Luke 12:4–7)
“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
What is Jesus getting at?
He asks an “Is it so?” question about buying sparrows but then also speaks of God’s sight.
The point of the lesson may have seemed obvious to his listeners. Now, in our own time, we too are invited to understand something of what Jesus was teaching.
Do not be afraid,
[because]
[in God’s sight]
you
are of more value than
many sparrows.
Perhaps surprisingly, we know rather little about what these words mean!
God values? For us, God’s valuing is unrestricted; and in our shabby living, we are anything but.
So too are the implicit “because,” and God valuing us more than sparrows. Why? Because they are in reference to God’s understanding.
To make things more confounding, while progress is being made in the sciences and human studies, we still know relatively little about sparrows. Let alone about ourselves.
But Jesus’ lesson points to a bridge. Notice that the example he gives is not an allegory for what human valuing might be like. Jesus invites our attention to actual human valuing in which one pays an admittedly small amount of money for five sparrows.
Following Jesus’ lead, we can inquire into what happens in us when we value something and, in particular, when we value one thing more than another. These are familiar experiences. But it is challenging to make progress in describing let alone understanding them. In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) devoted no less than twelve main questions to the problem (ST, I–II, qq. 6–17).
St. Thomas identified twelve intertwined steps in our intellect that we go through as we move toward valuing, and choice. More recently, the Jesuit scholar Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) identified core dynamics of our knowing and doing, including the doing that is valuing. To begin to see how our core dynamics (described by Lonergan) weave through the twelve steps (described by St. Thomas) needs further adventures in noticing and describing key elements in human experience. And so Philip McShane (1932–2020) followed up on Lonergan’s dense writings with important pedagogical works of his own.
What we are trying to get across is that what we do when we value something is not at all obvious, that describing our valuing is challenging work, and that part of what is needed are series of beginnings. In the meantime, we can see that Jesus’ lesson has two main parts. In the second part, he invites us to attend to our own experience of valuing. This occurs in all of us, in all cultures and walks of life. We value food and shelter. Mothers and fathers value their children. We value our friends. Sometimes we even value our enemies. We can value our hopes and dreams. And we can value our failures. We can value sacrifice. We can value sparrows and the world’s ecologies. As Jesus noted, human valuing is also present when monies are used to pay for things. We can even value the fact that we can value, thus valuing an aspect of our human nature.
But how then do we make sense of the first part of Jesus’ lesson. How does God value sparrows? How does God value us? And how does God value us more than sparrows?
What is God’s valuing of us like? The book of Genesis assures us that we are made in God’s image and likeness. Following the example of St. Thomas Aquinas and so attending to our experience, it is not our body, nor our questions, nor our growth that are that living image. For God has no body, no questions, and does not grow. God’s living image in us consists, rather, of our acts of understanding and valuing. In faith, then, we can be assured that our valuing is like God’s, although God’s valuing is unrestrictedly better, and unrestrictedly more. And so, we can be assured that the more we know about our valuing the more, incrementally, we know about God’s.