Onions. Pigs. Context.

I have three boys who are convinced they do not like onions, so a bag of them can go a long way around here. I can't use too much at a time, nor can the pieces be too big, or there will be a dinner time mutiny in my future. As a result, I occasionally have an onion begin to sprout in the bottom of the storage box. It recently happened again, but this time instead of chucking it in the compost bucket I got curious and did some googling. I discovered that if I were to peel the dried outer layers off to expose the new growth I could separate the shoots, plant them and have new onions. It's too early to see if it will work for me, but if I hadn't dug in (pardon the pun) I would have missed out an interesting new depth of knowledge about the world around me.

What does an onion sprouting in the back of a pantry have to do with the Bible and faith in God? Just stick with me and I promise that this will make some kind of sense by the end.

I recently happened across a reel on Instagram about Jesus' encounter with the demon possessed man recorded in Mark 5:1-20. If you are unfamiliar with the story here's a quick run down: Jesus encounters a man tormented by a legion of demons. Jesus orders them to leave the man and as the demons are negotiating their surrender, they beg for Jesus to send them into a nearby herd of pigs. Jesus agrees and the pigs then proceed to hurl themselves of a cliff and into the sea. The men who were guarding the pigs rush to tell everyone who will listen about what they saw happen. Then the people of the area demand Jesus leave them. The message of the reel was that these pigs were the future wealth for the people in the area, so instead of celebrating the freeing of a man who was suffering demonic possession, they were more concerned about the loss of the pigs. They wanted Jesus to leave because they wanted to hold on to their worldly prosperity more than they wanted to know Him.

Of course, this got me thinking. Pigs were unclean under Levitical Law, which means no law-abiding Israelite would have been raising them for food. So why would pigs have been considered an avenue to wealth in ancient Israel?

They weren't.

Jesus wasn't in Israel.

According to Mark 5:1, Jesus had crossed the sea of Galilee and was in "the country of the Gerasenes." That was gentile territory. From what I have read, there are a couple different interpretations of who was tending to those pigs and why. One author says that the gentile inhabitants raised them as sacrifices to their pagan gods, another claims that Jewish people living in the region could have been using them to profit off the demand for pork in the area. Both of those possibilities can change our understanding of the story to some degree. If the first is correct we can see how the gentiles may have feared Jesus' power as a direct challenge to the gods whom they believed they were serving. If the second interpretation is accurate, then the local Jews might have been more concerned with keeping Jesus from cutting into their profits than meeting the long awaited Messiah. Either way, it is clear that the loss of the herd was a bigger issue to them than the miracle Jesus had just performed. His presence was treated as a threat to the status quo. For our purposes here, it doesn't make much difference if the pigs were for worship of a pagan god or an opportunity to profit off someone else's desires. Both interpretations have lead me to a similar conclusion: It doesn't matter what idolatry we are stuck in, when we value anything more than the presence of God, we will begin to fear it and try to drive Him away. However, I would never have seen this facet of the story if I hadn't gotten curious about the pigs and asked some questions.

So what does this have to do with the onions? It's all about the assumptions we make and the context we don't know. I assumed that those previous onions were only good for compost. It took a little curiosity and some research, but I discovered I had been letting opportunities for new plants to grow just wither and decay instead. Similarly, I have read and reread the story of the demon possessed man many times over the years, but I had never questioned the presence of pigs before today. I had never given a second thought to the geography of where this story occured, or what could have prompted the people there to marvel at what he had done and still plead with Jesus to leave. Because I was unaware of the context, I was missing opportunities to grow.

I have to do the work of going deeper. I don't know what I don't know, and I can either choose to accept everything in the light of how I see the world here and now, or I can learn more about the context surrounding the Scripture. Context is the key that unlocks my understanding of the Biblical narrative and my relationship to it. It teaches me about God's character and sheds new light on the condition of my heart. It takes what is written on the page out of the realm of the hypothetical and makes it concrete.

It makes the difference between an easy, shallow faith and one that is capable of propagating New Life.

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Proverbs 3:5 ESV

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

Proverbs 25:2 ESV

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.