Who Would Wash a Sow?

2 Peter 2:17-22

Matthew 11:2-15

Our reading from 2 Peter today includes an odd proverb. “The sow is washed only to wallow in the mud” (2 Peter 2:22), we read. My immediate thought was who the heck would bother to wash a sow? Surely that’s not standard operating procedure, any more than putting lipstick on a pit bull. But I guess it get a certain point across. There’s no reason to wash a sow precisely because it is just going to wallow in the mud again anyway. The writer of 2 Peter was warning readers against returning to the bad behavior of their earlier lives. Yet, what would you expect to see a sow do?

And what about the Messiah? John the Baptist seems to have needed some clarification from Jesus. Are you the one who is to come, or are we supposed to keep looking for someone else to show up? Jesus answered him saying, “Go tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matthew 11:4-6). In other words, there is no sow washing going on here. What we have is the will of God being carried out. And while Jesus may not have met all of John’s expectations of the Messiah, he certainly was doing the things the Messiah should do.

Maybe I’m forcing the issue a bit (or a lot!), but it seems to me that we spend too much time in our lives scrubbing hogs, and not enough time watching for Jesus and the signs of God’s coming reign. Besides that, we are called to tend to the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, those needing good news, not to wander after tasks that accomplish little if anything. So I’ll go out on a limb here and say that worrying about the relative expense or size of Christmas presents is sow scrubbing. So is getting caught up in human definitions of success and accomplishment. To paraphrase Jesus, we should leave the sows to wash the sows, and instead should be about the work of God.

Prayer: Lord God, help us to do what is important and necessary according to your will and not to chase after the wild schemes and silly distractions that so often plague us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.