Is there anything to interest a scientist, in considering lilies or ravens?`

What might one be curious about, in thinking about the beauty of lilies or the self-sufficiency of ravens? Is there anything in these topics one might ask some kind of scientist about, even today, even 2000 years after the sayings were said? I suggest three possibilities:

1. It is odd that people find flowers and birds generally beautiful, worth emulating in their own sewing and weaving. Flowers have colors, birds have colors, for reasons that have nothing to do with human beings. We know also, for some such colors, that the eyes they relate to most closely, bee-eyes and bird-eyes, have a different range than human eyes, see a different slice of the spectrum. So, why should natural beauty, natural color schemes, appeal to US? Why shouldn't they be alien schemes, relevant to the worlds of flowers and birds, to their natural audiences? 

2. It is odd that people carefully preserve fabric creations that they think to be greatly inferior to the natural color schemes of flowers. Flowers are thrown away. Dresses are cared for. This isn't quite a human universal. Sometimes, people  venerate the natural object. I think of the Dutch tulip-mania and of the Taoist idea of gongshi, but there is a general tendency, in our own culture, to treat natural objects badly while preserving much less interesting things that have been made. 

3. It is odd that ravens, big, active birds that spend a lot of time socializing, get enough calories to live. It is different with sparrows and robins; they seem to be always eating, and they are small and fairly modest in their movements. But ravens and crows are big and extravagant. There is a more general form of this puzzle: humans in agriculture work a lot. Around them are animals who get enough to eat without sowing and reaping, without fences and barns. When I was growing up, my school taught as obvious that agriculture was a great leap forward for humans, allowing leisure. Thirty years later, I read people who suggested that  hunter-gatherers were pretty well nourished on about five hours a day of work, that the little neolithic bands were paradise compared to the agricultural compounds that succeeded them. That is a thought not so distant from the remark about ravens: couldn't there be a more natural, less effortful way for people to get their livelihood? It seems like agriculture is a pretty complicated way to get what birds somehow manage to get without much fuss - and they still have time for complicated raven-behavior, some of them.

I am not saying that Jesus had any of these thoughts. But I want to combat a tendency in the interpretation of sayings: to see them as referring to well understood, un-problematic phenomena that are then used to make a point. The implicit idea is that there is nothing in lilies or sheep or lost coins that would create a stop in the mind of a smart person, a kind of mental beaver dam. That then leads to the habit of immediately rushing from the  image to some bit of advice. I think we have to always ask, when a thing comes up in a saying of Jesus: how intrinsically interesting is that thing?

Lingering on the Image in a Saying, Before Moving on to the Moral

 If one reads Jesus saying about lilies, the most basic thing one might say is that, if this saying has any connection to Jesus at all, it makes him out to be someone who thought about lilies in a certain way, as effortlessly beautiful and (perhaps) puzzlingly under-appreciated. Every version of the saying goes on to make that the premise in an argument, or in some other way  uses it to grease the skids for a bit of advice or a recommendation. 

It is my preference, in interpretation, to linger for a long time on the basic fact: Jesus thought about lilies in this particular mood of appreciation. Partly, that's because there are various ways of arguing out to advice preserved, and so it seems at least possible that early editors encountered a lily-observation and decided to make something useful out of it. That is one reason for not taking the advice all that seriously, at least at first. 

Three other general reasons occur to me (for lingering with the topic of a saying): (1) the advice is sometimes pretty obvious advice; (2) the advice is, on some plausible interpretations, bad advice; and (3) the reasonable argument connections between the image and the advice seem tenuous. Now none of those considerations rules out some image-advice combination being the best reading of the saying: Jesus could have wanted to emphasize the obvious, he might have sometimes given bad advice, and he might have sometimes used bad arguments. Or, it is surely possible that the origin of the saying we have is nowhere near Jesus, that our baseline is some ancient proverb that somehow wandered into the sayings sources. 

I want to urge that, in interpretation, one take one's time, and not run directly to advice and moralizing readings. I want to open a space for the possibility that the image - the lilies, for example - came first, were thought about in themselves first, not plucked off the shelf as a helpful way of explaining some moral or practical point. I also want to open a space for the possibility that Jesus was curious and puzzled about various topics, and that the sayings preserve, in part, the list of topics that engaged his curiosity. 

What am I doing, when I ask someone to consider something?

"Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Luke 12:27

At Luke 12:27, Jesus asks his hearers to consider the lilies. The call to ‘consider’ makes us expect various things to come next. In a courtroom or a political argument, that call often signals the start of an argument, as in “Consider the defendant’s actions on the day before the murder.” When we hear that from a prosecutor, we just know that the lawyer is going to try to convince us that the defendant was already planning the murder. I am guessing that this use of “consider”, as leading into an argument, is the first thing that comes to mind, when we hear the word. Let’s call this the argumentative use; it signals that someone intends to convince us of something.

 

A second use of ‘consider’: it points to a phenomenon worth attention but not necessarily well understood. One might say, “Consider how resilient prairie plants are to drought and fire” or “Consider how frequently the virus damages obese people”. The sense is: this is something interesting, something that should be investigated. Let’s call this the scientific use.

 

A third use of ‘consider’: it invites someone on a meditative or observational journey that is understood to be valuable, perhaps for its own sake, perhaps for its effects on attitudes and actions later. I think of the cases that could be made for amateur astronomy, for  birdwatching, for growing orchids, for reading Lord of the Rings. In each case, the suggestion is that this activity is valuable in itself. There may be an additional suggestion that doing this (considering the stars, the behavior of birds, the complexities of a novel) will benefit other parts of one’s life. ( The discussion around the psychological idea of priming is relevant here.) Call this the meditative use of ‘consider’.

 

So, when I am invited to consider the lilies, that might mean that I am beginning an argument in which lilies are important or that I find lilies perplexing and worth study or that I think it is valuable to think about and observe lilies.

 

A standard elaboration of this saying in the scriptures takes it to be the beginning of an argument: ‘God takes good care of the lilies, you are more valuable than lilies, so God will take care of you, so stop worrying so much (or being so risk-averse).’ But, knowing that morals have sometimes been added to sayings by later editors, one has to give some thought to the suggestions of the saying that are not argumentative.