrelevant.
The ancient Biblical practice of sacrifice to us westerners is quite frankly a bit of a put-off. It either smacks as having to give up something that’s dear to us or it has to do with some weird cultist animal killing – (best not talk about that). Understanding the sacrificial custom of transferring one’s sin to a spotless lamb may not be something that we westerners would normally be able to appreciate, but it is critical to how we interpret Christ’s death on the cross and the taking of our sins upon Himself. To the Jewish people, sacrifice was part of their daily lives and the whole concept of the Temple, the spotless lamb, the Holy and Holies and roles of the priests are largely unexplained simply because they were so obvious to them that they felt they didn’t need to. Jewish feast days are also an example of this unspoken story. Why don't the gospels say that Jesus was born during the Feast of Tabernacles? Because the event of Caesar Augustus's census (a tongue twister in itself) was the elephant in the room, an occasion worth mentioning, a moment in time that stood out.
Other passages in the Bible such as those referring to the preferential treatment given to the firstborn male child can baffle us today. What we don’t appreciate is that at the time, firstborns inherited the larger portion and had the greater responsibility than other offspring born subsequently. These firstborns were always the elders, leaders and the rulers of the clans/families and had prerogatives and privileges that went hand in hand with the position. What we learn as the Scriptures unfold is that sometimes the firstborn got things badly wrong and it was possible for the role of the firstborn to shift as we see in the case of Esau and Jacob, Abraham’s sons Ishmael and Isaac and with Jacob’s sons Rueben and Joseph. The scriptures tell us that the physical firstborn could have their inheritance taken away from them if they failed to serve God and their birth right was handed over to the one who would be faithful and pass on the baton of faith to the next generation.
To us all this seems absurd, but to Ancient Biblical thinking, this was so much a part of them that it went unsaid.
In his experiment called ‘The Forgotten Famine’, Mark Allan Powell had 12 students in his class read the story of the prodigal son from Luke’s Gospel. They then had to close their bibles and retell the story as faithfully as possible. The 21 American students retold the story as best as they could remember but all failed to mention that there was a famine involved. This was of huge interest to Powell, so he set up another experiment involving 100 students from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures. Six out of the 100 students mentioned the famine when retelling their version, the other 94 who did not mention the famine all had one thing in common – they were all from the United States. This got Powell thinking more and later he was able to carry out the same study, this time in St Petersburg in Russia where he gathered 50 people to retell the same prodigal son story. This time an overwhelming 42 out of the 50 mentioned the famine. Brandon O’Brien in his book 'Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes' explains why. “Just 70 years before, 670,000 people had died of starvation after a Nazi German siege of St Petersberg led to a three year famine. Famine was very much a part of the history and imagination of the Russian participants in Powell’s exercise”.
He went on to explain that to westerners, the famine was almost an unnecessary part of the story – it was a factor in it, but to them, the prodigal son had already committed the sin by squandering his inheritance and being so wasteful. He should beg for forgiveness. The Russian students considered the squandering less important than the famine. To them, the story had to do more with “God’s faithfulness to deliver His people from hopeless situations. The boy’s problem was not that he was wasteful but that he was lost.”
Neither interpretation is wrong, but when we overlook something, we are in danger of overlooking other things that can help us to have greater understanding of the scriptures.
In 2011 some young people were challenged to create Ten Commandments for the 21st Century, and they came up with a range of striking ideas about what ought to matter to society.
Their suggestions touched a variety of subjects from inter-personal relationships to the environmental problems facing the world. The Ten Commandments for the 21st Century (10C for 21C) competition was organised as part of York’s inaugural Festival of Ideas to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
Children aged from five to sixteen submitted a total of more than 250 entries using a range of media from ancient to modern including large collages, animated Powerpoints, email screens, scrolls, hand-painted artwork and calligraphy.
The entries covered an impressive range of subjects from energy and environment (‘Don’t build nuclear power stations in places that might have earthquakes or tsunamis’) to role models (‘Do not idolise people or worship celebrities, be your own person’).
They ranged from fairness (‘Try to pay a fair price for your items so that everyone gets a fair wage for the work they do’) to living in a digital world (‘Technology is very useful but is not to be worshipped’).
However, one thing was missing from each entry. Can anyone guess what it, or more importantly, WHO it was? Yes, God!
This cross-section group of 250 children were given a task to create a modern day take on God’s manual for living. For those astute Bible scholars among us, you may already know that first four of the ten commandments are concerned with how we relate to God and the remaining six as to how we relate to each other. A score of four out of six might indicate to some that our relationship with God is of less importance than our relationships with each other. But Jesus said “If you love Me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15). How we reverence God and the value we have of Him in our lives determines how we treat everyone else, including ourselves. Neither culture is right or wrong, we’re just different and our societies and the beliefs we value change over time. God, however knows us and He knows our differences. We are no surprise to Him!
In her excellent book Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus, Lois Tverberg explains that “North America and Europe are the places where the biblical message is most unacceptable, where we least resonate with the narrative of Scripture. ”We’re the ones who have a hard time getting the point” she says. Continents such as Africa, Asia and Latin America are the places where the Church has the most rapid growth. In 2010 researchers compared cultural attitudes between a variety of populations around the globe. Lois goes on to say that "the acronym W.E.I.R.D. was used for the attitudes that Euro-American culture displays – particularly in the secular university world. It stands for Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democracies."
We westerners, like the Greeks whom we have learned so much from, want proof based, science driven logic based on human reasoning and evidence. We want to know why something happened. To communicate an important idea, we’ll link together a lengthy set of arguments into logical proof, using nuanced vocabulary that reflects that importance. In the Biblical world the question of why doesn’t arise because they never questioned the existence of God and had an ingrained sense of awe for Him. Whys were for God to know and us to accept.
Parables and storytelling tend to seem unsophisticated to us, after all, why tell a parable when you can just tell someone straight and intellectually prove a point? As westerners, our identities are founded on work and careers outside the family home. For example “Richard is an accountant or Sally is an Engineer”. The erosion of the family farm/fishing business passed down from generation to generation is testament of our industrialised transformation. We have easy access to imported food and our aim is to accumulate for ourselves rather than sharing our riches with the community. We put strong emphasis on our individual rights and freedoms but much of the eastern world regards personal freedom as unimportant – people are members of families, tribes and nations. We think that thin is beautiful but in the Biblical world, fat is a blessing and indicative of wealth. Here youth is attractive, there age is wisdom. Here sunshine is happiness, there rain is utter joy.
Some may say that we in the West have things the right way round, but do we really? Is our way of life better for this WEIRD way of living? Is the fact that we struggle more with the Christian message than our Eastern counterparts indicative of our perspective on life in general? Why does it even matter?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps all that matters is our relationship with God, our reverence for Him and a love for our neighbour. After all, He doesn’t care which culture we come from surely?
In summary, I cannot wrap it up better than O’Brien who concludes:
“If we’re not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We’re members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I’ll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer ‘being fed’, I’m out the door. This is not biblical Christianity. Scripture is clear that when we become Christians, we become – permanently and spiritually – a part of THE Church, the body of Christ. We become part of the family of God, with all the responsibilities and expectations that word means in the non-Western world. We don’t choose who else is a Christian with us. But we are committed to them, bound to them by the Spirit. And we are not free to dissociate our identities from them – mainly because once we are all in Christ, our own individual identities are no longer of primary importance."
Be open to being wrong about your biblical assumptions, recognise your blind spots, allow yourself to learn from the things that aren't explained and try to enjoy the Bible free from Western blinkers.